This is Lucky covering her ears to tune out my constant complaining.

And this is the picture I'm going to show Lucky the next time she tells me she never really wanted a little brother.

The bar

So, I made it to Philadelphia and then quickly fell into the dark hole that is the bar exam. Three years of law school didn’t do it, but it only took three weeks of bar study to turn me into a full-fledged coffee drinker. I have a lot to update people on, but most of it will have to wait until August. I’ve been trying to come up with a good metaphor for the bar exam, and since I’ve been watching Olympic trials this weekend, I’m going with the always dependable sports metaphor. So here it goes. Say you decide you want to go to the Olympics in three years, but you’re not really sure what sport you’d like to compete in. So you spend a lot of money to go to a school where you learn a little bit about every sport and not very much about any sport in particular. At the end of three years, even though your self esteem has taken a beating and you and everyone you know is sick of your constant complaining, you decide you still want to go to the Olympics. Before you can compete, you have to pass a test. Now, the test will only actually cover some of the sports in the Olympics, but they won’t tell you which ones. So you run, and you bike, and you hurdle, and you learn the balance beam, and you dive, and you swim, and you ski, and you learn to ride horses and shoot a bow and arrow and bowl and play badminton. All so that on the day of the test you can perform in whatever sports they choose for you.

The metaphor might not make sense without knowing more about the actual test. It’s two days (but because I’m doing two bars, mine will be three). One day is for state-specific essays – six essays which can cover 23 topics. Each essay will likely have four parts, each on a different legal area. And even though practicing law is all about doing the right research, for the test you get no information, so if you don’t recognize the elements or know the applicable law, you got nothing. Then day two is a 200-question multiple choice exam covering six subjects. This one isn’t state specific because everyone takes the same one. Multiple choice questions can really only ask about areas of settled law where the law is the same in all 50 states. For example, in criminal law, parts of the common law have been replaced by statute in all 50 states but in somewhat different ways. So what do they test on? The common law, because the states uniformly DON’T follow it anymore. And since they test on areas where the law is firmly decided, the test doesn’t always focus on the most important elements of the law. For example, sidewalks are generally open forums for speech, but the sidewalk in front of a post office isn’t. I mean, why in the world would you have to protest directly in front of the post office? Walk down the freaking block and hold a big sign. But apparently that’s an area where they like to trick people, so I had to make a flashcard to hold just that fact.

Here’s my take on the exam so far: I don’t think it comes down to your knowledge of the law. I think it comes down to poise under pressure. 200 multiple choice questions in six hours means less than two minutes a question. But worse than that, a passing score is often only about sixty percent. So for six hours you have to maintain your composure even though you feel like you must be failing because almost every other question has not only felt wrong but has probably actually been wrong. I’m hoping that works to my advantage. Living abroad gave me a lot of skills to bring back with me, but I felt stupid pretty much the entire time I was away. Opened my mouth and sounded like a one-year-old no one could understand. Got on a bus that was clearly marked as going to Iasi only to find out it was going to Bucharest and I was the only one who didn’t know. Tried to buy a package of plastic cups one day and was told they only sold them singly; tried to buy them singly the next week and was told they only came as a pack. Stupid. Two years of feeling stupid, uninformed, confused. What I came to appreciate was that feeling stupid is a necessary component to trying new things. Sometimes new things are exciting and exhilarating and sometimes new things are the common law elements of crime. But they both have their payoffs and right now I’m trying to focus on the upside of all this book learning. It might seem silly now, but if I learn enough from the process, the end result will just be icing on the cake.