Midsummer update

The kids: are my world and I am so happy they are all home. Today we hit the beach and it was splendid. Trips planned: One week in a rented house at the ocean. One weekend of camping at the ocean. One day trip to local “big city”.  One day trip to local amusement park. One July 4th party which includes a clear view of fireworks from the back yard. One night at the car races. One night at the local minor league baseball game. That should do it. Mom’s pocketbook (which I never used to carry by the way…) is empty before we even get started.

The internship: is awesome. Although I’m not doing anything close to practicing law, I think I get more interaction with the people coming to court and also with all the court staff than my classmates who are interning with public defenders and prosecutors. This weeks highlights: one pro se criminal case, a jury selection, an assault on a judicial marshall, and an administrative appeal. Next week: I will spend an hour with a prosecutor and also tour the holding area with a marshall. I find every day at court to be interesting and educational. I am not sure, however, that I would enjoy working there.

The pocketbook: an item that every attorney must learn to carry? No. But I sure looked stupid carrying my keys, a wallet, and a package of tictacs while dressed in a suit. I managed to go 39 years without ever carrying a pocketbook. I’m not even sure if that is spelled correctly as a compound word. But sure enough, in a few weeks flat, I have a pocketbook so full of things that I can lose my own keys. This reminds me of lawyer hair for some reason. A must have that I am not good at maintaining. But I can learn.

40: that birthday that is fast approaching. I need to quit smoking and it is on my to-do list for 7/1/09. I do not want to be 40 and a smoker. Actually, I would like to live to see my youngest child through to adulthood. If I am a non-smoker on my birthday (which isn’t until August), I will be a happy girl. Oh yeah. Make that woman. I suspect it is time to grow up.

That’s all folks. Hope everyone is enjoying their summer. Read a book, take a tan, watch a movie, see a rainbow, or simply splash your feet in some water…

2L preview, decisions, and life

I watched a young person be sent to prison for ten years in a plea deal yesterday. Scary stuff. There is something about robbing people at gunpoint that tends to lead to bad outcomes. As one attorney put it – “scary stuff happens in here. It takes about two minutes in front of a judge for someone to agree to serve years in jail, and then they are gone”. That is exactly how it works, although I am certain many hours of discussions and investigations have occurred before those plea agreements are reached. The internship? I don’t get to do a lot of meaningful work, but I get to spend many hours in the courtroom and that is very helpful, useful, educational, informative, and quite enjoyable for me. Not to mention I am meeting lots of people. I love my internship even though I might not choose to work in that environment on a daily basis. Then again, maybe I would. Only time will tell.

Invitations to write on to law review have been issued. I am eligible to participate. This is a decision I have thought about, but probably not as much thought as it deserves. There is a certain part of me that believes my time would be better spent writing a quality piece for submission to someone else’s journal and getting an actual piece published. On the other hand, law review can’t be beat for resume purposes. Actually, if I had my choice, there is a secondary joural that I would enjoy much more. If I successfully write on, I might choose that one. So I need to make my decision very soon and plan to set the time aside. Truth be told, I don’t know much about this competition. I need to find out more and hopefully talk to a Prof. before I make this decision. I’ll let you know when I make up my mind.

Pretty soon I need to check the career boards and see what type of opportunities for next summer are presenting early. I know last year I saw people on interviews very early in the year. So I would like to be in that group. In other news, I found a local law firm that specializes in serving clients with brain injuries, from torts to medicine and education issues. It might be a perfect match if I can make it happen. So….I am currently thinking about next summer’s employment options? Yes. That is exactly what I am doing. Also thinking about how to best accomplish that article I want to research and write before school is over. Time is going on by.  I hope all my readers are having a lovely summer. For tomorrow, I am going to attempt to focus exclusively on my children and  my home. Wish me luck.

Realities of Law School Scholarships

I kept mine. I am grateful. I found out yesterday and it is still sinking in. But the relief that came with that news was tempered by information that a good friend of mine didn’t meet with the same success.  We started together, studied together, shared our concerns and our successes, and met each others’s families. We are both non-traditional students. Beyond that, our similarities end.  I’m a lifelong resident of the state I live in. The other person uprooted an entire family to get here. If one of us was in a better position to lose the scholarship, it was me. I still have a career here. But so it is. Any scholarship that is attached to a class rank is subject to being lost at the end of 1L year. It has been a humbling experience to say the least, and for my friend, perhaps life-altering. I need more time to decide how I feel about this situation, because hard work on its own, innate ability as reflected in GPA’s and LSAT scores on its own, or even the combination of the two is insufficient to insure success. As for the soft factors that were considered for these scholarships, both my friend and myself are the same people that we were before school started. Our life experiences, personality traits, and worthwhile goals and objectives have not changed. It is hard for me to say that either of us is less deserving of the scholarship today than we were last year at this time. Perhaps neither of us deserved it in the first place.  The optimist in me doesn’t want to believe the theory that the law school gives 1L’s money as a bribe to raise their ranking while expecting a certain percentage to fail. But no matter how you look at it, if you accept a scholarship that requires a certain GPA or class rank to retain that scholarship, you simply must consider what would happen to you if you lost it. For me, the risk would have been worth it anyway. For my friend, different decisions might have been made. Top half is not a given, no matter how accustomed you are to being at the top of the class. So….good luck to all those reading. I need some more time to adjust my attitude. For today, I am depressed and contemplative. I need to figure out what I want to do with this educational opportunity. I need to take full advantage of it this coming year, because a third year is not an automatic given. I’m not going to spend my year obsessing about grades, that is for sure. I’ll write again soon. Thank you to all my readers for over 7000 hits to this blog, I appreciate it.

Contracts, Grades, and a promise

I was sure I failed, confident my scholarship was on the line, and upset for days until I finally got to a point of acceptance. And in the end? I did fine. Pulled off a B, which is above the median. Unfortunately, one of the classes I thought I did well in ended up with a C+. But no matter how you look at it, my scholarship seems safe. I have one more grade outstanding and I don’t think it can pull me down far enough to significantly hurt me. But I have learned one lesson, and it is a mistake I will never make again. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PREDICT LAW SCHOOL GRADES. It is an impossible task. There is no way to know. I have said that before, but didn’t really believe it. Now I know from first hand experience. Today I am the happiest woman on earth. Unfortunately the outstanding grade is with a Prof. who is well-known for her delayed grades so it could still be a long wait until I am 100% certain of my fate. I hope everyone is having a great summer. I’ll write again soon about that internship. To the 0L’s reading this, enjoy the time you have left.

1L Summer, Time Management

So, I’ve made it to June. Three out of five grades are in, and so far I’m doing just ok. I’ve become amazingly disconnected from caring whether I retain my scholarship or not. I have decided that the wait for law school grades is really unpleasant and I don’t have time to postpone my life while I wait, so I have moved on. I found myself floundering for a few weeks because I have far too much time on my hands. I was actually used to being busy morning, noon, and night. So I have put myself on a schedule and that has helped substantially. The basics:

1. The Internship – I am working three days a week in a local courthouse, handling administrative issues for persons accused of minor crimes and sentenced to community service and various treatments. I meet the client before they see the prosecutor and again after they face the judge. It is interesting work. During quieter times I am able to sit in court and watch criminal trials and the general criminal docket. I have actually learned alot, and met many people. My school is well-represented here, with interns working with the prosecution, defense, and other administrative positions. So far, well worth my time.

2. The Real Job – I actually do have one of those. I am working 25 hours per week with my client for the duration of the summer, with most of those hours being done on the weekends when my children are with their father.

3. The Children – The college freshman is home and already working full time and taking a summer class. She and I have a standing date on Friday evenings for dinner and a movie. Boyfriend happens to work on Friday, so that works out well for me. It is great to have her home. The boys are still in school. They will be attending camp on my work days, and will have the option of going to camp on my two days off. I lucked out with a summer playground program that runs five days a week from 8-4:30 – total cost for two children? $450 for the entire summer! That’s total, not each. There is no way to beat that. They get to play sports, swim, make crafts, and do other camp activities plus take a field trip once a week (extra $ there, but that’s ok). Thank God for Parks and Rec. Three evenings a week are devoted to the children, from 4-9 PM. So far we have made it to the public library, the park, and out for a bike ride. I can’t wait for them to be done with school so we can take a day trip or two.

4. Reading – I am on my third book. As I have shared my summer reading list elsewhere, I can not share it here, but I love to read, I missed it during law school, and I am happy to have time to do it now.

5. Writing – I also love to write. I have been keeping up with my journal, and have allotted three late evenings per week to writing. No TV, no computer, no radio. Just a notebook and a pen. Whether I end up with poetry, a novel, a collection of nonsense, or just an extension of the journal remains to be seen. Six to nine hours of writing a week should certainly lead to something.

That sums up my weekly to do list. Housework fills whatever small voids are left over. I have also managed to plant some flowers and a couple of tomato plants. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. Sometime between now and the end of June I hope to have all my grades in and discover whether I will retain my scholarship or not. Until then….

Choice or mirage?

Daniel Hauser and his mother have returned home, and the child is recieving appropriate medical treatment. The court allowed the parents to retain custody of the boy and it seems like a happy ending. With some luck, he will recover. But you are wrong. I hope Daniel gets physically better. I hope he never develops any other cancer as a result of the chemo itself. I hope that his family can support him as he deals with the incessant and horrible side effects of this treatment, and I hope the child doesn’t fight to hard and need not be restrained or have his rights violated to receive the treatment in the first place. I hope he and his parents have the strenght to deal with pure hell. However, I maintain that nobody should have the authority to dictate that this child be repeatedly injected with poisin that will almost kill him as it saves him from almost certain death.

Medicine is not God. People who practice it are not God. The opinions of one American educated doctor are not automatically better or more justified than the opinions of a doctor who was trained in a different country. We are not the only country where people get cancer, and we are not the only country that has found treatment for the disease. We are far, very far, from being the best, most perfect, most knowledgable, most moral, most Godlike people of the earth. And the sooner we learn that the better off we will be. While people are all set to force the Hauser’s to pursue a particular cure for their one child, Daniel, thousands upon thousands of other children are in the care of the government. Many hundreds, likely thousands of those children are in hospitals tonight. They are locked up, strapped in beds, and drugged. They are abused by other children, abused by adults, and ignored by 99.99% of the people who are all gung-ho about questioning the Hauser’s decisions. These kids are ignored. They are at risk. They do not get proper care. They do not get proper treatment. Half the states don’t even know where all of their children are. Children are left alone in hospital beds. They can be dead for months or years before anyone even reports them missing. So everyone who wants to get all philosophical about this one child might do a parentless child a favor by leaving the Hauser’s alone and finding a child who needs a parent. There are, after all, thousands of them available. And if you want one with serious health conditions to decide about, there are kids with all variety of those who don’t have a parent who cares to do anything at all.

Blind faith in medicine

People should think long and hard about the mom who is on the run with her thirteen year old. One of my main contentions is that children are abused and tortured by the medical profession. I have witnessed it. Neither you nor I are in a position to judge the actions of this mother. People are allowed to refuse blood transfusions, for themselves and for their children.  Chemotherapy is poisin. It is a poisin that a majority of cancer specialists would refuse to use on their own bodies. And there is a reason for those statistics. For those people who choose to believe that medicine and doctors have the one and only cure for all that might ail a person, you are naive. Pharmaceutical companies drive health care in the USA. Money makes the choices. There is no “scientific” research on alternative medicine because the drug companies would not make any money if people took the natural or homeopathic route. Make no mistake that historically, doctors have killed and seriously injured many people by prescribing treatments that are later deemed to be dangerous. Any belief that medicine is good goes out the window when you get a glance at children tied to boards while they scream at the top of their lungs and “child life specialists” wave toys and bribe them with candy and toys and assure the parents that “they won’t remember”  the torture that the “all knowing” professionals deem necessary in the name of treatment. Whatever happened to “first do no harm”? Any doctor who would treat this child against his will and against the will of the parents would be committing a crime in my opinion. The very idea that the child is better off away from his parents is insane. All that allows is for a person who doesn’t know about the child and who has no vested interest in his life and well being (the whole life, not just the idea of it) to sign consents for torture. Once those consents are signed, all control is lost. The parents of this child love him. They have raised him for his entire life. There is no evidence they have ever harmed him in any way. They simply chose, after watching the results of one poisining, to not subject him to another. There are other treatments available. Maybe they will work, maybe they won’t. The fact that one alternative approach has failed means nothing. If the state would butt their nose out of it, the parents would most likely pursue alternate approaches. Maybe in the end they would even decide to try the chemo again. But those choices should not be made by doctors who are tied up in the hands of profit machines, and our judges should be competent enough to realize that the drug companies do not have the only viable and reasonable options for the treatment of illness and disease. Indeed, when done against the will of the patient, such treatment is criminal. I hope the mother and her son are able to remain safely outside the hands of those who seek to interfere. I pray to God that people in this country wake up soon and realize the dangers of  blind reliance.

I will pray for the forgiveness of any person who unwittingly participates in this disaster: the doctors,  police, the judge, and any foster parents or state workers who honestly believe they are doing what’s best for this child. But in the end, it is the biological parents and the child himself who are justified in their actions.

Scared

Yes. I am scared to death. If I do not stay in the top half of this class, my scholarship is gone. That is a distinct possibility even if I stay above the median in every class but contracts. Contracts scares me half to death. I know I missed an entire issue. A big issue. The main point of the question type of issue. And despite being totally pissed at myself, there is not a darn thing I can do about it. So I wait. If I lose the scholarship, it is very doubtful I will be able to return. Will it be my own fault? Yes. Was my confidence misplaced? Yes. Well, no, but I underestimated my competition.  So…..I shall wait. Right along with everyone else. In the meantime I am taking off for a few days. I start work at the courthouse the day after Memorial Day. I won’t check my grades until at least the middle of next week, although my goal is to wait until June 1 to check. Anyway – it is going to be a long wait. I can only hope and pray. This experience is humbling, to say the least. Have a great weekend everyone. I am going to try to forget about everything for a few days.

Last 1L exam

I made it!  My studying is over. Done. History. (no – not that – I can’t take any more learning this year). I haven’t allowed it to sink in yet. I have my last exam in the morning, then I’m taking off for the evening by myself to celebrate my accomplishments. I think it is probably going to take some time to get used to the idea that it’s actually over. My main goal is to avoid checking for grades until after memorial day. From tomorrow until Memorial Day I am taking a vacation. I can’t promise what type of updates this blog will get over the summer, but I suspect I will still post at least once or twice a week. It has become one part of my life that I actually enjoy. However, you will need to forgive me if I slack off. OK? I hope everyone has an awesome summer. The first year of law school is OVER! Imagine that.

mid-exam day off

I took one of those even though I didn’t mean to. I did look at contracts. I have everything spread out on my table. I just didn’t do too much with it. So I will take the rest of the night off just to make it worth it. Seriously, tomorrow morning I need to be on top of this. But I am so tired of studying there aren’t even words to describe it. It’s an open book test and I studied all semester. How hard can it be? Something tells me that by tomorrow night I will feel differently about that. I hope everyone has a great day. (Tomorrow is sonny boy’s birthday! 13 years old and already talking about buying his own car. Lord help me.)