Law School: The Space/Time Continuum and How Legal Studies Bring About The Perception of Riding The Dinosaur Train with Tiny, Shiny, and Don.

Starting law school is akin to what I imagine it would be like to step onto The Dinosaur Train and go through a time tunnel. “TIME TUNNEL...TIME TUNNEL APPROACHING!” (If you have never watched Dinosaur Train on PBS, your life will be richer if you do.) During the last two weeks I have only done a few things; study, sleep, and study some more. I think I may have seen my wife during that time, but it feels like a dream, so I can’t really be sure. The space/time continuum has been altered from my limited perspective now that my life revolves around The Sarkey's Law Center. Surely life goes on outside of the OCU campus, but studying law really does put you in the proverbial vacuum. I don’t feel like chit chatting with people in between classes because that just limits the amount of time I can spend preparing for the possibility of getting called on in my next class. Student organizations seem like a complete distraction and waste of time right now. Even walking across campus to the library is annoying because it takes five minutes. Granted, I don’t spend every waking moment with my nose in a case book, but the time that I’m trying to put in at school accelerates at a break-neck pace the moment I step foot on campus. 7.30am to 7.30pm goes by faster than what seems even rational. As a result, the days go by without much fanfare, but I am loving the experience.

Here are just a few things that happened over the last couple weeks that I was able to take note of and remember.

In Torts, while describing imminent apprehension of physical harm related to assault, the professor, in demonstrating what the defendant might have been doing when he assaulted the plaintiff, reached for a make-believe pistol at his hip, grabbed it but didn’t draw it, and shouted, “I’m gonna kill ya! I’m gonna kill ya!”*

*Imagine Adam Savage from Mythbusters sans fedora and about twenty pounds heavier.

Riding my bike to school one morning, it began to rain. It rained so hard I nearly drowned. When I got to school, the rain stopped, and went in the bathroom and wrung out my jeans. I put them back on thinking, “Oh, they’ll dry out...” An hour later, shivering, I rode home, changed, and drove back to school. It didn’t rain another drop all day long. 

Riding home one night, I approached a teenager who was walking in the same direction in the middle of the road (it was a residential street with no traffic). As I came up to his right side, he turned, saw me, and jumped while saying, “Oh, CRAP!” I said sorry as I passed and surely he went home to change his drawers.

Time to study some more...