My, What a Large Pyramid!

Getting to school at 8 am and leaving at 8 pm for several days in a row can have several effects.

For one, it tends to make me feel like a nocturnal creature. I get to the Paul M. Hebert LSU Law Center shortly after the sun has begun basking the world in its glow and finally leave the law library at day's end to find the sun has gone to bed. Does that make me Dracula, the Dark Knight, or just a raccoon? More than likely, I'll go with the raccoon option. I'm so hungry by that time of night, I'd dig through a trash can to find food.

Getting to the library an hour before class gives me a good opportunity to warm my legal brain up. Finish a little Roman history, perhaps...perform a few mental calisthenics - hypotheticals they're called...finish some case reading I didn't finish the night before. Whatever the case, there's a mass exodus from the library at 9 a.m. for class. And here we go again with Professor Criminal-law, C.L., for short. With esoteric questions of moral condemnability being hurled in our general direction with the rapidity of a fully-automatic firing weapon, we gaze forward in shock and awe at this academic performance. And we are engaged in it.

Perhaps, I just wanted to prove to myself and the class that Yes! my brain is grappling with legal issues as everyone else is. Or perhaps, I could not take the built-up pressure of having not been called on in any class yet - much like the pressure that a movie character feels to yell when hiding from a villain for a long period of time. Or perhaps, my breakfast just turned over a complete revolution in my stomach. Or perhaps, I really was offended by the notion that beyond a reasonable doubt would consist of not even having the thought for one second that the defendant is guilty.

Whatever the cause, I felt my hand yanked to the ceiling by some force within my body to argue and of course the Prof. C.L. pleasantly gestured toward me to speak. 60 seconds later, the Prof. and I had apparently had some sort of - intelligible? - exchange of ideas in which he claimed I had used the words "prolonged" and "abiding", which appeared written in green marker on the white board. All I could think to myself was, "Did I actually say that?" And to tell you the truth, I very wel may have. I just don't remember anything excep: (1) Right as 70 eyes turned to me - rather, 70 pairs of eyes = 140 eyes - I felt my throat invaded by the Sahara Desert and all of its aridity and (2) Realizing I was rambling, I suddenly stated "I feel as though I am rambling at this point and digging a hole from which there is no recovery" to everyone's nervous laughter.

And so goes the mystery of law school. Of being a "1L." I mean, "1L"? I know laywers are intellectual geeks, not creativity artists, but, "1L"? I feel like not only are we inmates, but inmates who don't even have differing identification numbers. We're all just "1L."

But the truth is, it's all very enjoyable. After several others classes in a day - including Prof. Torts tossing out hypotheticals involving smiling and benign people tossing buckets of acid on supposed friends - we come to the "end" of our day.

And then it begins. The hermitage begins. At least for me it does.

I find my cubby on the library 3rd floor and "dig in" like a soldier in the trenches. Or to use a different analogy, I enter the warm womb of intellectual thought and spend hours pouring over cases and theory and statutes to synthesizse something that I hope will actually be talked about in class the next day.

I know that one day I will begin blogging my thoughts on legal theory and such, but for now, Iam a foreigner in the land of Legal Thought, wandering with amazement, excitement, terror, and bewilderment among the pyramids, Great Sphinxes, psychedelic port-a-potties, and other ancient monuments.