miss adventures

Tomorrow Is Another Day
(Especially If You Didn't Do Well On The First Day of the Bar Exam)

Listen, if I have to take it again, I will. It's that simple. I hate the process. I hate the 3 days, soon to be 9, that have transpired. But I got both a good laugh, and a good cry, out of today.

It was all sort of anti-climactic. When I was sitting there, I felt like I had been there last week. During the fingerprinting and handwriting sample, while the (fertile) octogenarians were picking up the torn wrappers from the moist towlette proffered to clean your fingertips with, I thought about what I might blog about today. Should I blog about my breakfast in the hotel, and how lucid I was reviewing Section 16(b) and Rule 10(b)5? Should I talk about listening to Whitney Houston's "One Moment in Time" on my iPod on the walk over, and being inspired by the lyrics, "I've laid the plans, now lay the chance here in my hands"? Should I blog about the poor, nervous, sweaty girl two seats down who forgot her external A drive and had to handwrite the whole exam?

I thought I would say this. Bar examiners, thank you very much for handing me community property. I was ready for you. But fuck you very much for handing me property and corporations, the two things everybody predicted we would not see. At first, I thought I had bumbled the third essay because out of four calls addressing, respectively, ultra vires acts, director's board meetings, the corporate opportunity doctrine, and then a lawyer's professional ethics, I only properly addressed two. And that was with law I bullshitted.

So then at lunch, I got on the phone immediately with Cirrus. I bawled a little bit. The sweet girl had run into the bathroom to chat because she anticipated my phone call. At the end of it, her message was this: "But Dozer loves you. So promise me you'll get something really yummy to eat for lunch."

I then called Teresa. She was ready for my call, too. I asked her if I could pass the Bar exam having verifiably bombed one essay, because Teresa claims to have botched the Constitutional law one from July 2004, but then having subsequently passesd (with flying colors). "Absolutely," she said, "and you seem to think my idea of bombing is not your idea of bombing, but it is."

I went back in after lunch, hopped up on caffeine, ready to nail the performance test. It went very smoothly -- but I knew it would be a softball. Like last time, it was a persuasive client letter where two out of the three cases were on point. Blah blah blah.

Afterward, Po and I did the math. "If you get a 70 on a PT, then that's 8 points higher than the 62 average required for each essay to pass, which means if you got a 45 on the essay you bombed, and you add 16 [doubling the weight of the PTs], you get a... 61. Oh." Yeah, numerically, it's hard to beat. Then Po said, "Well, the Bar is like war. Some die, some don't. It's like the Polpot regime. I got out of the Polpot regime." I suppose the Bar examiners are a bit like the Khmer Rouge.

I talked to my dad. Who was amazing. "When this is over, I want you to call me, and forget about the consequences."

I talked to Tony. "I don't want to hear this 'I bombed it' crap. This isn't the same girl who went in and won the car."

And finally, after all day of trying, I talked to Natalia. Who had the worst ordeal of all. Her dramatics were surprisingly uplifting, and in the end I was lying on that king-sized bed there laughing in gales. "Eve was fucking right. It's all about presentation for that asshole who's going to grade my exam. If only I had put 'duty of care' down as a heading and then under it 'xxx' they would still give me a better score."

Only until a little while ago did I realize, that property question, I answered quite incorrectly. I answered it like a contracts question. We're talking offer, acceptance, etc. Catastrophic. 45 coming my way, along with 55 for the corporations one!

So, the theme of it all? Tomorrow is another day. This all matters so little in the grand scheme of things. I'm not saying that I don't care and I don't want to try my bestest and that I don't want to pass. I do, so much. But I will not let this upset me, anymore, even one more day.

posted by Lucy Sloan @ 8:21 PM