i presume that the intention behind the endless reading that underlies the law school experience is an effort to have students explore, contemplate, and debate the virtues found within centuries of legal history, thought, and analysis.

and far be it for me to challenge my judi-licious forefathers, but if they gave me a red pen and free reign over the 1-L curriculum, next year's class would have far less homework.

when i glance in my classmates' books, i see colored-coded highlighting implemented to call attention to facts, issues, and holdings. i see deep personal reflections scribbled in the margins. and i see profound relishment in their rereading federalist 78.

and when i look at my own class preparation of cases, i realize that i have spent hours on a case without a single analysis; just notes on comma splices, language redundancy, and incorrect noun/verb agreements.

in short: my peers come to class having prepped to debate a case; i come to class having edited it.

i suppose you can take the girl out of communications, but you can't take away her red pen.

despite my attempts to fight the inevitable "shared suck" of first year law school, i think that part of the transformational experience is a process of discovery ... discovering that lawyers and judges use 500 words when 100 will suffice.

when i applied to law school, my personal statement offered insight into my passion for language -- which as a communications profakesional and language word smither -- still holds true. i then extended this argument to explain that my motivation for pursuing a law degree was an interest in learning the language of jurisprudence.

and i guess i'll learn the language eventually. but it turns out that brevity -- and rosetta stone learn-a-language-in-six-weeks programs -- are a modern luxury not afforded to law students.

you know that dream about sleeping through one's alarm clock and then showing up for school having read the wrong assignment? and subsequently experiencing that gut-wrenching, heart-pounding fear-of-being-called-on?

even when i just think about it, i can almost feel the acid churn in my stomach now. although, i suppose that could be the taco i ate for lunch.

psychoanalysts attribute this type of dream to a manifestation of latent content. here, that dream is most likely a vehicle to represent anxiety. or a symbol of castration as a punishment for masturbating. but probably just anxiety.

a week deep into law school and it's already happened to me twice -- not the dream; actually oversleeping and reading the wrong assignment. and the anxiety in real life is no less intense than in freud's world of analysis.

for me, adapting to law school has been a little like asking a fish to grow wings. presumably i'll learn how to fly eventually, but after spending a year navigating the waters of finance and accounting, i find myself asking for "the bottom line" and desperately seeking real world applications for very hypothetical notions. and begging the administration to bring in an operations management professor to help them figure out the unbearably inefficient lunch lines.

although i almost popped a boner in torts when a case demanded a knowledge of discount rates and the time-value-of money, the horrible scarring of business school became most apparent this week in my civil procedure class. in a case used to demonstrate due process and the weighing of individual rights against the financial burden on our government, my die-hard non-profit-do-gooder-uber-liberal role in the business school classroom -- for just a moment -- flickered into the greedy, fiscal conservative i fought so hard to trip in the hallways of business school last year.

of course, i sensibly came back to my people, but in recounting my fleeting conservative moment horror story, my i-banker friends were tickled. i'm not sure if they were more pleased with my own transformational business school experience or with themselves ... most likely the latter.

when i was younger, my friends used to make fun of me for my simple coping mechanism to deal with overwhelming excitement, anxiety, or stress: i fell asleep.

you name it: i slept through get-togethers, birthday parties, and occasional court-side basketball miami heat games. it might seem like an odd reaction to a physical adrenaline rush -- a hormone that, when secreted into the bloodstream, rapidly prepares the body for action in emergency situations. but leave it to me to fuck up thousands of years of biological human behavior.

needless to say, between starting law school, maintaining my business school network, and continuing my part-time intern work for kuugle, this week has been a whirlwind of anxiety. fortunately, i have yet to sleep through class or fall asleep while driving, but i have unfailingly fallen asleep during every reading assignment -- which is probably why i'm doing the wrong ones.

... at least i don't have to fear bad dreams of sleeping through my alarm clock or showing up for class unprepared. after all, why worry about it while sleeping if i'm doing them both while awake?

my stomach is in knots.
i'm nauseous.
and when i think about socrates or pickles, i want to throw up.

so either this is what law students feel on their first day as a "one-L." or i'm pregnant. and honestly, it could go either way.

somewhere in the whirlwind of the last two weeks in august, i finished a job in california, moved across the country (cat plus mother in tow), started a part-time job, and oriented myself to what will undoubtedly be the worst year of my life to date.

and basically, i'm overfranxiosed.

the sheer difference in strategic thinking, casual conversations, and everyday lifestyle between an mba internship at kuugle and being a first year law student is like the difference between a cup of black coffee and a grande-non-fat-bone-dry-vanilla-cappuccino.

i went from a green bouncy desk chair to a cold, hard seat in a lifeless classroom. from choosing a color scheme for a power point presentation to penti-colored highlighting 19th century arguments. from hot chefs preparing ginger infused lobster potstickers to lunch ladies serving overpriced turkey sandwiches.

but perhaps the greatest distinction that seems to underlie every conversation i've had in the last 72 hours is how law school compares to business school. and here's the best analogy i can muster (my mental agility is currently overcapacity): being a JD/MBA is like having foie gras and a cheeseburger on the same plate.

the people are different. the conversations are different. the learning is different. and the wardrobe choice is completely different. but everyone is smart -- albeit in different ways.

business school people seem to be, on average, less socially awkward (with definite exceptions on both sides); however, in terms of sheer mental horsepower, i'm floored by the intellectual abilities of some of my law school peers. they might not be my first choice of protection in a dark ally, but i wouldn't want anyone else to protect me -- or my enron-admiring business school friends -- in a courtroom.

. . .

(^^that's a law thing, and i don't know what it means yet, but i felt like implementing it.)

tonight, as i sit before still unpacked boxes and unread law school assignments on the first day of what might possibly be the worst year of my life, i'm unable to discern a single telling event to segue into the hurricane of emotions swirling around my apartment.

the hardest thing about the life that i've chosen as a twenty-something is that i've been in a perpetual state of change. i feel like i've spent the last 3 years of my life making new friends, saying goodbye, and scaling learning curves.

i've had five different casts of friends. lived in four different cities. gained and lost and regained the same 12 pounds. and i while i can happily whip out a six-course meal, the perfect chocolate chip cookie still eludes me.

and although i've survived -- barely -- the first day of law school and the first year of business school, i remain firmly certain that the privilege of attending this university will eventually be revealed as a peculiar joke or a horrible mistake before i graduate.

"in baseball it's the rookie year. in the navy it is boot camp. in many walks of life there is a similar time in trial and initiation, a period when newcomers are forced to be the victims of their own ineptness and when they must somehow master the basic skills of the profession in order to survive. for someone who wants to be a lawyer, that proving time is the first year of law school."

but i once had to judge a tighty-whitey contest for lambda kappa pi. so trust me, if i could handle that, i can handle anything.