Legal Fiction

“Go to lunch before you f*ck things up again.” – Random police officer shouting to other random police officer at ten in the ante meridian.

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Despite my last post, now I shall regale you all with stories from my life as a law school student. When the crap hits the fan, we get some marginally interesting stories.

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My internal priority system assigns various priorities to assignments and duties, then slots them into a master list of procrastination. This list tells me how long I have to put something important off to finish something less important but more interesting. For example, last week when I had to finish my paper, I stopped to swab my bathroom for an hour, though I had perhaps a half hour’s worth of work to complete on the paper. Thereafter, I also stared about my room for a good fifteen minutes, putting off the paper work.

The IPS also buffers giant wads of free time into the ranking system. One of the most important things I ever learned was to estimate the time till finish of any assignment as twice as much as it should normally take. Finish on time and you look like a hero. Problems crop up and you still have plenty of time to fix them. Thank you Star Trek. Please note that my IPS only works precisely because the buffers accept the less important assignments. Without the buffers, the system is worthless.

Take note that the IPS does start to break down during finals, if only because for some reason, I cannot properly estimate study time when it comes to cumulative finals. I generally screw myself over at this time, when it seemed that it would take forty minutes to learn a certain rule, and it takes two and a half hours. Taken in short, the IPS makes my life livable, since procrastination lets me put off certain things to enjoy life’s simpler pleasures.

Related to the IPS, I had a presentation on the semester’s work on Monday. The IPS placed this below sleep, breakfast, morning class, and lunch at the Inner Harbor. And that was Monday’s priority. The IPS ranked that hour-long presentation below smoking crack. As there was no crack smoking done, that tells you how much work was put into the flavored tobacco presentation.

Heights, the dark, clowns, being alone, public speaking. These are my driving fears, none moreso than public speaking. Ignoring the inevitable made it bearable. Like an ostrich on a beach with a tank bearing down on it, I wanted to hide my head in the sand.

So right before class, N.S. and J.M. hadn’t completed their powerpoint presentation. One, no one said we needed powerpoint. L.G. and I were just going to shoot from the hip. Two, they completed their separate halves of the powerpoint, and were going to merge it during the first hour, while we presented on flavored tobacco. Right, good luck.

L.G. and I sat at the side of the room, when K.D. said, “And why don’t you both move to the front of the room, to make it more official. And wow, they both just shot me dirty looks when I said that.”

To make it similar to a presentation before the general assembly, it was opened up to questions for the duration of the hour. A prohibition on flavored tobacco is extraordinarily difficult, if only because the questions that can be raised about the delineation of flavoring/non-flavoring and the questions with no easy answers, which cropped up throughout.

Do I remember what the discussion was like? Not a clue. However: L.B. whispered something, which I overheard, and that threw me out of my “rhythm.” This rhythm is most similar to white man’s rhythm, which follows a beat and pattern all its misguided own. I stuttered and started a lot. At one point, the words “I’ve gone completely blank” left my mouth. I had to take off my glasses in a vain attempt to “hide” from the class. If I can’t see you, you aren’t there. Unfortunately, this had the unintended side effect of “If I can’t see you, I can’t hear you.” Great for when you have to answer questions. At one point we were assaulted by three or four hostile questions in a row, which threw me into defensive mode. When a friendly question came up, I took it as hostile and nearly “attacked” the questioner. At one point, I wrote the words “I’m lost” on my sheet, sliding it over to L.G. My leg shook a mile a minute. Had a telegraph button been put under my foot, I could have sent “Oh crap oh crap oh crap” off to Germany, which, ironically, I would have rather been than in that classroom.

The next day, we had a meeting with K.D., one of the last two with her. After a semester, we’d almost concluded our project, or at least, our involvement with it. Starting out, I knew that it was somewhat futile, and there was no chance the bill would pass. I knew that. I knew that. And somehow, it washed out of my mind, lost in all the work we’d been doing, the effort we’d put in. I should have remembered that. Instead, something in me, that philanthropic, selfish urge to make a difference exposed itself. It felt like this work might make a difference, small though it might be.

K.D. was tired, somewhat demoralized. She told L.G. and myself that the bill wouldn’t pass, that we were almost done, that the work we’d done was more or less worthless, that we wouldn’t care after the next two weeks. It boiled down to all this being a sham, a legal fiction. The story that we’d lived, all for naught, save a little letter on the sheet. Finally, when I started caring (and yes, in spite of all the bitching, I did care), it gets shot down. One of the roughest moments in my law school life, if only because I opened up, and the door slammed shut.