Amber fretted about finals at work today:

Amber: I am not looking forward to my week. You’d think I wouldn’t be so stressed out about a two-day week, but this is sort of the last breath of freedom before finals – but only, it’s NOT a fresh breath because I have commitments with NORMAL people who do not understand the madness that law students have to go through.

What makes law school finals stressful is not the material, but the curve. Our grades are not based on what we know, but on how much more we know than our equally-competent¹ peers.

There are miserable students live in the library during November. Most of us don’t want to become that goonish, vampire-like study-carrel dweller, but we all want to do well.

This is why finals season feels like a SAW sequel: how much are you willing to give to stay alive? An arm? A leg? Your right toe? Dum dum dum…

A lot of us are saying “fuck it.” The job market is too slim to ruin our health and social lives for an arbitrary grade. It is more important to just learn the material as best we can and retain sanity.

This week was busy even without the unnecessary finals panic. There was the crushing weekly reading, work, and an oral argument that almost did not happen.

I have to work on my Vanna White smile for class. Some of my classmates are getting exponentially more inappropriate as the semester progresses and it’s hard not to glare.

There is one girl in particular who asks such amazingly off-topic questions that it will shock NO ONE when she raises her hand one day and asks:

Off-Topic Girl: “Professor, you were talking about x, and that reminds me – sorry if this outside of the scope of our class – but, what is the meaning of life? Can you speak to that?”

That’s going to happen before the end of the semester. Guaranteed.²

Aside from the circus that is school, I’ve spent my evenings and afternoons at work. And this weekend I went out on Friday and Saturday.

We started Friday at The Eagle’s happy hour, and then later that night went to The Saloon. On Saturday we went to this gladiator-themed gay bar called Gladius. The bar tenders at Gladius wear these little leather gladiator-skirts…with running shoes… and there was a boy trying SO HARD to sell a tray of these red shots that looked exactly like DayQuil (in the DayQuil cup and everything!) Fail.

The music at Gladius was impressive, and we spent some serious boomkat time on the dancefloor.³ The party continued at The Saloon, where I managed to get my glasses stolen.

The Saloon has a heater right above the dancefloor, so Eric and I took off our blazers and put them on a speaker. My overpriced plastic frame glasses were too light and kept slipping, so I set them on my blazer.

When I picked up the blazer the glasses were gone. Dum dum dum. Angela Lansbury had already gone to bed, so that case went cold pretty quickly.

I’m going into for a contacts fitting on Tuesday. I figure contacts are a more practical investment than another pair of lose-able/steal-able glasses.

I only have class on Monday and Tuesday this week, and nothing but Tax Law on Wednesday. The rest of the week will be spent working and outlining full time, but hopefully a little less stressful than Amber’s week.

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¹ And it’s really a shitshow at UMN law, where the 98/99% bar passage rate means that even the people with the lowest GPAs are competent enough to practice law.
² Minnesota nice has gone out the window. Sure, off-topic girl is annoying, but a lot of people are just downright bitter. If I can hear the bitchy comment from two rows away, or read it on gchat screen on a nearby laptop, then off-topic girl will find out eventually.
³ Will and I were the only ones on the dancefloor, because Joel and Eric were too busy socializing. And no, although some minimal voguing was done, there were drops or duckwalks.