Tour de Bar Exam

I have not had much time to blog lately. Not only am I mired in bar exam studying, but we had to move over the 4th of July weekend and did not have internet for a week, but we are up and running again. Studying has its good days and its bad days. I am glad the bar exam starts in a week because I am ready for this to be over. I think I am ready on at lease half of the subjects if the exam was tomorrow. I have a week to make sure I have the other half in my head. It was hard to study last weekend because I just wanted to have a day off to do things I wanted to do, but then I remember it was either two more weeks of studying or six months. At least I still have my sense of humor. Last night S found this picture that describes the exact hypothetical our Sales professor used to explain when risk of loss transfers. Imagine you are buying an ice cream cone at the beach and just as the vendor hands it out to you, a seagull swoops down and grabs it out of his hand-vendor's loss because goods not tendered. If you take the goods into your hand, they have been tendered and if the seagull comes in the situation depicted below, you still have to pay for it. I thought he was just making up a crazy hypothetical. I guess I was wrong.

Back at It.

I was pretty much worthless all day Saturday, and it has been difficult getting back in the swing of things. When it comes to studying, if you give yourself an inch, you might take a mile. I certainly needed a break, but it became easy to rationalize more breaks as the weekend went on. I really had to struggle through writing essays yesterday. Plus it is getting very warm here, so it is getting harding to study.

I have a no class today, but I have essays to catch up on. I just finished 3 evidence essays which was so refreshing after commercial paper. It is nice to have a few subjects that I feel good at. If the exam was today, I am pretty sure I could pass whatever evidence question came along. That is one of the advantages of criminal law: you really learn evidence. Civil attorneys simply do not use the rules of evidence as often as in criminal law. This afternoon I have to write torts essays, and even though I kind of like torts (not committing them) I struggle with those questions. They are such a jumble of activity that I seem to miss torts that are going on. Anyway enough details. My brain appears to be back in business a little bit.

Brain Freeze

My brain finally gave out yesterday afternoon. It totally froze up and would not let me learn anything else. After 18 subjects in 5 weeks with 3 more subjects to go, I sat down to write my practice essays in commercial paper yesterday afternoon and try as I might, I simply could not get the rules to come into my brain. I was spent: too much information in too little time. I somehow slogged through 2 essays, but it was essentially a waist of time and I would have been better off trying to recover than persist in the futility. I am hoping I can muster enough energy to get through a few essays today and then take the rest of the day off to enjoy the nice weather we have and give my brain a rest. The cool morning breeze coming through the window to the study is just too delicious to sit here all day and there is no way I am going to get through another week without some time to recover.


(view out my study window of a beautiful morning)

Corporations

I hated learning corporations as much the second time as the first time. It was painful to spend the whole day writing corporation essays. Each time I start a new subject, I forget that the first couple of essays always suck, but with corporations, it was not until the 5th one where I started to feel like I knew what I was talking about, and considering I took a whole semester on business entities and did not remember anything, I don't have a lot of hope I will remember much of what I did today when I have to sit down again in week or so to write more. I actually find it easier to write on a subject that I never took the class in and just learned the basics in our 3 hour bar prep class. They say the bar exam is like a river that is an inch deep but a mile wide, so it is easier to have less depth in a subject than more. Once you learn the 15-30 basic rules for a subject, that is all you really need to know and be able to memorize them, spot them and write them out again on the essay. A whole semester of business entities left me more mostly confused (I somehow did half-way decent on the exam) than if I had just learned the rules in a single class as I did for secured transactions.

Anyway, time to get outside with the dogs.

A wall and the other side

I kind of hit a wall this week. I don't know if it is the constant onslaught of new subjects or the relentless pace of essay writing, but yesterday evening I wrote one professional responsibility essay and I simply could not do any more. My brain was just full and I couldn't take it. Luckily S, having taken and passed the bar, understands these things and took me out for Mexican food and a margarita.

I also visited my old (not so old, but it seems like I have been studying for the bar for ages) office this week, which left me with mixed emotions. On the one hand I feel totally left out of life and I missed work a lot when I heard about the interesting cases that the lawyers were working on. It took me until today to let that feeling inspire me to get over this wall that i have run into and remember why I am doing this: because I want to be a lawyer.

That said, I got all my essays done for today, so it is time for a break.

bar

Whereas the first week of bar prep was all about getting organized and the second week was all about getting a rythem, last week was all about getting exhausted with bar prep. A lot of people were like me and found time for themselves last weekend, because even though it has only been three weeks it seems like ages since I have had extra time for myself. Now though it is time to grind through the rest of the review class. We are getting exhausted into some subjects now in which I have not taken the class: wills,trusts, secured transactions. Why cant there be more criminal procedure?