Two weeks into law school

So those of you who have been reading this site, you’ve been wondering what ever happened to me this past month and two days. Well, like the title of this post explains, I’ve started law school at Mystery Law School. It’s a rather small school (well, considering the tiny number of fellow first-years compared to my undergraduate class, which was a behemoth), but I like the feel of a small, reclusive school after 4 years of invite-all, partyhouse, “twenty-five people from my high school are here” Mystery College. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy my college years of being around my fellow undergraduate colleagues. But over all, I enjoy being here in a small, focused setting surrounded by people who are all motivated to get a law degree. No more undergrads who don’t like their major! Everyone here loves law! Haha.

So I ended up finishing that book about How to Learn Anything Quickly. It was a very quick read, and I must admit that it was meant more for educators than students. The biggest drawback for me was that, before reading this book, I already had quite an accurate idea of my strongest learning style, or “superlink” as Linksman puts it.

Getting to Maybe is proving to be an excellent guide to law exams. I highly recommend it. Interestingly, the IRAC format isn’t very appreciated by this book, though it’s been widely discussed by both my Civ Pro and Writing & Research professors. We’ll see how it goes come midterm time!

I ended up returning The Portrait of a Lady before finishing it, because the sheer volume of law school material took over my schedule. I’ll finish it during winter break or something, I guess.

Enough about books. Last weekend I built a computer for the living room. New motherboard, CPU, RAM, and sound (although it’s integrated sound but it’s got 7.1 channel output and 24-bit playback). Now I can hook up my Yamaha PF80 to it via MIDI-USB cable and use Native Instruments Kontakt 2 player after loading up my East West/PMI Boesendorfer 290 sample library without a sweat. It sounds awesome, although I’m in the process of getting Synthogy’s Ivory 1.5 after hearing excellent reviews. I love technology.

Summer break…

After graduating from college, I spent 2 weeks in Japan (actually more like 3 days in Japan) and the rest in South Korea. It was a blast, as I had not been in Korea for over a decade. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, and above all was surprised at (1) how well the Japanese are organized as a functioning, societal unit and (2) how much Korea partied and celebrated the FIFA World Cup matches in rooting for their home team, the Red Devils. I remember the cheering and millions of fans all dressed in red, starting the cheer at dinner time, going all the way through the night, all the way throughout the game which actually started at around 4 am the next day, local time. (Actually, I fell asleep at 5 am and that was only up till about the first half of the game). The amount of cheering, although very high-spirited and displaying a fine example of national unity, was, in my view, a complete waste of time. Let’s think for a moment: is soccer THAT important? The answer, as long as nations move on the basis of things other than sports, will be a resounding “NO.”

So now that I’m back, I’m spending summer vacation in the Bay Area with the parents. Actually, I’ll be living with my parents for some time, well into my first year at law school. I missed being at home after going to college far away for 4 years. And now I don’t have to deal with living with roommates. Roomates are fine, but there is a kind of relaxed atmosphere felt exclusively in the home of your family members.

I’ve been reading “The Complete Law Companion: How to Excel at America’s Most Demanding Post-Graduate Curriculum” by Jeff Deaver, and it’s pretty good. He lays it down plain and simple, in a straight-forward manner what law school is like. I bought a couple other books on the same topic online and will be reading those in the upcoming weeks.