housing clinic Archives - Memos and Mirth

Taking a stance by fleeing

January 21, 2010

I dropped my Housing Clinic before the first session ended.

Today’s class was a blitzkrieg of red flags which made it clear that the clinic would make me miserable. The directors spoke in terms of “amorphous grading,” last minute changes, and court times that force students to skip class.

They also hinted that housing cases move so fast that “good enough” would have to suffice for court preparation, and the student directors said that some of the hearings were so brief that they sometimes only had time to spurt out their first, best argument.

I need a break this semester. I want to snuggle up with the dogs and the tax code. Rushing around crazy and sleep deprived because I let some irrelevant¹ clinic play Godzilla to the Tokyo of my schedule is not going to happen. “Looks good on the resume” be damned.

So I am the newest member of the morning international tax course, and so grateful that I put my foot down, and fled.

¹ Irrelevant to my career goals.

End of break, start of spring

January 20, 2010

Spring semester started, somehow. That means winter break is over.

I had this vision (delusion) of winter break as this slow, peaceful thing filled with vast amounts of free time. Instead, winter break was characterized by 10-hour¹ workdays, epic nights out with long-neglected friends in Minneapolis and Miami, and a slowly deteriorating apartment.

The apartment was so disorderly by the end of break that I would only let Phillip see it. Then came the second dog, a massive apartment scrub down, and – yep – classes again.

This semester is more exciting and less cluttered. Two of my professors are partners at law firms, and one of my professors has reached an age and level of prestige where she just can drop F-bombs in class. I love it.

There are also no more 8am classes, ridiculously stacked² days, and I started going to the gym again! I am beside myself with joy.

And no class on Friday. Oh yeah.

The only class³ I have yet to have is my housing clinic. This is my first clinic⁴ and I’m not sure what to expect. I guess I’ll find that out tomorrow.

Tonight I’m seeing Joel, who has been MIA, and we are going to the Colbie Caillat/Uncle Kracker/Theory of a Deadman concert. The concert sounds a tad less exciting than a Beyonce concert, but not quite as bad a root canal. We’ll see how this goes.

¹ This was because I worked full time, but 3 of the 4 weeks of break were compressed. One week was compressed because finals ended on Tuesday, and the two weeks abutting the Miami trip were also shortened. This is why I had to work 10 hour days to get my time in.
² Stacked days mean stacked books. Last semester I had to carry around an overnight bag just for my books. This semester I only have two 1-inch books. This is so awesome I might cry.
³ Class, ie, not moot court. I have no idea what’s going with that…
⁴ One thing I like about this semester is that my classes are very practical and relevant to my goals. I came to law school to practice estate planning, but I really like tax law, so I was excited when my estate planning seminar professor told me that estate planning is laden with tax issues.