darkest before the dawn...

you know how in action/adventure movies, there's inevitably the scene where the hero is up to his/her eyeballs in chaos and bad stuff, and it just gets worse and worse and worse, but somehow s/he is able to get the hell out of dodge before the world crashes in around him/her?

your honors, i move to enter the following into evidence as plaintiff's exhibit WTF:


that's right. that's "barco high school", as in the barco law library, as in the university of pittsburgh school of law. as in i can feel the ground beneath my feet beginning to crumble as i grasp determinedly for the escape of graduation.

way back when i was a 1L, the jokes about the similarities between law school and high school were a welcome breath of humor. the similarities are plentiful: the lockers, the cliques, the lunchroom tables, the student organizations, the people obsessed with getting drunk, the juvenile behavior of certain classmates... but to take that to a level of having cafepress make t-shirts??!! i mean, sure, i've made a couple of t-shirts throughout the course of my legal education that reflect certain aspects of my time at pitt law*, but to embrace the high school aspect to the point where it looks like a celebration??? uh, no. that's just sad. really really really really depressing.

you see, i haven't been a high school student in 13 years. i never want to be a high school student again. all those people who suggested that high school would be "the best years of [one's] life" were wrong. and the ways in which law school has felt like high school are not the aspects of law school that i want to remember.

this is the last week of school -- tomorrow is the last day of classes, then my only two finals are on friday. this will be over soon. the heroine will escape from the peril, even if only by the skin of her teeth!


*those shirts, by the way, are awesome. one of them says, "[constitutional law professor not to be named on this blog] lost my final and all i got was a lousy B". the other one, truly the greatest t-shirt ever to exist of all time, says, "what would justice brennan do?"

i'm brilliant!