Jeremy's Weblog

I recently graduated from Harvard Law School. This is my weblog. It tries to be funny. E-mail me if you like it. For an index of what's lurking in the archives, sorted by category, click here.

Sunday, February 01, 2004

I got a letter today from the firm I'm working for this summer. "First, please complete the attached form...." "Second, orientation dates...." "Third, the firm offers a salary advance for all summer associates...."

What??

They barely even know me and they want to give me money? I'm tempted to just take the money and run. To Canada.

How did I get here so fast? Law school just started yesterday. I feel like I was just six years old and afraid to walk down the hall to the bathroom by myself because the hall monsters would swallow me alive (I went to a dangerous elementary school; we lost three or four children a year to the hall monsters, more during leap years).

I'm not ready to be an adult. There's still too much I didn't accomplish as a kid. I don't really tie my shoes all that well. I never beat the last level of Super Mario Brothers. I've never been arrested.

Tomorrow, we start another semester of classes. It's old hat by now. One of my friends has been wondering aloud for the past couple of weeks what he's going to do with himself for the 155-odd hours a week we're not in class, now that, really, there's not much new on the horizon. We finished the recruiting process, we're way past the law review competition, exams no longer really matter, we're pretty much in every extracurricular activity we're planning to join by now (although it's never too late to convert to Judaism and join the Jewish Law Students Association, I tell him). He's thinking about learning to play the oboe, or making a really big rubber band ball. These are not valuable uses of our time (with apologies to oboe players).

But what else? You stick the recruiting season in so early and... no, that's not where I want this train of thought to go. That's too serious. I don't really know how to reform the legal education and law firm recruitment industries to meet everyone's needs and not make the last half of law school feel like an exercise in thumb-twiddling.

Instead, I thought I'd just come up with some ways to spend the other 155 hours of the week I'm not in class this semester:

6 hours alphabetizing my CD collection
3 hours seeing if I really can suffocate myself with a plastic bag
5 hours building a tower of toenail clippings
11 hours watching the Paris Hilton video over and over again
2 hours flossing
4 hours watching my cell phone battery recharge
12 hours sorting the Fruity Pebbles by color
1/2 hour testing the smoke detector
28 minutes refolding my sweaters
2 minutes on the phone with my mom
8 hours figuring how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop
16 hours playing Spider Solitaire
9 hours making sure none of the pages in any of my casebooks are missing
23 hours crying
34 hours watching "Full House" reruns (There really are 68 episodes of Full House on each week, on basic cable. Sixty-eight. Unbelievable.)

and, oh, I forgot:
14 hours sleeping (practice for the law firm job)
7 hours eating-slash-collating random bits of paper (more practice for the law firm job)

Total: 155 hours. I'm ready for a great semester. :)