Prostates on the top; scalpels on the bottom*

"Well, I mean, to some extent every man in this room has prostate cancer."

My torts prof said this. I’m still not sure I understand it. I laughed though.

That quote plus those three sentences sum up my law school experience at the Georgetown University Law Factory so far. Teachers saying things. I'm pretending to understand. Then, lots of awkward laughter followed by me staring at my crotch.

If I had to come up with a word to describe my experience so far, it would be manic-depressive. Two words you say? Piss off. MS Word says it’s one when you have a 2,000 word memo due the next morning. Hyphenation is key.

On the manic side, DC is good, I see SlackerP more than I did when I lived in NYC (can you believe she's running a marathon this weekend? Me neither, but I'll let you know if she actually does it), and I have re-entered the blissfully ignorant bubble of life on an urban-but-gated academic campus. When class gets tough I watch Tai Shan;* I might buy his t-shirt, and I fully support his nomination to the bench. When class is [really] easy, I try to picture myself as a licensed lawyer [for what it's worth at this point, before a felony convictions].

On the depressive side, learning the law is hard (if not impossible), the liquor store down the street closes at 9p and has a $10 credit card minimum, and I’ve regressed to my pre-kindergarten reading rate of 3 pages per hour.

So I argue back and forth a lot about whether I’m happy here or oppressed by the inevitable crush that GULC must face in trying to separate/rank 600 law students and then force them back through the meat grinder into respectable jobs (hopefully). I’ve even drafted posts before, but scrapped them when either a) they sound too crabby, or b) too many Viagara adds show up in the comment section after I post them.

In the end, I’m pretty lucky and happy, until I run out of whiskey.

I’ll close how I ended, with a GULC quote:

"If Roe must be aborted to end legal discrimination on the basis of sex in this nation, then hand me the scalpel."

That’s from the student newspaper. I mean, what’s not to love?

*So far, the main lesson of law school has been semi-colons