!@#$:@L#K:LK:@L#K$:@L#$K

That's about as introspective as I get right now. Boy did I waste a lot of time today - and now I'm feeling slightly paniced because despite spending the better part of 8 hours on what boiled down to about 10 pages of substantive stuff out of a whole whopping 30 pages (sense the sarcasm) of reading assigned for tomorrow's 3 classes, I'm still wishing I had two more hours of time tonight - about another 30 - 45 minutes to make sure my Civil Procedure stuff is down pat, and the rest to finish up Constitutional law, which I didn't finish to my satisfaction this morning.

Of course it doesn't take that long just to read the stuff. Mostly I'm spending a lot of time writing the case brief as I go, which means for the moment outlining the issues at question, the holdings on those issues, and the rules of law. See, all this would be nice and straightforward if they said "here are the issues, here are the applicable rules of law, now see how this case demonstrates them and see if you understand why the court made the holding it did." Oh no. No that would be far too easy - or more to the point, that wouldn't allow us to develop the mental skills of reasoning they want us to develop. It's true that I probably understand all this more by having to work all this stuff out the hard way - it's actually acknowledged that the professors omit from the casebooks the parts of the decisions that explicitly summarize this stuff.

I'm hearing a big fat "I told you so" from Heather and Tom in my head. ;-)

But this afternoon I just managed to be non-productive in multiple ways, including being distracted by the Color Guard performing with the Big Red band in front of the campus store, and walking to the wrong copy store, and IMing people for a whopping 15 minutes. And tonight I allowed myself a full hour for dinner at the welcome BBQ - I had intended to only be there 15 minutes but I sat at a table with a couple former merchant marines and took the opportunity to ask them what the heck merchant marines were - a question I have honestly wondered for a long time. That resulted in a 45 minute conversation on the topic. It actually was both interesting and entertaining; the wife (the non-law student) was very animated in telling stories about crazy mariners.

But my self-preservation unit, i.e. GUILTY FEELINGS, has finally hit peak and I have to go back to work from my little break before I relax myself into a heart attack.