Seattle Patriot

In my last post about the Bar Exam, I was feeling relatively confident and upbeat. Now we’re halfway through the lectures, and almost halfway to the Bar itself, and the confidence is, well…waning at times.

The outlines we make every day are getting longer, and the stack is piling high – and we still have 10 more subjects to learn. The exceptionally helpful advice to just “memorize it all and you’ll be fine” is true but useless. But we’re holding together. In the periods where my mind is so full of information that it starts to zone out, I’ve been trying to liken this experience to something more corporeal that everyone could relate to, and I’ve come up with a couple of ideas.

First, I thought it was kind of like a giant trust fall from a really high platform – only you start falling on June 11, and you don’t stop until October when scores come out. Everything in between is the panicky feeling that you’ll land on your head, and that half the people will laugh and the other half will pity you. But that metaphor doesn’t quite work, because I’m not sure who the people are who are supposed to be catching – the Bar Examiners?? Not likely…

So then I thought, maybe it’s like a cruel game of “Would You Rather” where your choices are between: (1) getting locked in a room by yourself for 6 weeks and forced to memorize minutia, then you get to come out and if you haven’t memorized it you keep getting sent back in, or (2) never being able to do a job you’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars and put years of your life into achieving. Hmm.

But I think one that works the best is a comparison to a game my cousin got for Christmas a year or so ago: We (heart) Katamari. As he describes it, you roll this little thing around a small area, like a living room, and everything it touches it picks up (lint, then lamps, then end tables…). As it gets bigger, you can pick up bigger and bigger stuff, until it’s picking up cars, and then buildings, mountain ranges, etc. It becomes a huge ball of stuff – that’s the Katamari. So that’s what BarBri is doing. It’s rolling us around in a bunch of law and trying to get as much as possible to stick to us. And as a result, we’re ending up a huge out of control Katamari.

Well, I can’t pick up any cars yet, but I’m getting a cat here and there. I’ll keep in mind a quote from one of my favorites, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO: “Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout…Do your worst, for I will do mine!” That’s right, Bar Exam, bring it on!