January, even a good January, can be merciless. January pokes at the
sediment until it finds the motionless mass that is you, rousts you out off the
ocean floor and drags you wincing back to the surface. January went and did it
again, pulled me and my third-year colleagues back for the second half of what
conventional law-school wisdom holds is the year that bores you to death.
I am less bored with law school than inured to its attention-seeking
whine. A 3L has things to do. Time
is elusive and patience is thin. There are bar applications and job
applications, forms and photographs and all manner of mysterious fee, and yet
law school whimpers for its due. We are more done with law school than it is
done with us, but the feeding tube is out and the morphine drip is in.
Whatever ground is left to cover, I am changed in fundamental ways. I
catch an old Twilight Zone, the one set in a gentlemen’s club at a time when
that meant cigar-chewing men in book-lined dens and overstuffed leather. An old
colonel annoyed by a young man’s incessant chatter promises him a half-million dollars
if he will refrain from speaking a word for a solid year. Time was, I would
have marveled at the masterful storytelling both for its own sake and for what
it said about human nature and desperation and the pull of the dark impulse.
Today, I switch off the set thinking breach of unilateral contract and shake my
head at the detrimental reliance at the heart of the whole affair. This is
where law school bows out and the world takes over. We’re inexperienced as hell
and equipped with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but there are things
we won’t know until our boots are on the ground. We know, for example, that the
Uniform Commercial Code was authored by the devil himself, but the full
depravity of it is a mystery until then.
Those of us who suffer from competing streaks of perfectionism and
indecision know that when the twin traits intersect they can produce a deadly
philosophy that says until it can be done perfectly, it cannot be done at all. I
resolve to improve, and begin to experiment with lists. I turn to the Internet
for inspiration, the way one does, and run across two lists of interest. One is
a 1490 to-do list culled from a small leather notebook purportedly carried by
Leonardo da Vinci: “[Discover] the measurement of the Castello,” “Get the
master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.” “Draw Milan.” The
other is a 33-item list of New Year’s resolutions compiled by Woody Guthrie in
1942: “Wash teeth if any.” “Help win war – beat fascism.” “Love everybody.”
“Dream good.”
My list reflects neither the erudite aspirations of Leonardo da Vinci
nor the sweet humanity of Woody Guthrie. For 30 days or more, it was a series
of tedious tasks capable of distillation into just one: gather up the shreds of
paper that document your existence on earth, shove the whole of your life into
a nine-by-twelve envelope and dispatch it to an omniscient force empowered to
assess the suitability of, if not you, then at least the paper you, for the
practice of law. Now that my bar application is submitted, however, I have
renewed hope for this list thing. With the bitterness of January gone and the
number of weeks in this final semester diminished by four, the list could
channel chaos and uncertainty into something that resembles order. If nothing
else, the list can be a way of re-centering oneself. The things we deem
important say a lot about who we are. I will start the Great 3L List with borrowed
ideas that constitute something of a Woody-Leonardo hybrid: Study hard. Be kind
to people and animals. Live with integrity. Dream good.
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