Panic Level – Mild

*very boring, whiny bar complaint post below.  I make no excuses – this falls under the “therapeutic” category of blog posts – but I do offer you this opportunity to bail.*

I’ve reached the “mild panic” state of bar studying.  I have a certain way of preparing for things, but it requires time, which I do not have enough of.  This is like being waterboarded – there’s just no time for a breath.  My method of learning a passel of information (well enough to write essay questions about it) is that I need to hear it lectured upon – then I need to read over my notes/outline and firm it up, trim it WAYYY down, and re-write it in my own words – and then I need to do several practice questions on it.  I also need to take full days off here and there – even just one day per week – so as to refresh.  But right now, it’s all that I can do to keep up with the lectures.  I have 400+ pages of outlined notes that I’d really like to go through and drill down, selecting some memorizable sections and creating a short study outline (because who can study and memorize 400 pages?  Not this girl!)  I have hundreds of practice questions at my fingertips which I can use to hone my skills and determine my weaknesses, and I’d like to dig into them.  What I don’t have is TIME – we even have class on the weekends!  I skipped two days of lecture for Liam’s birthday – and I don’t regret it because my boy deserved my full attention on that special day – and I ended up skipping a third day because I didn’t see that I had a full class on this one Saturday.  So catching up 12 hours of lecture – on top of the 4 or so per day I already had assigned – took me all week, a miserable week of pushing my brain to stay focused through 6 hours a day of learning.  It’s hard to actively learn new information for 6 hours a day.  Maybe this coming week, without having to play catch up, I’ll end up feeling less desperate.

I just counted lectures, and already I feel better – I’ve done 21/29 substantive lectures (not counting technique lectures), so I have listened to well over 2/3 of the substantive information I need to know.  I probably know 1/3 of it really well (MBE subjects, which is all the stuff you take your first year of law school.  Much of that, at least, was review – review of information I learned almost 3 years ago, but still stuff I once knew very well).  I don’t know Alabama Civil Procedure well at all – and apparently we not only have to memorize rule numbers and sub parts (like I have to know what Rule 50(a)(1) says SPECIFICALLY), but we also have to know every time period possible – like how long a Defendant has to file an answer in Civil Court after a Plaintiff has filed a writ of attachment.  Our lecturer kept apologizing to us – “this is definitely not the type of thing that I would test on a bar exam, if I were writing it, but they test this in Alabama so we got to know it, kids.”  No kidding, dude.  This is something that a lawyer can look up in five seconds – why make us memorize it?  Alabama is one of the only states with a 3 day bar, and this is why??  So we can display our ability to memorize a bunch of numbers?  I tell myself that everybody has to do this, and no human being possibly can do it, so I just have to memorize MORE than most everybody else taking the Alabama bar.  I used to be an actress.  I can memorize.  I wish I didn’t have to, but I certainly can.  RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, and then suck it up and give The Man what he wants.

I know I only have a few weeks of this misery left, and then I have several weeks of summer fun (before I start my job, which will be a different sort of fun/panic/stress).  I think that Monday morning I will carve out some time to make a strategic plan.  I’ll feel better about all of this if I feel like I’m controlling the flood, rather than being swept away by it.  It won’t make it any less work, of course, but it might convince me that it’s manageable.  I can already see, though, that July will be 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, right up until a few days before.

And then August will make up for it, in spades.