9 More Days

9 days till the bar exam and this week my main goal is to avoid all my panicky classmates and all their stress because I don't need all that around me! I actually feel very calm right at this moment. I am systematically going through my outline for each of the 19 subjects that will be tested, and making a bullet point list of all the most important and most-likely-to-be-forgotten items from the outline for that subject. I am making charts to compare federal civil procedure with Georgia civil procedure and the Uniform Commercial Code with the common law of contracts. And finally, I'm making lists of "scenarios" for each subject that could come up on the multiple choice (example: if you enter someone's home with a key you stole, that's still a "breaking and entering" and you committed a burglary). I will have all the subjects reviewed by Thursday, and I am going to spend the weekend going over multiple choice questions and reading sample essay answers from past questions. And I'm totally getting a massage on Friday too ($10 massages on the undergrad campus? Yes please.) I am printing out all of my lists and charts and filing them in this old Washington and Lee binder I have from college, and that's going to be my final notebook of stuff to read the Monday morning before the exam. Then, I am going to drive to Atlanta, check in to my hotel, and CHILL until Tuesday morning--game time.

There are some topics that I really, really hope will get tested--for example, I am really hoping we get a family law essay or a wills essay. If we get a federal diversity jurisdiction question, I'm pretty much, mentally, going to be sitting on the beach sipping a margarita while I answer it because those questions are SO easy (I could teach that to someone entirely untrained in law in a matter of 5 minutes). Thankfully, there aren't really any subjects that I feel like I would totally have no clue about if they asked. I mean, I would much rather not have an essay about property or criminal procedure, but I feel like I could still write a semi-intelligent response if we did. But I feel like I at least HAVE A PLAN for this last week, which is half the battle. And I got groceries and gas and cooked for the week today, so hopefully my personal life will be handled for the next week. It takes me about 3 hours to get through each subject outline, but I've already done a bunch of them in the last few days, so I think I can tackle them soon enough. I started saving a fair amount of time when I realized I don't need to always put in my notes, "Under Georgia law . . . " I told myself, well of course it's under Georgia law, it's not like I'm taking the Montana bar exam!

Well, time to review some more multiple choice questions and review annulment of marriages in GA. Terrible things happen in these multiple choice questions, y'all, I'm telling you what. I'm like, who thinks of this stuff? For example, bears chase people, hikers fall into canyons, people drop cigarettes inadvertently into gas leaks on the ground and cause explosions, people get drunk and do lots of stupid things, people ask others to commit crimes and then realize that the person they asked is actually a cop, gravel flies off the back of people's trucks and onto the roadway and causes accidents, defendants run around the courtroom in a frenzy until they have to be restrained, a beekeeper's wild bee colony gets loose and terrorizes the community, etc., etc. This question about liability for keeping animals on your property was so absurd it just made me burst out laughing: "An eccentric couple kept a kangaroo in their backyard. The kangaroo was always gentle and had never hurt anyone. But one day, a visitor came to see the couple, and the kangaroo attacked the visitor!" Well, of course it did--it's not a pet, eccentric couple!

More to come soon--I'm off to go figure out why, even though C is technically a correct answer, D is a "better" one. Almost there.

"Do not pray for tasks equal to your power. Pray for power equal to your tasks." --Phillips Brooks