Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...
Here follows a rambling rant of repetitive regret, ruefulness, and reproach. Be ye warned.
I ran out of the pills that keep my ADD and anxiety in check on Thursday. I didn't realize that the prescription for another bottle of pills had already arrived in my mailbox, and was in fact sitting in a pile of unnoticed coupon mailers on my desk for several days. Consequently, I hit a low point on Sunday. I refilled my prescription last night, and I am now safe in my medicinal cocoon.*
Even though I am over the panic now, I still feel like some of the conclusions I reached during my little episode are pretty valid, and I recount them here so that I can think about them some more and whore for LiveJournal comments.
I guess one of the lingering aftereffects of wigging out for days and then resuming the interval is a screwed up sleep timer. I've been exhausted all weekend, and last night I couldn't get to sleep until 4am. That didn't stop me from waking up at 7:00. Well, to be more accurate, I don't think I fully slept the entire time. I have a vague memory of just lying inert in bed, not quite alert enough to contemplate why I wasn't unconscious. Anyway, even though I have been awake the whole damned time, I decided to take a mulligan today. I have maintained good attendance in my classes so far, with few exceptions, and I knew that I was going to be a worthless husk if I tried to actually read cases or answer hypothetical questions, so I stayed home and have been re-aligning my soul all day.
In my deeply depleted and plebeian state, I have been meditating on the anxiety-inducing thoughts of the last few days. I have concluded that I don't want to be a lawyer. The law degree was just one step on the way to getting a legal education and an MBA so that I could somehow represent artists' rights, but I didn't realize that I would hate it this much. I suppose hate is the wrong word. It's more like apathy so intense that it's palpable. I want to skip to Intellectual Property and Copyright law, but I have to wade through the slough of despond basic first-year courses before I get there. Let me tell you exactly how much of a shit I do not give about the Rule Against Perpetuities.
All of my research about what life in law school is like and how to get through it comes from sensible plans with the ultimate goal of getting a job as a faceless drone in a big law firm. If you know me at all, you realize how out-of-character it would be for me to commit to working 80 hours a week on salary just to cover my student loans. Add to that my desire to get a bidness degree, and the future becomes even cloudier. If I don't want to be a lawyer, then my goals are not really in line with the "how to succeed in law school" plans. In fact, part of me is considering the possibility that I don't have to excel in school right now. (The success plan to which I have given the most thought espouses acing the first year classes and getting on Law Review. This has an added bonus of increasing the likelihood for financial assistance for the next two years.) But if my goal is to go on to another degree, then my motivation to bust my ass evaporates. If all I want is the legal education, and to focus that education on topics that I won't even study for another year, then why should I try to come out on top of my class? The grading system, like most other aspects of law school, is a fucking racket that screws the students, but that is a subject for another rant.
I am at a crossroads in my first semester as a law student. If I decide to press boldly onward, I will have to buckle down and work my ass off for the next couple of months. I have pretty much burned through all of my allotted slacking off time. I have overcome the kneejerk desire to quit law school altogether, though that wasn't really and option, as the consequences of such an act - defaulting on my loans, being stranded in DC with no job and no income, telling my parents that I gave up - are untenable. Now I have to look at what I want to do with the next few years of my life and decide if I should commit the next 2.5 years to trying to excel at something I loathe, or if I should merely extract the education that is useful to me out of law school, a la plasmapheresis. (Sorry, I gave at a blood drive at school last week, and so certain vocabulary words have a greater presence in my mind than they usually would.)
Pessimistic though it may be, I am afraid to try forcing excellence because I'm not sure that I can actually do it if I don't care about my classes. I'm at least going to finish up this year. And that puts me 1/3 of the way to a law degree if I continue, and puts me on the other side of a wasted year and mountains of debt if I don't. Is it less of a waste to half-ass my way through law school then it is to quit after a year? I haven't done nearly enough research on MBA programs (the joint program at GWU was pretty much the only option I considered), so I don't know if business school will be any more tolerable than law school. Is it too late to start a band or run away to Hollywood?
That's pretty much it. Do I buckle down, or just buckle? Stress myself out and give up my life to get good grades, or just do enough to get by and get the degree and the education for my own benefit? I'm equivocating, but I need to make a decision soon. And since asking my parents for advice in this case is pretty much asking for a confrontation, I am asking you, the intertron, for insight.
This tirade brought to you by 3 hours of pseudo-sleep, medicinal metabolic lag, and the letter Q.
*This makes it sound like I spend my days in a drug-induced haze. Not so. I'm really pretty much the same person, only I have less trouble focusing, and I don't agonize over petty details as much. Seriously, I never realized how panicky I was until I started taking pills that have a side-effect of reducing anxiety.
I ran out of the pills that keep my ADD and anxiety in check on Thursday. I didn't realize that the prescription for another bottle of pills had already arrived in my mailbox, and was in fact sitting in a pile of unnoticed coupon mailers on my desk for several days. Consequently, I hit a low point on Sunday. I refilled my prescription last night, and I am now safe in my medicinal cocoon.*
Even though I am over the panic now, I still feel like some of the conclusions I reached during my little episode are pretty valid, and I recount them here so that I can think about them some more and whore for LiveJournal comments.
I guess one of the lingering aftereffects of wigging out for days and then resuming the interval is a screwed up sleep timer. I've been exhausted all weekend, and last night I couldn't get to sleep until 4am. That didn't stop me from waking up at 7:00. Well, to be more accurate, I don't think I fully slept the entire time. I have a vague memory of just lying inert in bed, not quite alert enough to contemplate why I wasn't unconscious. Anyway, even though I have been awake the whole damned time, I decided to take a mulligan today. I have maintained good attendance in my classes so far, with few exceptions, and I knew that I was going to be a worthless husk if I tried to actually read cases or answer hypothetical questions, so I stayed home and have been re-aligning my soul all day.
In my deeply depleted and plebeian state, I have been meditating on the anxiety-inducing thoughts of the last few days. I have concluded that I don't want to be a lawyer. The law degree was just one step on the way to getting a legal education and an MBA so that I could somehow represent artists' rights, but I didn't realize that I would hate it this much. I suppose hate is the wrong word. It's more like apathy so intense that it's palpable. I want to skip to Intellectual Property and Copyright law, but I have to wade through the slough of despond basic first-year courses before I get there. Let me tell you exactly how much of a shit I do not give about the Rule Against Perpetuities.
All of my research about what life in law school is like and how to get through it comes from sensible plans with the ultimate goal of getting a job as a faceless drone in a big law firm. If you know me at all, you realize how out-of-character it would be for me to commit to working 80 hours a week on salary just to cover my student loans. Add to that my desire to get a bidness degree, and the future becomes even cloudier. If I don't want to be a lawyer, then my goals are not really in line with the "how to succeed in law school" plans. In fact, part of me is considering the possibility that I don't have to excel in school right now. (The success plan to which I have given the most thought espouses acing the first year classes and getting on Law Review. This has an added bonus of increasing the likelihood for financial assistance for the next two years.) But if my goal is to go on to another degree, then my motivation to bust my ass evaporates. If all I want is the legal education, and to focus that education on topics that I won't even study for another year, then why should I try to come out on top of my class? The grading system, like most other aspects of law school, is a fucking racket that screws the students, but that is a subject for another rant.
I am at a crossroads in my first semester as a law student. If I decide to press boldly onward, I will have to buckle down and work my ass off for the next couple of months. I have pretty much burned through all of my allotted slacking off time. I have overcome the kneejerk desire to quit law school altogether, though that wasn't really and option, as the consequences of such an act - defaulting on my loans, being stranded in DC with no job and no income, telling my parents that I gave up - are untenable. Now I have to look at what I want to do with the next few years of my life and decide if I should commit the next 2.5 years to trying to excel at something I loathe, or if I should merely extract the education that is useful to me out of law school, a la plasmapheresis. (Sorry, I gave at a blood drive at school last week, and so certain vocabulary words have a greater presence in my mind than they usually would.)
Pessimistic though it may be, I am afraid to try forcing excellence because I'm not sure that I can actually do it if I don't care about my classes. I'm at least going to finish up this year. And that puts me 1/3 of the way to a law degree if I continue, and puts me on the other side of a wasted year and mountains of debt if I don't. Is it less of a waste to half-ass my way through law school then it is to quit after a year? I haven't done nearly enough research on MBA programs (the joint program at GWU was pretty much the only option I considered), so I don't know if business school will be any more tolerable than law school. Is it too late to start a band or run away to Hollywood?
That's pretty much it. Do I buckle down, or just buckle? Stress myself out and give up my life to get good grades, or just do enough to get by and get the degree and the education for my own benefit? I'm equivocating, but I need to make a decision soon. And since asking my parents for advice in this case is pretty much asking for a confrontation, I am asking you, the intertron, for insight.
This tirade brought to you by 3 hours of pseudo-sleep, medicinal metabolic lag, and the letter Q.
*This makes it sound like I spend my days in a drug-induced haze. Not so. I'm really pretty much the same person, only I have less trouble focusing, and I don't agonize over petty details as much. Seriously, I never realized how panicky I was until I started taking pills that have a side-effect of reducing anxiety.