New (to me) Blawgs

Since even *I* am tired of my righteous indignation about current political affairs, I've been doing a little "light" reading around and have found two great new blawgs with which to while away the hours.

First: Screaming Bean is a 2L somewhere that has ice in March. I haven't had time to cruise through all the archives for more detail, but what I have read suggests there's lots of good stuff in there for those of us heading to law school soon. The tip for these directions for building a Starship Enterprise out of a floppy disk is definitely worth the price of admission, as is the link to a new law info portal, Legal Beetle. We all need our own Enterprise and more law info, don't we?

Second: In addition to having chosen an ingenious name for a blog, Mixtape Marathon also sounds a little (ok, very little) like my doppelganger. In her (I'm assuming) opening post, Bekah writes:

I graduated from undergrad with a double major in English and Philosophy, and went straight to law school. Law school was my choice because I couldn't decide between English and Philosophy grad school and because I didn't want to do math on the GRE. I now know that this reasoning is not really the most logical, or the most satisfactory. And yet, I can't think of anything else (other than nothing) that I would rather be doing with my life, so I guess my reasoning wins by default. Although I do think about what it would be like to just be a construction worker, like Peter in Office Space ("I did nothing, and it was everything I hoped it would be"). I have friends that are traveling now, working on farms and in restaurants, seeing the world, and I envy them. I especially envy them on really beautiful days when I just want to be able to ride my bike for hours, or sit by the fountain in the park and read a Victorian novel, and instead I'm trapped inside reading about limitations on implied warranties in the Uniform Commercial Code. But I know if took the proverbial "year off" I would just be prolonging the inevitable. My bitter friends and I who are in school or in abysmal jobs like to assure ourselves that we are doing something worthwhile--that we made smart decisions. And I know we're right. Law school isn't an end in itself: it's a means to an end. And like law school, I'm a work in progress, so of course I won't be satisfied immediately.

Ok, this doesn't sound like my doppelganger, but it is at least a bit like the doppelganger of me in my early 20s, sans the Philosophy part of the double major and the fact that she went straight to law school out of undergrad instead of going off to do some of the fun things she's watching her friends do. I, too, think about being a construction worker (just last night as I was walking down the street I had a brief but intense desire to be a cab driver), or better yet, like Peter in "Office Space," I dream of doing nothing (which, by the way, I'm doing now—it's great). And I've spent a few years traveling and riding my bike for hours (as a bike tour guide at least part of the time, so I actually combined bike/work/travel into one—why did I leave that job!? oh yeah, there were reasons), and I've sat by fountains reading decidedly non-Victorian novels (although I love George Elliot—just not Middlemarch so much, since I didn't ever really finish it). And although I really didn't want to do the math on the GRE, I did it and did horribly but it didn't really matter because I still got into a respectable grad school for English and after four years of that I'm finally going to law school. And so, having done at least some of the things Bekah sometimes wishes she were doing, I still feel as unsure (aka: ambivalent) about law school as ever. Maybe that will make Bekah feel better. Maybe not. She has her own travel stories now, so maybe her perspective has changed, anyway...

Posted July 30, 2003 09:20 AM | law school