So, I have officially finished my first year of law school, and the blog is still going strong!  When you start law school they put you in a room with the rest of your incoming class and tell you all about how scary/stressful law school is.  This lasts for a week.

The next week we start our writing class, which actually scares the crap out of us.  That's supposed to be the class where they rip out your brain and replace it with that of a lawyer.  We all thought it was super funny the week before.  It's actually quite painful.  Anyway, this also begins the social experiment where they place you in the same classes with the exact same people for a year.  

At the beginning you group up with a few people and hope for the best.  By the time the rest of your classes begin in a couple weeks, the cliques have formed.  Oh, and did I mention that by the time those classes start you have already been doing roughly 20x the amount of homework you had in your worst week of undergrad?  Well, it happens, and we all wander around in a frightened fog joking about how our lives outside of the school have already been put on hold.  

Around this time our writing teacher gently explains that no class is at full workload yet, and it will all be at full workload at the same time.  She also noted that we would panic.  Also around this time, my buddy J-No noticed some people from our larger class had already dropped out.  October came and suddenly everything got crazy.  A dark cloud of fear and panic fell over the entire building.  We all wandered around going through the same thing together, but really very much alone.  Then, as suddenly as it arrived, it was gone.

At the close of the first year many of us have left our original cliques of those first weeks, or at least some members.  But, by the end, there is a sense of camaraderie among all of us, because we all went through something life changing together.  The panic and loneliness have been replaced by law school humor, and inside jokes.   And, for being able to experience this, I am incredibly grateful.

In closing, things are as hard as they said it would be, but we got used to it.  We learned to work together and to have fun.  We went from thinking "How the hell do they expect us to sit for a 5 hour exam??" to "Seriously, only 3 hours??  How do they expect us to write a decent exam in 3 hours??"  It is a strange road that culminated in days like those up there where there are law books, laptops, and random legs and torsos everywhere.  Oh, and just so y'all know what is coming up in the next couple weeks here at the blog:  awesome wedding, new sex worker interview, and a couple of Buffalo restaurant reviews, so stay tuned!