Dan update, May–June 2008

I’ve been a little scarce ’round these parts lately. Truth be told, it’s because I’ve been as busy as I’ve ever been with school. Spring finals kicked off in the first week of May, and before that was study week, when five hundred 1Ls scramble to go back and actually learn the last three and a half months’ material.

During that period, my MacBook’s hard drive died. This was, of course, the worst possible time I could lose all my data, and I spent the next day running around Cambridge, trying to negotiate Apple’s repair process for the first time and recover my off-site backups from Mozy (on this, more later). Eventually I did recover my notes and documents, but I had to reinstall Leopard, and couldn’t resist tinkering around reinstalling everything else over the next week or so. Eh, exams are overrated.

As for those, I could definitely feel the difference between my first and second semester. Eight months into law school, I realized final exams had lost their power to terrify. Where, in December, I spent every waking moment either studying or feeling guilty about not studying, this time around I was able to gauge my learning throughout the semester, so the specter of a single test at the end didn’t represent such a forbidding question mark. That’s not to say that I’m guaranteeing a better showing from my second semester grades over my first — indeed, my newfound awareness was matched by an increasing exhaustion, as I neared the end of the most continuously taxing year of school I’d ever had. Having only a week’s study break instead of three over Christmas and New Year’s didn’t help, either. Overall, though, I’ve come to terms with the law school experience, and in some measurable ways I’m better for it. At 4pm on May 14, 1L was over.

I spent the next day packing up everything in my dorm room to move into the new place — oh, didn’t mention that. Two friends and I are sharing a duplex next year a ways north of the law school. After beginning the housing in the uncharacteristically responsible month of February, we finally found the place during study break, around the same day my laptop died. The current tenants were good enough to let us store our stuff in the basement over the summer, so my friend and I called a taxi (O, the simplifying effect one’s living arrangements undergo when one pursues a postgrad degree) (to be fair, though, it was a big taxi) and moved our material lives a few blocks up the street.

The next day, I started the famous Harvard Law Review writing competition, by which eager first years can earn a spot on the journal with a good score on the weeklong contest. Here’s what that was like.

The very day after turning in my competition packet, and not unrelatedly also the very day after staying up all night and verifying that, yes, Kinko’s is open at 5am, I was on a plane for London. I’ve been quiet here about my summer plans, first because my grant funding situation teetered for more than a month on the edge of my not being able to afford to volunteer in the world’s second most expensive city, and then because the rush of exam period led me to be quiet about almost everything here. Anyway, I arrived Sunday night following a canceled flight, slept until teatime on the best-timed bank holiday of which I’ve ever been a part, and started work on Tuesday.

My first week in London was a haze. The sore throat I brought with me to my first day rapidly blossomed into the kind of whole-body ugggh I hadn’t felt since the days when my mom would have to write an absentee excuse to school the next day. Family, friends, and coworkers have suggested that it might have been caused by running myself ragged the week before, jet lag, or London’s novel microbial ecosystem. I, on the other hand, blame a gang of all three factors attacking at once, if only because I think that helps justify my several days of moaning and nose-blowing from a simple cold virus.

The last few days have finally seen me acting like I’ve adjusted to working in London. My project at ORG is on network neutrality, and you can see it come together here. Meanwhile, the people are great and so is the city — I’m liking it here!