phbbt

It’s just been one of those weekends. We enjoyed a lovely meal of sushi Friday night, but I made the mistake of following dinner’s sake with a beer and a glass of Jameson’s Irish whiskey, and that pretty much wrecked Saturday. The hungover Halloween shopping I had to do drove me into a late-afternoon three-hour nap. Nothing like standing in line for 25 minutes at the party superstore to wear you out.

The SNL Halloween party was fine; I was slightly uncomfortable due to the down pillow I had wrapped around my midsection (remember, I was supposed to be Joliet Jake, AKA John Belushi). No one managed to take any photos of us, though. Too bad—I really did look good.

At any rate, I’ve felt completely uncompelled to be productive at all. Thought about working on my apps, but Mr. Angst is trying to complete defensive driving online, and he’s had to use the same machine I was using for my apps. Ah well. I need to put finishing touches on my resume, anyway—once I do that, I can make sure all my employment information and extracurricular information is the same across all the apps.

So, it’s still a holding pattern here. Currently sitting on the couch, flipping between MiB, Austin Powers, and the Weather Channel (waiting for that cold front!). The kids have pretty much stopped coming by. It was a light year for trick-or-treaters, in fact. I definitely bought way too much candy.

(Funny note, or maybe not so funny? One kid peeked past me into our house, said, “Nice house! Hey, you have an X-Box! Guys, they’ve got an X-Box!” We are now officially cool, I guess.)

So I’ll give the chirren another hour or so before I turn off the porch light.

holidays

Although Halloween is not by far one of my favorite holidays, I like it because it signals the nearness of turkeys and reindeer (thanks, Janine).

I LOVE Thanksgiving; but I REALLY love Christmas. This will be my first married Christmas and I plan to do the house up good. I will also decorate my portion of my triple-occupancy office. I will bake yummy-smelling foods and light holiday-scented candles. I am already planning this, and Christmas is two months away.

But between now and then, I have three big things to accomplish:

1. Finish my law school applications
2. Get the gift thing out of the way (bought or baked)
3. Design, lay-out, print, and mail my grandmother’s Christmas letter (This is a chore I have not written about before, but it’s really time-consuming. Essentially, it consists of photos of our entire family with little captions, and it makes sense for me to do it since I’m a graphic designer, and I am family and free and my grandmother was getting robbed by the print shop that had been doing it all for her. But this year I have seriously fallen behind in my picture-gathering duties. I’m probably not going to post about it because I am terrified of how behind I am.)

Law school apps get the first three weeks. Then the newsletter will consume me—this is good as it will keep me from fretting all December about law school applications. Baking and buying will likely be done last-minute, if I know myself.

thoughts standing still

All I seem to think about lately is law school. That was true over the summer, and then it was less true, and now that I’ve gotten my LSAT score back, it’s true again.

It seems everyone in the world is sending their applications in NOW, and that’s great, but I can’t send mine in officially until I know my letters of recommendation are in. And that’s forcing me to be patient.

I am not patient. I never have been. It’s a sort-of nightmare. Wait wait wait, knowing that the reason I have to wait is because I was not as on-the-ball about getting my LOR requests to letter-writers. Sigh….if only I had…if only I said…if only I did…

I have a bad case of the if-onlys.

head spinning!

The little people really did exist! And they lived in caves or under the earth, and they were little.

Seriously. I love it when little things like this pop up that give credence to folktales that are similar all over the world. From the faerie in Briton to the ebu gogo of the island in this article, little people have been a persistent myth.

Sometimes I think I should have been an anthropologist or archaeologist. And then I remember that I got two of my lowest grades in college in an upper-level anthro class and geology.

life is good

1. My mom is in town. This will be the first time I’ve seen her since she moved several hundred miles away earlier this year. Since, for the last five years, she’s been living about an hour away, the move was a big deal. I’m very excited to see her and my stepfather.
2. Today is Mr. Angst’s birthday. We are going to lunch instead of dinner because he has class and I have choir. But tomorrow we are going out to dinner for his birthday with my mom and stepfather; and Friday we’ll celebrate just the two of us. Maybe I’ll cook again!
3. Mr. Angst found out that his request to take a week off at Christmas was approved. Since we’ve already bought our plane tickets and begun planning some campus visits during that time, this was VERY good news.
4. I have gotten two more fee waivers. Again, not from schools I plan to apply to, but they are schools in the range of schools I want to apply to. My ego is recovering.
5. After several weeks of waffling, Mr. Angst and I have officially settled on our Halloween costumes for the SNL-themed party we are attending.
6. We finally edited our closets last week; today I dropped all the edited clothes at Goodwill. Those things were the last piles of stuff that needed to be removed for our home to be clean.
7. I gave my boss his packet of info for my letter of recommendation, and he was quite excited to see it and eager to write the letter.

Today is going to be a good day.

first fee waiver received!

Not from a school I plan to apply to, but it is a good school—tier 1, in fact. If location weren’t a factor, I might even apply there.

Nice little ego boost. Givin’ me a little smile on the downward side of the work day.

Application Activate! Form of a Headache!

I began my apps last night, using LSACD on the Web.

After tinkering with two computers, one server, a laptop, and adding me
as an administrator to most of those machines, I could finally use the
damn web application. Stupid Service Pack 2! Stupid Windows! Stupid
LSAC, making us use stupid Windows!

The funniest thing is that the problems were caused not by our lack of
computer savvy, but because of our over-abundance of it. Between the
two of us, we have mastery of three operating systems and working
knowledge of another two and regularly do things with our machines that
make our friends say, “Wha?” We’d have been better off if we were a
little more ignorant.

I think LSACD on the Web is sort of indicative of the relationship
between law and technology in general. It looks and smells like you
need some technical know-how to use it, but when you investigate, you
find that you need to start with the lowest common denominator or none
of the directions will work. In other words, if I had just added
another user to the original machine, instead of trying to log in
remotely with my domain identity, all would have been well. Sigh.
Live and learn.

The applications aren’t difficult, at least. There are some things
that are annoying–high school GPA, for instance. I’m putting mine
down in the 100-point scale, because I have no clue what it would be on
a 4.0 scale and I’m not sure my high school will tell me. Also–class
rank in college? I have no clue. I know the general percentage. I
wish I’d known I would need that information when I was up there last
weekend. I had the foresight to get a copy of my transcript, and my
exact major GPAs. But class rank? Of course I wouldn’t ask for that.
Phbbt.

And then there’s the way you’re supposed to select your major for the
common information stuff. I had two, so I just used “Other” and filled
in my majors, using a handy / (slash) between them. This despite LSAC
saying how important it is to use the standard abbreviations, so the
schools can properly download the data. I think many of their
instructions are just filler, to make people who frequent the boards
happy. I avoid directions, because if you have to read the manual,
it’s probably not good design, right?

Sigh. I think I might have to unlearn that prejudice.

revisionist?

I’m rereading my last post and I don’t like it.

I won’t delete it because that seems somehow unfair, if even just to myself. I had those thoughts, felt those feelings, and they are valid. But it’s just such a crappy post, so self-serving and self-aggrandizing. I hate the tone of it, and its snobbishness.

Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what happens next. My LSAT score doesn’t really change things—I’m still applying to law school, I still want to write and teach—but it has changed the way I feel about myself applying to law school.

One of my good friends, C., who I see so rarely but saw this weekend at our reunion, made the comment that she knew I had done fine on the LSAT. She added that she also knew that I felt my “fine” just wasn’t good enough. She was right. I always want to be better than “others,” whoever those “others” are. I don’t even have to be better than everyone else—just those I think I should be competing with. After all, C. way outclasses me intellectually, and I’ve never felt the need to compete with her.

So my last post was all about proving that I am still good enough, still smart enough, to be a law professor—or even just to get into a prestigious school. It can be exhausting, trying to live up to my promise. Maybe I should stop groping around for recognition and pay more attention to my happiness.

because I am a nerd

I have been crunching the numbers, and I am realizing my numbers are still just fine. My Excel spreadsheet tells me so. My chances of being accepted at certain schools are moving down a few percentage points (more than a few with schools like Harvard, but so what? It’s Harvard, for goodness’ sake.), but I am still in good ranges for most of the schools I want to apply to.

I am, however, removing UNC from my list. Not only do I have a poor chance of getting in as an out-of-state student, I am not thrilled with their proscribed essay topics. I also don’t like that they have a pretty specific length expectation on those essays.

Over the weekend, I ran into lots of people I went to undergrad with who are currently doing law school, or are dating someone in law school, or married someone who just finished law school, etc. And I got lots of feedback on some of the schools that are on my list simply for geographical reasons—lots of good feedback, of the “Oh my god I LOVE this school” type. That gives me a good warm feeling.

So. The weekend is over, the LSAT score has been digested and dealt with. I start my apps tonight, knowing that I have lots of intangibles that can help put me in that 10-20% of people with my numbers who still get accepted to the schools at the top of my list.

meh

I got my score. It was lower than I expected. The percentile is good, but we all know it’s the number that really matters.

Despite being somewhat heartbroken at first, I am dealing with it. I’m looking at my ambitions and asking myself what exactly it is I want to do, not where—and I am realizing that the what is much more important to me.

Plus, I have a wonderful husband and really good friends who have been amazing to me, reminding me that a number is just a number, and it’s a good number at that. (Just not amazing.) And no matter where I end up at law school, I will do well.

It’s been a bumpy few days, and I was immediately regretful that I checked my score during my reunion. I thought it was going to ruin the weekend. I was so wrong. I have such wonderful friends who believe so strongly in me, and wonderful old professors who are becoming friends; I had a marvelous undergraduate experience, and the lessons I learned there way transcend a little number like my LSAT score.

So. There you go. Expect some template revisions soon, though—I’ll need to revise my target list of schools.