Law-new-view's turns 50

I just noticed that this is the 50th post to this blog. I have already discussed the role of blogging at law school and even began to reflect on the One-L year in my last post, but I havn't talked about another event that has run simultaniously with this time in law school: living in Seattle. 50 posts in 8 months is not not really that many, and if I look back, most of those are weighted more heavily toward this end of the school year, but on the other-hand, 8 months is not that much time either, especially when you have to read and actively understand thousands of pages of legal texts. When I started law school, I also started a new life in a new city. Starting both at the same time seems to have made my integration into this new city somewhat slower. I still constantly confused when people talk about places in this city, although, as the weather gets nicer I have been out exploring on my bike. I know my neighborhood relatively well, but I am continually bumping into other law students who live a block or two away, and I had no idea that they even lived in the neighborhood. Outside of lawschool, I know maybe a dozen people in Seattle, and while I have met a lot of people in law school, as I said in my last post, it is healthy to have contact with others who are not struggling to learn the same things you are. This explains another aspect of moving to a new city for law school. It has been hard to make friends at law school. Part of that is that I moved here with my girlfriend and we formed a kind of sociel unit unto ourselves that I am sure affected the process of meeting others, but I also think law school itself is not condusive to making friends. Sure there are people I chat with at school, I chat with online, I occationally chat with on the street, but we are all under the same time constraints, and unless you make the library an opportunity to meet others (i.e. turn studying into a social event, which is pretty common) when you leave school, most people are going home to study or to spend time with people they know outside of law school. In addition, I think law school attracts certain types of individuals that I have previously tried to avoid. If I had thought about it before law school, I probably could have predicted that there would be a lot of frat boys and sorority girls in law school, but I guess I didn't let my mind wander there, so it was kind of a shock to realize that this sub-culture of individuals that I had purposely avoided for years had somehow returned in numbers not seen since living in the dorms as a freshman in college. This is not to say that there arn't people in law school that I find interesting or that I could see spending time with outside of school, but rather that this hasn't really happened yet. (summer is coming, which tends to bring people out of their winter-time hovels,) Otherwise, Seattle is a good place to live. It is easier to study when you don't want to go outside in the rain, but at the same time it can be demoralizing, especially if you come from a place with a lot of sun.