Friday, February 24, 2006

no, seriously you idiot, how was the test?

Ow. Ooch. Ergh. After a more than a week of illness, no sleep, unquantifiable stress, inexcusable diet, and spending hours in a hard chair with bad posture, perhaps my first day back in the gym should not have included deadlifts. I'm sure when I try to get out of this chair, I will fully understand how that exercise earned its monicker.

Oh yes, the exam. How sweet of you to ask.

My opinion of the exam is caught up in an interesting dynamic. On one hand, I am as delighted to be finished with the exam as could reasonably be expected. On the other hand, I miserably botched the very last afternoon portion. The bar examiners are tricksy and false, and I fell for a sneaky little trap in the instructions, which could very well have cost me as much as 10 points.

This mistake in no way reflects my intelligence, understanding of the law, ability to apply the law, or my inordinately good looks. It does however reflect my inability to detect intentional word traps after three exhausting days of testing.

And I realized all of this shortly after I had handed my exam to the proctor.

[If you are a reader who happens to be familiar with Bar Exams in general, I would be glad to explain to you exactly how this trap operated. But if I wrote about it here, most people wouldn't know what I was talking about, and they wouldn't read it. Like when I post about video games.]

The MBE was... curious. There were actually two questions in the afternoon session that caused me to stifle laughter. They were just absurd. I'd tell you what they were, but the National Committee of Bar Examiners would kill my family. And if that seems to you like mere morbid hyperbole, you've obviously never had any dealings with the National Committee of Bar Examiners.

[Did you know that the "people" that write the MBE questions aren't even lawyers? Let that soak in.]

In the hotel lobby, before walking over to the first day of the exam, I had a conversation with a woman who was a 1st- time taker. On the walk over, I spoke with a lady who was a 2nd-time taker. The gentleman seated to my right was a 3rd-time taker. The dude to my left was a 4th-time taker.

I thought that seemed odd. Luckily, this guy was my proctor and he explained it to me:


4 recidivists! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Oh yeah. That'll preach.

Anyway, I'm off to bed. We've gotta roll out bright and early to help one of our single-parent moms move some furniture. Well, I guess we're not really going to help her, we're pretty much just gonna do it. This of course is assuming I can super-glue my spine back together and deadlift myself out of bed in the morning.