My Fall Schedule (The Most Exciting Thing in the World, Ever.)

Sections came out today, which means everyone on the admitted students facebook group is excitedly trying to figure out who their classmates are, making fb groups, everything. Someone brought up the comparison of sections and Hogwarts houses, but I'm getting more of a vibe of splitting up into teams for the camp-wide week-long color wars. I feel like I should be thinking up a bunch of team cheers or something. (Besides, if we went with the Hogwarts comparison, Section E, my section, would be the awkward outlier. That's no good.)

Here's what my schedule looks like for the next semester:

Monday

9:05am-11am - Contracts

1:25pm-2:45pm - Torts

Tuesday

9:05am-11am - Contracts

1:25pm-2:45pm - Torts

Wednesday

10:35am-12:10pm - Civil Procedure

1:25pm-2:45pm - Torts

Thursday

8:00am-8:50am - Legal Research & Writing

10:35am-12:10pm - Civil Procedure

1:25pm-3pm - Constitutional Law (and I got the professor I wanted! Hooray and hurrah!)

Friday

10:35am-12:10pm - Civil Procedure

1:25pm-3pm - Constitutional Law

Habits: Organize ALL the Things!

The time of moving draws nigh! I'm headed up to Minneapolis on the 7th, again with my mom as co-pilot, though thankfully it's a one-way trip this time. As I'm not working and don't have any big time commitments, I've been trying to keep myself busy and stave off boredom, which has oddly uncovered some latent organizational tendencies. This picture (from Allie Brosh's amazing Hyperbole and a Half) sums it up pretty well:

I have never been the hyper-organized, clutter-free sort. But I guess something finally clicked in my head that threw me into a getting-rid-of-stuff frenzy. I suspect that all that time I've spent on Apartment Therapy, looking and lusting at rooms has made me realize that I had too much crap entirely.

Here's a picture of part of my room at the co-op (from a year or so ago), on a good day.

Since I had to keep all of my stuff in the same room, rather than spread out throughout an apartment, I really had to confront how much stuff I had accumulated throughout college. When I moved out, I gave a bunch of stuff away, but I still had a lot of unnecessary miscellanea.

seriously, what is all that? and why was I taking pictures?

Getting work done on that desk was an accomplishment. Though it did seem to be getting a bit of action as a music stand.

Although my space has gotten a lot more organized and less cluttered, it still has pretty far to go. The ideal for me is something more akin to this:

Being super-selective about what I bring with me is going to be important. As much as I love my books, it's laughably unrealistic to expect I'll have much time to read for pleasure once classes begin. I really don't need a full shelf to pick from, much less books that I read in college that will likely never be inclined to pick up again (I'm looking at you, Thomas Aquinas.) So, I'm limiting myself to one box (excluding cookbooks), which is even less than I initially brought to my freshman dorm.

I've cleaned out my wardrobe, which has resulted in the startling discovery that I have enough hoodies to make a stack a few feet high. I got rid of half of them, which still leaves me with a lot of hoodies. And while I cut down on clothes by a lot, like six-garbage-bags-full a lot, I still have too much. I figure this is stage one of the moving process; I got rid of a third of the things I had stashed in my room, and when I start packing to move, another third is going to be left behind. Ideally.

What I'm really hoping results from this is that it inspires a continued desire to keep stuff organized and fairly simple, for both physical objects and for routines. Probably where I got into the most trouble in college was having a scattered approach to my classes; things would often not get done because I didn't organize my time very well, which inevitably led to me panicking at the last minute and trying to learn a semester's worth of German in the week leading up to the final or writing papers on Wittgenstein the night before. As stupid as that approach is in undergrad, trying to do that in law school would essentially be academic suicide.

I think that these past two years after college have given me the necessary distance to evaluate what worked academically and what didn't. My extreme embarrassment at turning in (several) sub-par papers isn't as immediate as it was in 2010, which makes this examination a little more comfortable. When I try to remember what routines I had, I realize that I didn't have them at all. Which explains a lot, actually.

I think how well I do in law school will depend a lot on how well I can set up schedules that I can stick with, which will really play a huge part in how I budget studying time but will also extend to more basic stuff like sleeping and cooking/eating. While it's impossible to commit to a study routine before I even know when I'll be attending class, I can start getting ready by setting up the mental framework of organization. And that starts with, at least for me, getting my living space in order.

sidenote: I know this post was essentially about cleaning my room. Future topics should be more exciting. But then, what topic wouldn't be?

Related:

Hyperbole and Half: This is Why I'll Never Be an Adult (context of the first picture)
Apartment Therapy: Liz's Well-Edited Half of a Durham Duplex (lustworthy apartment)

Packing Prep: Do I Really Need This?

Less than a month to go now! I haven't entirely solidified moving plans yet, but it looks like my brother and I are going to make the drive, and then my parents will fly in to meet up with us. My mom continues to be way over-invested in the sort of bed frame that I buy. I mentioned that I was thinking a daybed might work well in the small bedroom (so that I'd have room for a desk in there too), and now she's told me that she's done daybed "research", whatever that could possibly mean, and that stores x, y, and z have wide selections of them and do I want to go look at them right now? No. I do not.

In other news, this week I've been setting up appointments I've put off for a while, getting some car repair done, and have been contemplating what I really actually absolutely need to bring with me. I'm just taking my own car up, no u-hauls or other supplementary mobile storage units, so room is fairly limited. I started typing out an overly-specific packing list, though I think a better approach may be to figure out the big stuff that's definitely going up with me and that will take up the most room, and then figure out what can fit around these huge, important items. 

As fast as I'm going through books this summer, I know I'm not going to have much time for personal reading once classes get started and shouldn't really keep that many with me. But I still want need their presence. More than almost anything else, having my books with me makes a place feel like home to me. And I know from past experience that if I don't have enough around me, or if my shelves seem a little emptier than they should be, I'm all too eager to go to the used bookstore and fill them. However, I can ship these up, so it's not much of a transportation issue as it is a storage one, since the bedroom I'm moving into is quite small. I'm thinking that I should limit myself to 50ish and hope my new roommates aren't bothered if a new bookshelf appears in the living room. :)

I'm also determined to bring my digital piano up, despite it being big and clunky and it taking up way more than its share of car space. When I stressed out in undergrad, having a piano to noodle around on for a few minutes/hours was one of the best ways to unwind, and I think that'll be doubly important in this upcoming year. Plus, I wouldn't want to deprive my future roomies of my mediocre renditions of songs from the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack. So, that's definitely going, and I'll have to figure out how to pack around that. 

Thankfully, all my other stuff is fairly limited. I didn't accumulate a lot of clothing in college I'd feel bad leaving behind, mostly just student-group t-shirts that I should probably drop off at Goodwill anyway. And I'm not bringing much in the way of linens, since I'm getting a different-sized bed. I am leaving behind my TV and DVDs at my parents' for now, which will probably be a good move; if I need to get my Breaking Bad fix on a bigger screen, I can make some new friends who also share good taste in TV programs. No furniture, aside from a metal desk chair I'm a bit in love with, is coming with me.

I'm really looking forward to shedding a lot of the unnecessary stuff I've accumulated in college and beyond. The trick is going to be keeping everything minimal and organized.

relevant link: Unclutterer

Habits: Cooking

I now have a kitchen gadget that sings to me.

Okay, maybe not sings exactly, but this lovely creature plays "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" when it starts making me rice and a different song when it's finished. And I guess more importantly, it cooks stuff really well. I bought this with the hope that it'll make packing tasty, healthy lunches for law school more convenient.

Like fixing my sleep schedule (which is going really well, actually!), cooking on a daily basis is another important habit that I'm trying to ingrain in myself before orientation begins. In college, I didn't do much cooking at all and ate a lot of unhealthy junk from fast food places. It's not that I didn't like healthier food, but I had a lot of classwork and a massively screwed-up sleep schedule that stressed me out and didn't put me in the right mindset to start teaching myself more about cooking. I had really good intentions; I even got a CSA box every week. But school-related activities and my unfamiliarity with how to prepare the stuff I got just led to me feeling guilty when I opened the door to get milk and saw the sad, neglected kohlrabi sitting there.*


I didn't learn to cook growing up, unless you think shoving a slice of cheese between two pieces of toast and calling in "grilled cheese" counts as cooking, which I don't. (It's still good, though.) I could do very basic stuff— follow directions on boxes, scramble eggs, that sort of thing—but I never really got into proper cooking until I was out of college and living with seventeen roommates.

As a member of the co-op, I had to take on five hours (or "lumps" as they were called, since the time for each task could vary a bit) of chores/responsibilities. In the year I was living there, I did dish-washing, bathroom-cleaning, floor-mopping, newsletter-editing, and cooking. Every day, there were two people assigned to cook, a two-lump head chef, and a one-lump cook who basically just chopped stuff. I one-lumped a few nights a week with some of the more experienced co-opers, and I began to get a lot more comfortable with all aspects of cooking, from basic prep to the more creative aspects of putting together a meal.

After living at the co-op, cooking seemed a lot less daunting, but it's still not a daily habit. In law school, I don't expect I'm going to be making myself three home-cooked meals a day, but I'd like to try to make my lunch most days. I got this awesome lunch jar so I can bring stuff that will stay hot or cold. In these last several weeks leading up to orientation, my goal is to cook at least one meal per day that I'm at home. That way, by the time that law school really gets going, I won't have to attempt to work in a new routine on top of all the other stress I'll be under.

On that note, I'm off to make lunch.

*I'm still not entirely sure I know what to do with kohlrabi.

links of interest:

Just Bento - a good resource for packed lunch recipes.
The Cooking Adventures of a Tired Law Student - a recent law grad's cooking blog.
Cooking for Geeks - really fascinating if you're interested in the science behind cooking.

0L Networking: Proceed With Caution

In the months leading up to law school orientation, a lot of 0Ls, myself included, have been connecting with our future classmates online, through TLS threads and/or Class of 2015 Facebook groups. It's nice to be able to talk to people in the same situation and chat about moving/housing/other topics only other 0Ls seem to find fascinating, but there's also some tricky terrain to navigate with this sort of social networking.

If you choose to add future classmates as friends from the Facebook group without meeting/talking to them first, you have some choices to make. Who are you going to friend? Everyone in the group? To me, that seems a little overwhelming, but then that leads to another dilemma: how are you going to determine who would be a good  person to friend?

I've added a few people because their posts indicated we had something more in common than the school we'll be attending together, but quite a few of the people I've added have been friended on a whim because I saw them post on the group or reply to something from another 0L. And, unfortunately, I've very quickly found a reason to regret this second approach. A link I posted recently became the source of a drawn-out argument between a friend of mine and a randomly-added dude from the admitted students group. It was kind of like watching a very-compelling train wreck. When new notifications popped up, I winced and thought oh shit, what is it this time? At the same time, I was eager to see the latest development.

I restrained myself from fully jumping into the argument because I figured it wouldn't be good to start antagonizing future classmates before I even got to Minneapolis, but after watching it all play out, I don't think I'm going to worry too much about this particular one. Especially because, on top of arguing really poorly, I saw he had linked to a Sarah Jessica Parker-Looks-Like-A-Horse joke on his own wall, which is a great litmus test to determine if someone is an unimaginative asshole.

But on the other side of this, I haven't regretted friending anyone else (uh, so far) and even met some cool future classmates out in Real Life after making online contact first. Incidentally, my friend who was the person primarily arguing with randomly-added-dude was someone I also added on Facebook without having met her first, and she's one of my best friends now. That said, I'm looking forward to moving up in August so I can actually get to meet people face-to-face and start friendships in a more natural way than friending them on Facebook and hoping for the best.

Texas Farewell Tour

It's July! I only spent one day at home after the Minneapolis road trip before hopping in my car to take off, solo, to Austin. The seven-hour drive out there isn't so exciting, but it's mostly traffic-less and was in an odd way, pretty relaxing after the last unfamiliar, tension-filled twenty-hour journey with my mom just a couple of days before.

I took off so soon after getting back home in order to make it to some friends' wedding, which was casual and a lot of fun. Several of my former housemates from the cooperative that I lived in for a year showed up, and it was satisfying to catch up on the latest gossip news. The reception was a potluck, which meant lots of tasty food, plus something that I ate that I later determined was a pork rind. I spent a few days at my friend's house, ate delicious food, and actively enjoyed not being in Lubbock.

I'm currently in the land of Texas A&M, visiting another good friend who keeps on feeding me delicious homemade food. We marathoned both seasons of Game of Thrones in three days (Legally! I have HBOgo! So don't sue me!) and have started planning how to celebrate Scalia's future retirement complete with party games like, "Who said it? Scalia or some other random dickbag?" This all stemmed from me reading some particularly ridiculous excerpts of Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, which was quoted in Flagrant Conduct, a book by a U of M professor who, after reading this book, I am crossing my fingers that I get for Constitutional Law. (If you'd like to get in on the party planning, here is the pinterest board for it.)

I am popping back to Austin for another couple of days, in order to hit some spots that I missed last week (Barton Springs!), hang out with friends a bit more, and to get some delicious peaches to bring back to my family in the unfortunately-peachless land of West Texas. 

Unrelated to all of this travelling, a friend of mine was recently featured on Above the Law for creating a indiegogo campaign (kind of like kickstarter) in order for family and friends to help contribute to her first semester's tuition. The original article is snarky, but the comments are fucking terrible. I'm not sure if ATL has a comment policy (and am a little too lazy to go looking for it at the moment), but the sheer douchebaggery in the comment thread makes pretty good case for having one.

Habits: Sleep

There are sixty-three days left before law school orientation starts, a month and handful of days until I move to Minneapolis, and I have some really important stuff to take care of. I, of course, have to deal with all the forms and fees and everything that goes along with matriculating into law school, but I have some less-official but equally-important business to attend to: changing old habits and cultivating new ones.

Top on my list of priorities is to get my sleeping habits in line. I tend to be a night owl, but staying up until two or three (or five or six) probably won't be the ideal schedule for law school. And trying to start waking up at seven in the morning after months of going to bed around that time seems like it would just make getting a successful start in law school that much harder. The recent trip to Minneapolis actually forced me to wake up at a normal-person time (we had to start driving at 8-9am to get a full day of driving in), so I'm already on a much better cycle than I was a few weeks previous. Still, with a couple of months ahead of me and all that time to potentially screw up this great sleep schedule I have going, I'm a little worried. Right now, I'm staying with some friends who have 9-5 jobs and are up and about in the mornings, but soon I'll be left to my own devices. I need to create some sort of plan to keep this up.

I've experimented in the past with various ways to wake myself up the morning, but approaching my schedule that way may have been a little misguided. No matter what wonderful intentions I have the night before, no matter how many individual alarms I set, my brain in the morning never has my long-term best interests in mind. I'm frustratingly good at stumbling around in the morning, turning off multiple alarms without really waking up. But all of this comes back to being able to get to sleep on time at night. Even when I am on a normal-ish sleep schedule as I am now, my bed time tends to creep later and later, and I think I'm going to have to put some strict measures in place to stop that happening in law school. The first (and probably most important) of those being: no computer in bed. The bed is for sleeping, not drowsy Pinterest or Tumblr-browsing.

Also important, and this kind of goes into another post I intend on writing, is exercise. I'm not planning to start triathlon-training, but I want to set aside time for regular physical activity, if only to break up the monotony of sitting and reading all day. There's been some recent research that indicates exercise and sleep quality are linked (though there are some interesting responses to that claim too), so it's possible that it might contribute to feeling better in the mornings. I haven't been very active since had reconstructive ACL surgery a few years back, but this lull before the 1L storm is probably the best time to start up again. More on this later.

Somewhat-related link:

Above the Law - You Guys Aren't Getting Enough Sleep, Are You?