Wrapping Up the First Year

Well, with the end of the semester my life has been a bit of a whirlwind and thus it has been a while since I posted anything to the old blog. I am now in day three of my two week vacation before I start my internship, and with the novelty of doing nothing beginning to wear off, here is yet again another random post of my life as a law student in DC. First, a quick rundown of my life’s events for the past month or so: read, write a brief, argue the brief (three times), read some more, take some finals, and read. I am sure Lauren has truly enjoyed my company throughout the past several weeks…

As these events are very un-blog-worthy, I will instead briefly give a rundown of the few things that managed to provide an escape from studying and thus have been invaluable in keeping me (mostly) a normal, sane person. These are just a few of the little quirks that have distracted me enough from the books to keep me from snapping and that have become part of my daily routine.

Starbucks

I am now a full blown Starbucks heavy user. Nothing fancy, just a grande coffee each morning, but my routine has become regular enough that when I walk through the door every morning at 7:50 they say “Good morning, grande coffee?” without me having to order and everyone looks at me like “Wow, I wonder who that guy is…” (this probably isn’t that abnormal for them to memorize such an easy order but as a bright spot of my monotonous law-school life, I like to think I am pretty special). I have even become a Starbucks gold member, which pretty much doesn’t mean a whole lot except for that I get to use a fancy gold card each morning to pay for my coffee.

DC Sports Teams

Moving to a new city has allowed me to adopt all the local sports teams and thus (much to Lauren’s dismay) I have a whole lot more events to watch to distract me from studying. During finals, this provided a break from outlining by pulling up Slingbox on my computer and checking all the scores. I first started watching the Capitals, DC’s hockey team, in the Stanley Cup playoff. Of course, since I jumped on the bandwagon they promptly lost and left me with the Nationals and Royals to distract me from my studying. Having two baseball teams to watch has dramatically increased my win percentage, as only four times since opening day have the teams lost on the same night.

Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com has this little speaker icon that you can click on and it will say the word to you out loud so you know how to appropriately pronounce the word (this is highly addictive). Every time I come across a tough word in a case book, I take a little study break to have the nice electronic man on dictionary.com tell me the appropriate pronunciation. “Vior dire,” “stare decisis,” “comparable,” no problem, I know how to pronounce all of these (okay, most people probably wouldn’t have trouble with that last one, but spelling/vocabulary is definitely a weakness of mine).

Fantasy Golf

A carry over from our fantasy football league, I am part of a twelve man fantasy golf league. As there isn’t quite the hype surrounding fantasy golf as there is surrounding fantasy football, in order to compete you truly have to do your research. During the semester this obviously was a low priority, and thus I was holding solid in 8th place for most of the year. However, this has been a great escape from studying for finals (notice a pattern) and thus over the past five weeks of the spring season I have finished in the top three four times, now sitting in second place overall. My starting lineup for the Player’s Championship this week: Tiger (I think he’ll bounce back), K.J. Choi, Camillo Villegas, and Charl Schwartzel (my dark horse for the week).

Lauren’s Support

While these all provided an escape from hours of reading, I truly couldn’t have gotten through my first year without Lauren’s support. Every time I became overwhelmed (which seemed to be too often) Lauren reminded me to take everything one day at a time and I managed to weather the storm. And while I became a hermit over the past month, Lauren pretended it was no big deal that I was blatantly ignoring her. I had many quirks to keep me sane throughout the year, but without her support I truly would not have made it. Thanks Lauren, I love you!  And goodbye 1L year!  You were, ummmm, memorable?!