North Maple Rag

I'm back in SoDak. I woke up in Berkeley this morning at 4:15am, showered, went to the airport, flew to Minneapolis, hung out for a few hours, flew to Omaha and then rode to Sioux Falls. It was a long trip.

Midwest Optimist and her boyfriend picked me up in Omaha in their rented convertible and we made the trip up I-29 to Sioux Falls in style. I went out to dinner at the Tea Steakhouse (a great restaurant, by the way, if you're every rolling down I-29 near Sioux Falls and looking for a tasty slab of steak) in Tea, SD with a small group of friends and then met up at a Sioux Falls cigar bar with a larger group of friends who are in town for tomorrow's wedding. It's been great. The comfort of old friends is something for which there's no easy description other than to say that I'm home and it feels good.

It also feels good to have a taste of Midwestern summer. The week that I was home after finals was mostly dreary and rainy. When it was sunny, I was inside working on my writing competition entry or packing for California. Today, as soon as I got off the plane in Omaha, I smelled the "summer on the prairie" smell. It's a combination of grass and soil and crops. It's fresh but also a little dry, and it smells like everything I remember summer to be. I'm grateful for two days to enjoy my friends and Sioux Falls. This wedding feels like the end of an era for a lot of reasons, and I'm glad I get to be here for it.

UPDATE: The wedding was beautiful. I have wonderful friends. It's hard to leave.

I just submitted my law review/journals writing competition entry. I'm so glad that's over. Although, I've heard from a few other students have much more labor intensive competitons, so I'm not really complaining.

I also started my job today! All signs point to this being a fun and educational summer. I kind of think it's a bad policy to post almost anything about my job. So, except for the following list, don't expect to hear about the job much, if at all, from now on.



1. My office supply drawer was stocked with all four sizes of binder clips, ranging in size from the huge ones pose a threat of injury to the adorable teeny-tiny ones.

2. My office supply drawer was stocked with four types of post-its (including the ones that have fax information printed on them so you can just stick 'em to a document, fill 'em out, and fax). Post-its run my life (at least, when I'm working).

3. The lawyers took the law clerks out for burritos at a place just a short jog from the office. My fish burrito was delicious.

4. My desk space is like three times what I had in the Senate.

5. My co-workers all seem to be bright and fun.

Berkeley's great. The food is great. My apartment's great. My roommate's are great. My mom is great. God, I'm so glad to be done driving. I know what you're thinking, "But, North Maple, you love to drive!" Indeed, I do . . . when I'm not preoccupied with other things. By the end of this trip, there were all sorts of things that were making me nervous and anxious. I'm glad to be settled.

Despite all the stress, today's drive was incredible. My mom and I had some extra time so we wandered through Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties. We eventually wove our way out to Point Reyes. Breathtaking. The trek out there and back is a little daunting (especially the windy coast road), but it's worth it. I'll post pictures later.

Just as last summer, the sounds of Phantom Planet's "California" ushered me across the Oregon border into CA. This time, I was on I-5 instead of Hwy. 101. So, I was a little suprised by Mount Shasta. Mountains like that (the only others I've encountered are Mt. Ranier and Mt. Hood) are so unexpected and then they stay in your view (or rearview) for hours.

Anywho, Red Bluff, CA is kinda dull.

I'm in Hood River, OR, a town I visited for a few days last summer and am fond of. One of my best friends from high school moved here a few years ago and I had a great dinner with her this evening. She, like a lot of my friends it seems, will be moving this summer. It was fun to hear about her successes and comforting to find out that we've got some similar concerns about our respective futures.

The drive today was fine. Very pretty in parts and kind of icky in other parts (southeastern Washington). My mom and I made a quick stop in Missoula, MT and just like last summer, I was reluctant to leave. That town and the surrounding area just feel good. Maybe someday I'll be able to spend some real time there.

I get to California tomorrow, Berkeley on Monday and start my job on Tuesday. I haven't even started to think about the job thing yet. Just getting to my new apartment and finishing these silly law review/journal personal statements is taking up most of my attention.

That's the super-quick report. My computer's almost dead and I need to report back to the hotel where my mom and I are sleeping tonight.

Happy trails!

My mom and I started the "California or Bust" roadtrip yesterday afternoon. The first stop was my grandma's house. Along the way, we saw 40 pheasant by the side of the road (as well as countless others in the fields), seven frolicking deer, two duck families, and two jackrabbits. The fields were green and the sky was clear. All in all, a great drive. After picking up my grandma, we made a quick trip to my aunt and uncle's drive-in in Bowdle for ice cream (to eat immediately) and fleishkeuchle (for the road).

The drive-in:


We hit the road around 7:00am and stopped in Mobridge to see Sitting Bull's gravesite:



Here's Sitting Bull's view of the Missouri River:


By late morning, we were in Lemmon, SD. The drive between Mobridge and Lemmon goes through the only part of SoDak I've never visited before, so that was kind of exciting. Also, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, one of my favorite books was written by an author from Lemmon. Oh, and there's Lemmon's Petrified Forest, which is quite possibly the most bizarre thing I've seen in my home state (and really, that's saying something). This description's pretty accurate.

Here's one of the concrete/petrified wood cones:


Nearly the rest of the day has been spent crossing Montana. Somehow, in the 10 months since I last did this drive, I managed to forget just big this state is. I'm not complaining, though; we're in the mountains now, so the drive is gorgeous. Also, all the gas stations sell Fat Tire beer. Yum.

The Rockies:

1. Gilmore Girls is awesome. Anyone who says otherwise can't be my friend.

2. Taking a month off from running is a bad, bad, bad idea. Yesterday's run was gaspingly awful. Thankfully, today's was markedly better (although still a little bit awful).

3. It's town clean-up week here. That means everyone sets all their junk out on the boulevard for the garbage people to pick up. Before that, though, lots of people drive slowly through town gathering up things they think still have a little bit of life left in them. Old couches, plywood, rolls of insulation, what have you. We've got a small pile of stuff in our yard that doesn't seem to be gathering much interest. The yards across the street, however, are getting all sorts of visitors. That's what I watched yesterday in between reading chunks of my law review write-on packet.

4. Super Wal-Mart opens tomorrow. Ugh.

5. This blog provides a nice privacy gauge. Whenever I have to decide if some tidbit of information about myself or others is private, I ask myself, "Would I write about it on my blog?" If the answer's "no," then I'm careful with who I tell about it. The amount of things I'm not willing to write about here is kind of surprising. Like right now, I can't write about what I've been thinking about for the last few hours, so I'm writing about Gilmore Girls and garbage. That's annoying.

6. I've only got two more days at home. That's scary. But, it's also good, it's forced me to get things done that I otherwise would've put off.

7. I don't miss law school yet.

Well, I'm assuming this is the first and last time I'll quote Bruce Hornsby lyrics for a post's title. When I was much younger, I convinced myself that song was about my Watertown and it was running through my head last night as I went for walk near home. This is what it looks like when the sun goes down on my part of town:



Now compare that to the sun going down on NYC a couple of days ago. There's just no competition:



I love being home. Each summer for the past four years, I've spent a week or two at home before starting various adventures. Each time, a little part of me has wished that I was sticking around. Watertown boasts Kampeska Days (at scenic, but not so clean Lake Kampeska) and the small towns in the area contribute to the summer fun with their own festivals. For example, Clark has Potato Days and Clear Lake hosts its annual Dog Days of Summer featuring a main street lined with business owner giving out mountains of free hot dogs. Okay, okay, my summer plans are probably more exciting that all that, but it's good for me to remember that South Dakota really is a fun place when you know where to look.

My room is empty, but for this computer, a bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper and a bowl of pennies. The laptop will be put in my backpack and the pop will be consumed, but the bowl of pennies has no home. It' s all pennies, so there's no point in taking it to the bank. At the same time, I can't throw away money. It's impossible disposal has been mocking me for the past two days. How horrible would it be to just leave it in a drawer? It's a nice bowl; I bought it at Fish's Eddy.

I've got 8.5 hours to kill until my ride to the airport shows up. The last couple days have been filled with three things: packing, barbeque's with friends, and saying goodbye. A strong finish to what's been a pretty good year. I'm going to go take some pictures of the neighborhood, get some dinner, and maybe go out for drinks. By 9:45 tomorrow morning, I'll be back in SoDak. Yay!

It was drinking and nostalgia and anticipation for casebook-free summers all wrapped in one. It was fun. And, I only had to pay for one of my drinks all evening, so that was a success. Also, I realized that the best law school decision I've made so far was the one to branch out this semester and have fun. Over the course of the semester, I found out that I like a lot of my classmates and that alone makes the thought of coming back here in August entirely bearable.

Amazingly enough, the having fun thing hasn't hampered my learning. My grades may not reflect it, but I've learned so much more this semester than I did last fall. That's a good feeling. I can't even begin to predict my grades, but I feel like the substantive knowledge I'm taking out of this semester is a whole lot more, well, substantive than last semester.

Also, in it's own way, New York has become my home. This is, for the next two years, the place I return to. Some of my classmates are fortunate enough to be able to return to their real hometowns for the summer. That's not the case for me; I realized recently that I really can't go back to any of my previous homes. Sure, my parents still live in my hometown, but visiting them is just that, a visit. Most of my college friends have left our college town to scatter throughout the country (and world). DC's great, but the things and people I loved most aren't there anymore. Long story short, I've been feeling a bit homeless. It's reassuring to know that I can feel good about coming back to New York. Plus, next year I'm living far above the honking horns and screaming drunk people. Woo hoo! Law school's not so bad.

Oh, and as a sidenote, my final final was fine. I wrote a lot. The last question was about Medicare and due process, and that made me unreasonably happy. Thanks to my Civil Procedure professor, I could write about due process for days and thanks to my former job, I have written about Medicare policy for days (years, actually). So, I think I did pretty okay on that question. The others? Who cares? I'm going home on Saturday and that's all that's important.

Test. Test. More test. Margarita. Margarita. Sake bomb. Sushi (amazing sushi, actually). Sake bomb. Sleep.


I'll keep you posted.

I'm only a tiny bit sad; people are nice to 1Ls. Other than that, I'm ready to be a 2L. 13 hours and three essay questions left to endure. Then, two days of packing and running errands before I get to go home. Home, where people don't yell or honk outside my window at night; I can hear the grasshoppers already.

25 hours to go and what I'm really looking forward to is not the inevitable drinking binge, but sleep; a long, deep sleep unplagued by guilty feelings about how the time could be better spent studying. Back in the halcyon days of studying for property, four hours of sleep left me refreshed and ready to spend the day tackling covenants and takings. Now, even eight hours of sleep at night needs to be supplemented with an afternoon nap. I'm falling apart. I've been asked if I'm losing weight and I think the answer's yes (I haven't actually confirmed it with a scale). The sad part is that any weight I've lost in the last few weeks is attributable solely to malnutrition. The closest I've come to exercise is walking across Washington Square Park to get sushi.

Luckily, the end is squarely in sight. Real life begins again on Thursday. And, by real life, I mean a life not dominated by law school. A life that includes regular meals! Reading fiction! Hiking, biking and running! Driving my car! Not being in New York City!

Alright, that's enough. I've got a practice test to take.

I've got a nice little list of things to review, revise, and re-read before my final final Wednesday morning. Then, after three and a half hours of what I'm hoping will be pure Administrative Law brilliance, I'm planning to consume my weight in tequila. Well, a couple shots, at least.

The studying is going about as well as can be expected. I talked to my mom yesterday and we roughly plotted out the road trip to Berkeley and really, the planning for that, as well as for my first couple weekends in California is much more fun, even than Admin (shocking, I know).

I went out to Brooklyn to study with a classmate tonight and ate at a great Thai restaurant. If nothing else, my time in New York has taught me how to eat with chopsticks. This was the second Thai meal consisting of unwieldy noodles that I've eaten in the past two days without 1) spilling on myself; and 2) looking entirely stupid. Say what you will about about legal analysis and research, learning the chopsticks thing is the real accomplishment of my 1L year.

Words running through my head today:

Drifting, footloose, fancy-free, fly-by-night, gadabout, jet-setting, journeying, nomadic, perambulatory, peregrination, peripatetic*, rambling, roving, trekking, unsettled, vagabondage (ew, that one sounds slightly dirty), and wayfaring.

Okay, some of those words I looked up. I am not however, exaggerating how antsy I feel. Despite a lovely New York afternoon that included a stroll through the West Village and a wine tasting at Union Square, I'm ready to get out of this city. Two weeks from now, after a brief layover at home, I'll be road tripping across the Western U.S.

I. Can't. Wait.



* The official definition of peripatetic is "movement or journeys hither and thither." Say "hither and thither" out loud. You'll smile, I promise.

The torts final starts at 9:30 tomorrow morning, and I guess I'm prepared. I've studied, I've discussed concepts with other students, I've asked the professor questions, and I've taken what seems like an endless number of practice tests. Nonetheless, I feel like I'm taking this final on the fly. I'll have no outline to back me up and while I have a cursory understanding of the concepts, I don't have a deep understanding of any of this. So, there's a good chance the unavoidable policy/theory question will make me puke and/or cry. Whatever. 13.5 hours from now I can leave negligence and all it's not-so-fun friends behind. That alone makes this test worthwhile.

And, in my delirious state, the first footnote of this made me laugh out loud.

Coffee in the middle of the night is an amazing thing. I've disliked coffee most of my life and it's only been in the last month or so that I've been able to enjoy non-flavored coffee. So, unlike most people, I have no fond college memories of plowing through multiple pots of coffee while pulling an all-nighter.

It also means that a large cup of coffee like the one I finished an hour ago makes me a little crazy. I just finished cutting my torts outline and taping it to note cards in order to facilitate some of the memorizing that needs to happen in the next 24 hours. As I glanced at one square of paper, I saw two bolded words starting with "man" and "de" and thought, "What does Manifest Destiny have to do with products liability?" Uh, that's "manufacturing defect" and yes, I'm delirious right now.

I spent most of the day studying. Most, but not all of it. I'm almost done with a condensed 15-page outline that I'm going to spend the next two days memorizing word-for-word. I've gone over a few practice test and while I'm not yet at the point where I spot every issue, I'm spotting the big ones. So, I'm not going quite as crazy with this test as I did with property. The thing I figured out after the test yesterday was that I really didn't learn anything in my last 24 hours of studying. Okay, that's not entirely true, but I didn't learn much.

My new-found finals calm has contributed to what's been a pretty night. The student services office sponsored free massages this evening and the masseuse they assigned me did some amazing things to my shoulders and neck. A classmate who has a slightly disturbing love of The Cheesecake Factory brought some back tonight. Yum. And other than that, I've spent the evening with my laptop and Wilco (I told you it was mellow here). One more week until the last final; if things stay like this, I'll be fine.

So, tonight I'm going to tell you what's been good about finals: I'm finally able to concentrate again. Last semester, I never felt like I was able to the required concentration into anything. I'd read stuff and even when I understood it, I'd have a hard time remembering or explaining it in any constructive way. It was frustrating. this semester, however, I've been able to sit down, read things, and just have them stick. I'm not at all sure that it will have any effect on my grades, but I do think it means that I'm learning more, so that's nice.

I'm also kind of proud of myself for rallying tonight and putting in a few hours on torts. I left my property exam, found some friends, and had the margarita that I'd been promising myself for the past week. Then I went on an aimless walk and then I took a nap. Post-nap, I really wanted to watch tv, but I went to my new super-special studying spot and started the torts internalization process.

This torts exam has me a little scared. It's closed book and despite the fact that I spent 16 years of my life taking closed-book exams, I'm a bit spooked. I keep reminding myself that I don't use my outlines much and I never use my books on exams, but they're still nice safety blankets.

I had a computer malfunction during my property final. Actually, it happened right before the final, so I was just sent to a computer lab to take it on one of the school's computers. It could've been a lot worse and actually, it was kind of nice to take the test in a room with ten people instead of 50. Of the ten or so people who had computer problems this morning, about eight were from my section. I think we got the tech support rookies 'cuz most of us had the same problems and it seems like there should've been an easy solution. Anyway, I have two suggestions for law school proctors:

1. Don't start the test until you're sure everyone in the room a) has a copy of the test and b) has the exam software running. Sounds simple, right? Not so much. As I waited to be escorted to the computer lab, I watched as several classmates frantically tried to explain why they weren't ready to start. All had legitimate reasons (like, as I mentioned earlier, they hadn't received a copy of the test). I know you're supposed to start at 9:30, but sometimes an extra two minutes is just better for everyone.

2. When someone's waiting to be escorted to the computer lab because they're computer malfuctioned, don't tell them you think they'll get all their time. Law students aren't really rationale beings during finals and stuff like that makes them want to hit you.

Then, property came along and smacked me upside the head for being too confident about my knowledge of its intricacies. We're currently 13.5 hours from the beginning of the test and, well, I know what I know.

"Luckily, it's only a three hour test, so I don't have to know everything. Knowing everything would be a waste of my time. I just need to be able to effectively and efficiently convey all the stuff I really do understand."

That's what I've been telling myself for the past few hours. Wish me luck.