There’s nothing funny about law school.
There’s nothing funny about eating at Subway 8 times a week, but only showering once.
There’s nothing funny about being called on unprepared and falling on your face in front of 120 classmates. And even less that’s funny about being called on when you’re prepared, only to fail anyway.
There’s probably nothing funny about six-figure student loan debt. Though, if you think about it, seven-figure student loan debt would be pretty hilarious. But there’s definitely nothing funny about having your whole night ruined by an improperly italicized em-dash. Or period. Or space. And there’s nothing funny about spending your whole life studying and taking tests only to then take a test that will allow you to spend three more years studying and taking tests, after which, as a reward, you get to study for and take the stupidest test in the history of tests.
No, looking back at it, there really wasn’t much of anything funny about law school.
But somehow we still managed to laugh. Quite a bit, I think.
So . . . try to remember that. Try to remember that, yes, we are going into a humorless business full of uptight, soulless pricks. But it can only stay a business full of uptight, soulless pricks if we all in fact become uptight, soulless pricks.
So here’s to the eternal preservation of the soul, the endless suppression of uptight prickery.
Here’s to getting a laugh out of the law everyday. And not a lame, bullshit laugh like “Heh-heh, that guy went to a state school” or “Oh man, she must have missed the bonus this year--she’s shopping at Banana Republic.”
Make it a real laugh.
Here’s to dropping the Ludacris footnote into your judge’s opinion, or the GHB in the hiring partner’s coffee, or your pants at the firm Christmas banquet. Here’s to providing fodder for the hundreds of law students blogging about their clerkships each summer. Here’s to setting aside a few minutes out of each day--each of the thousands of days we’ll spend in this serious profession--to take ourselves a little less than seriously. Seriously.
It’s been an odd but rewarding experience to inflict myself upon the world for the last three years, and during that time this blog has managed to poke into my real life in more ways than I ever could have expected. It got me a job. It got me called out in class. It got me tens of tens of dollars in advertising revenue, and one time it even got me sweet concert tickets. But I’ve needed to call it quits for quite some time, and that time is finally now. The hope: That putting an end to my blogging activities will finally force me to finish at least one of the countless “legitimate” writing projects I’ve started since puberty.The reality: Don’t be surprised when you stumble upon the anonymous blog of a Texas practitioner whose obsession with Russian gymnasts and his own rock-hard abs seems more than a little familiar.
I’d like to thank everyone who’s read this over the last 40 months, particularly those who’ve taken the time to comment, or those who came here looking for porn. I liked to think of my comments section as a sort of treehouse for law students who didn’t have time to meet in a real treehouse, which, now that I type it, is sort of sad and makes me wish that I’d just built a treehouse instead. But, anyway, thanks for reading. I’d like to thank the network administrators at each and every American law school for making wireless internet access available in classrooms. Without you, my readership would have consisted mainly of my mom. (And maybe Professor Brian Leiter, provided that I took the time to mention him so that his weekly self-Google would bring him here.) I’d like to thank my wife, who put up with this shit, and only rarely took the time to make fun of me on my own blog. And last, but most importantly, I’d like to thank Harriet Miers, without whom none of this would have been possible.
So long, and thanks for all the outlines.
--Mike
