And that’s the game

I am officially DONE with law school!!! I took my very last final EVER this morning, and once again, this is probably the closest approximation to how I feel right now. You get yours, Cookie Monster.  I now have a glorious month of toodling up and down the east coast to look forward to (but first, some celebratory burritos and margs. Like ya do) before I start complaining about BarBri trolls.  The end of law school by no means indicates the end of this blog, but I’ll go ahead and thank you all for the last year and a half of law school-related blog entry readership anyway. You guys are all that stand between me being a “blogger” and me being a “crazy lady who yells at clouds and throws cats at people.” And for that, I salute you.

Why yes, that is a picture of an empty carrel (specifically the carrel I vacated for the very last time during my very last library study session last night. And yes, the kid behind me did think it was odd that I was taking cellphone pictures of my chair and silently weeping to myself). Empty library carrels make me nostalgic, ok? It’s a very emotional time.

The true greats

First of all, let me start off by saying that tomorrow I have my very last law school exam EVER. That makes today my very last library day (here, anyway) EVER. Which means I have to say a tearful goodbye to all of the library trolls, toenail clippings, and Asian tour groups that have made studying here so very colorful over the last three years. In that spirit, a timely anecdote.

Yesterday, Earl stopped by the lib around 7PM (which is about the time 3Ls should start their day).  She noted that the library troll behind me had packed himself a cloth Whole Foods bag (ugh) filled with troll treats like the whole raw almonds pictured below.  Apparently the organic treats necessitated the dental floss you can see hanging off those whole raw almonds.  That sentence made me throw up a little in the back of my mouth. DENTAL FLOSS. IN THE LIBRARY. WHY?? Anywho, whether it was the almonds or the festive, casual atmosphere of a Saturday at the lib, hometroll decided that although DENTAL FLOSS was a necessity, he had no need for his organic hemp shoes. So he walked around barefoot. Everywhere. All day. The library is no place for your almond/flossing/barefoot frolicks, sir. This isn’t the Keebler treehouse.

Thankfully Earl was there to witness this scene.  After a week and a half of this shit, I’m beginning to feel like Jane Goodall among the library trolls.  You know, if instead of just observing the family and social interactions of the chimps, she had gone insane and tried to murder them all in a blinding rage of disgust.  In typical Earl fashion, she decided to leave the troll a note: WHO FLOSSES IN THE LIBRARY!!!? Great question, Earl.  Of course then she scampered off to Starbucks to leave me behind with the awkward fallout as the troll returned (barefoot) to his almonds-and-floss-laden lair, now with the addition of an Earl note.  I heard some whispering behind me, and eventually the scribble of a pen.  The troll departed, almonds-and-all, and we were left with our answer.

Touché, library troll.

UPDATE: Today Earl and I had just settled ourselves in for a relaxing lunch break of lumpy eggs and porridge, when a glance over at the next table revealed that the Flossing Troll was seated next to us with his sidekick.  Naturally, he was flossing. That’s two for you, Flossing Troll.

Dig ‘em

Things the person sitting behind me has eaten while sitting at his carrell today:

1. 2 pop tarts. The number of pop tart cameos during these finals period is getting weird. Blame 90s nostalgia.

2. 3 mini boxes of cereal. Including Honey Smacks, which apparently Kellogg’s still makes to torture me. Honey Smacks mascots of yesteryear who I’d like to see make a comeback: Smaxey the sailor-suit-wearing seal (I mean, come on) and the Smackin’ Bandit, a half-mule, half-kangeroo nightmare who tried to kiss everyone. Nope, I can’t picture what that would look like either, but he sounds kind of soft-porny and even the internet is trying to pretend it never happened.

3. 1 granola bar unwrapped so painfully slowly I’m not convinced he wasn’t just eating wads of plastic like an endangered turtle.

4. 2 travel mugs of coffee. Dude slurps like a cockney flower girl pre-Henry Higgins intervention. I’m just saying.

5. A BOWL OF SOUP. See #4. SOUP IN THE LIBRARY. WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE??

On a darker note, I saw this sign hanging in the B school’s weird glass pyramid/cement water tower/indoor jungle at our concert last week. Sadly, there were no fish to be found.  It seems the coins finally got the best of them. Either that or they just moved to our library to eat soup and unwrap pop tarts with the rest of the library trolls. New low, fish trolls. Hi Earl!

It all comes from liking honey so much

Since my first (and second to last, if you’re the glass half full type) exam is tomorrow, I’m hopped up on caffeine like a wiggly puppy. I could either put that energy towards studying OR push out a blog post. Because I’m a giver, here you go. First, here’s a $600 cast iron skillet in the shape of Wisconsin, for that special Midwesterner in your life who insists on pancakes shaped like his home state. Indulgent.  On the other hand, for $250 you might as well just get the New Jersey skillet and make yourself some fine looking eggs for a third of the price.  These are hard times, after all. Speaking of fine looking eggs, Justice Stevens stopped by yesterday, bow tie and all (as this gratuitous grainy iphone picture would suggest).

Besides being the most articulate/sharp/sartorially advanced 92 year old in the world, J.P. also examined Ty Cobb in the 1951 public hearings about baseball’s exemption to antitrust laws.  What. a. G. Also a G: Casey Stengel when he testified at the 1958 Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee hearing on the same subject.  When Senator Kefauver asked him why baseball wanted the exemption bill passed, he answered:

Of course, we have had some bad weather, I would say that they are mad at us in Chicago, we fill the parks. They have come out to see good material. I will say they are mad at us in Kansas City, but we broke their attendance record. Now on the road we only get possibly 27¢. I am not positive of these figures, as I am not an official. If you go back fifteen years or if I owned stock in the club I would give them to you.

HA what a gem. That was about as nonsensical as these fortune cookie fortunes I got (confusingly) with my sushi the other day, and not nearly as self-serving.  First of all, I ordered sushi, which I’m about 85% sure is not Chinese food. Secondly, MSG. However, I’ll forgive them as I wait for my agreeable romance to begin to take on the appearance.

Eating more Chinese food, rather than making you healthier, I’d assume, is much more likely to get you stuck in a hole like Pooh Bear in this built-in wall art Wisco sent me at 5am.  Honestly, if I ever do get stuck in a hole (or more likely, a metro turnstile), I hope someone a little more substantial than Christopher Robin and his army of small furry friends comes to rescue me. I mean, check out that first rabbit. Bunzo is totally phoning it in right now.  Plus maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found there to be weird sexual overtones to Pooh’s thing with honey. That bear will stick his mouth/paw (and apparently his bottom half) into anything, amiright?

It all comes from liking honey so much? I bet it does, pal.

Pink heaven

Post-classes library day 1: not an auspicious beginning. The library trollette sitting behind me has been splitting her time between crunching her face out of the world’s largest bag of chocolate (?) cheerios and getting rubbed/rubbing/sitting on her troll’s lap.  CARRELS ARE NOT FOR ROMANCE. There should really be a sign about that. What does the world’s largest bag of troll food look like? I’m glad you asked.

That’s what it looks like. Periodically she’ll zip up that ziplock like the crunching is almost over and sweet, beautiful crunch-free silence will once again reign in the library. But then moments later, apparently overwhelmed by the temptation for crunchy, crunchy troll food, the bag pops open and the trollette keeps on crunching. It’s like Chinese water torture. I’m about 30 seconds away from giving up all of America’s secrets. Sorry, America.

Anywho, our school has been overrun with alums this weekend, which has several implications.  First, we had to sing to them, awkwardly from behind furniture, while they ignored that and carried on with their conversations.  Business as usual. Nevertheless, we were still thrilled to be there because where there are alums, there is also delicious free food and lots of alcohol.  And not just B-team cheese cubes and dip, we’re talking mini pulled pork sandwiches, sushi, dumplings, sliders, and most importantly, pink champagne. In fact, the alumni association dedicated an entire table manned by a kindly gentleman who made beautiful straight rows of pink champagne-filled glasses. I quickly learned that if you began to approach him with a purposeful look in your eye, he would automatically grab a glass and hold it out in your direction. I didn’t even have to come to a complete stop.  Needless to say, after a few (five) brisk champagne laps by pink champagne man, I may have proposed to him. 

 

Ok, lockjaw is probably worse

Health services has been chasing me down for approximately the last year and a half to get my tetanus booster and I’ve been artfully dodging them like a clever cockney orphan in a Broadway musical.  Sadly, I know all about Clostridium tetani and their endospores from my days of listening to my microbiology professor explain (and pantomime) why it was important to wipe from front to back.  Yes, that kind of wiping.  And because my brother is like 97% of a doctor now and has repeatedly assured me that lockjaw is not as fun as the robot pirate I like to picture when he says that. Anywho, the point is that tetanus is some bad shit, but you know what else is some bad shit? SHOTS. Not the exciting-dancing-skeleton-at-Millie-and-Al’s kind of shots either (I’m coming, DC!!!). The intramuscular-stab-you-in-the-arm-with-a-tiny-sword-needle kind of shots. I hate shots. I also hate that doctors/nurses insist that you don’t look. Listen pal, you’re coming at me with an unsheathed weapon. Looking at it doesn’t hurt, the stabbing part hurts.

So why now? Welp, I’m about to be health insurance-free for a few months, and Wikipedia’s tetanus page includes that traumatizing painting of a tortured soul doing a bridge stretch on what appears to be a mattress of nipples. Much like the placenta-filled birthing video in sex ed or the endless films of car crash victims who unwisely refused to wear their seatbelts I was made to watch in high school (and then she DIIIIIIIIED), this image did its work. Consider me warned, collaborative internet encyclopedia.  Even though I haven’t been running around with a rusty safety pin in my ear (I’m looking at you, Bean Sprout), I am now officially up to date on all of my shots. Well, this shot. For the next decade anyway. So now my arm feels like it’s losing a rowdy game of punch buggy on a freeway of Volkswagens AND health services didn’t even give me a lollipop. NO LOLLY. Consider this my crotchety Yelp review, UHS. One word: malpractice.

Countdown

Welp, finals have rolled around again, which means I have reached a critical mass of papers/outlines/reading to ignore and blog about instead. Are we excited? We sure are. Actually it’s been so long since I’ve posted that WordPress has completely changed its format in the meantime. Apparently I can post a quote post now. I don’t know what that means, and since I make up/falsely attribute all quotes on this blog anyway, let’s call that a moot point and get down to business.

First item, LAW SCHOOL IS ALMOST OVER. Like, fo realz almost over. Wednesday marks my very last law school class ever. Let’s indulge in a bit of nostalgia in list form, yes?  If you’ve been paying close enough attention for the past couple years, you could probably write this list for me. No? Fine. Without further ado, the top five things I will miss most about law school:

5. My ability to attend class in gym clothes, indicating to all that I did/will work out in the near future/past when I actually just don’t feel like showering in the morning.  That’s a not-so-succinct way of saying I could allow my hygiene to slip and still remain in the top 10% of smelling ok in this town. If the library is any indication anyway.

4. Uninterrupted hours of Law & Order SVU. This legal education/hulu subscription was worth every penny.

3.  Free food. Obviously. I listened to two personal financial planners for an hour last week for the handful of oatmeal cookies I got to shove in my bag. And because they were strangely attractive. 

2. Shirtless volleyball playing on campus. Just kidding, these are shirtless law students. It’s actually more like a visual assault of blindingly pale skin and scrawny limbs. But maybe you’re into that.

1. Ned and Earl. My two favorite truckers/law students who are both far too attractive/social/fun to be here, and yet miraculously arrived just in time to make the last three years kind of awesome. Also, they may be (definitely are) the primary audience/readership of this blog. Coincidentally.

Stay tuned for the top five things I will not miss. If you think that list may include library trolls and Asian tour groups … well, yeah.