What I really worry about

I wake up at 4 am in a cold sweat. Am I freaked out about the Bar Exam that happens in 3 days? Nope. I've just had a nightmare about being back in law school (which I imagine will follow me for the rest of my life).

In my dream, I was back in the last month of my first year of law school and I, apparently, had not been to class since the first day of the semester (OK, it does sound like me...). But here's the twist: A classmate I bumped into around town told me there was a HUGE paper for Criminal Law class due that day. Of course I hadn't even heard about this paper, let alone written it. So what did I do? I asked my friend to drive me to the hospital so I could fake an illness and be excused from the paper.

The kicker? A good 9 hours later after all this nonsense, my friend tells me that it won't work because I had pulled this same trick on the same professor during the first semester. Damn my dreaming luck.

My mind is a brittle little guy.

Wake-up juice

Bar study keeps you up most nights when you're a month behind the scheduled assignments, trying to play catch-up two weeks before the test. Even more so than in law school, I've been on a constant diet of caffeine to keep my head above water and in a book.

So I've come to some conclusions about the best way to achieve my newest high:

1. Espresso drinks are not only horribly overpriced, but completely ineffective for long-term study sessions
2. 7-11 coffee is far superior to Starbuck's coffee, and cheaper
3. Red Bull is best for sipping while you study (Coffee gets cold and gross if you sip it too long. Seriously, it's like cold shit soup in a cup after 30 minutes sitting out.)

I hope you never have to use these tips.

Bar review sucks

For someone so unsure of whether to practice law, I sure have been killing myself studying for this stupid bar exam, lately.

I went from not wanting to practice at all, to thinking about it, to deciding to take the bar in February, to scrambling to get my shit together for the July exam. How did I get to this? No idea. Maybe a fear of not knowing what to do with my life coupled with the crippling debt of law school that I need to start repaying soon (incidentally, I'm now almost $100k in debt).

I started a home-study bar review program that normally takes students upwards of 2 months to complete when moving at the normal pace. There's less than a month until the exam. Now, I could've started early June but the nice people at the bar loan place decided to hold my loan application up in bullshit for the last month. Thanks, guys!

Despite all this, I'm surprisingly nonchalant. Let me try and relate to you how much I care about passing this exam. I care about passing this exam about as much as I cared about Pluto being declassified as a planet. I care about passing this exam about as much as I care about the Sex and the City movie. I care about passing this exam...well, about as much as I cared about succeeding in law school.

So I don't exactly have a lot tied up in this exam. It's not like I've got a job waiting for me if I pass. No, I'll still be groping blindly to get my foot in the door at some place that I don't care about but I pretend to be totally psyched about in front of the recruiters. Seriously, every law firm is exactly the same. They all do boring law stuff and they're all named after 5 or 6 boring, old white guys who could give a shit if their employees live or die as long as they're not bothered.

I'm not jaded.

If I actually do pass this exam then I suppose I'll have to continue this ridiculous game.