My car indicated to me that as of today it had carted me around for over 100,000 miles - just a few months short of our 11th anniversary together. I wonder when it came off the assembly line it ever dreamed we’d form a relationship that endured for over a decade? I know I did not, but I am grateful for my car’s loyalty and dedication. Sorry, I feel sentimental after watching that Joey Lawrence movie.
I wear my heart on my sleeve for you and now there you go playing hard to get. Typical.
Post exam 1 (Friday) I found myself stuck in the bargaining stage of the five stages of grief. I like to call it the bargaining/justification stage. I have altered Ms. Kubler-Ross’s well-regarded paradigm on the stages of grief to allow for the very important stage of rationalization. I based this slight variation upon rigorous studies and examination of my own behaviors and thoughts. It’s a process I like to call “Freud-ing” myself. Or more typically “de-Freud-ing” myself when the rationalizations I make entail a rather irrational and impractical quality.
The scene was as follows. I completed the exam and returned home with the goal of studying for exam 2 which was to occur in sixteen hours. I would argue that having two exams within a 24 hour period was unconscionable, but they’re all lawyers so I am reasonably sure I would lose. Instead, I decided to “check myself.” Some questions on the exam lent to a quality that there was a definitive right answer and there was no “essaying” around it so I wanted to see if I was correct on these items. The problem was that I had a certain level of confidence at this point. Not a “wow I rocked that test!” mindset, but a frame of mind somewhat akin to “maybe I did alright after all.”
So I open up my notes and outline and study guides. And look, I had the foresight to make BOLD some of the issues which I saw on the test and yet, I seemingly got them wrong. See, when an item has been made bold it typically means to PAY ATTENTION. It’s important. Study it. Know it. I obviously took out the time to select the text and hit the “B” icon in Word’s toolbar and still I failed to give it the attention it required. For shame.
I look up some more items and yes it appears another one wrong and another one wrong and another one bites the dust, yeah, another one bites the dust. (Sing it with me now…)
Allow me demonstrate the cycle.
“Holy crap, are you effing kidding me with this test?! I can’t believe this is happening! It’s really not possible that I could suck so badly on these exams!”
(Yes, you were accurate if you believed you detected some anger in stage 1. Anger is all over this process for me.) “Man, how can you do this to me with this test! I suck. You suck. Everyone in the world sucks! Steven Emanuel why didn’t you save me! I am so made at you. How dare you (the professor, not Mr. Emanuel) break typical law school exam expectations by the type of questions presented in the exam. It was precedent setting in that I had not seen such questioning previously. Ughh, argghhh! Don’t make me angry! You won’t like me when I am angry. Why is my skin turning green?!”
“Wait, let me look again. Maybe she’ll read into something that I wrote which may be acceptable and point-worthy. Maybe, just maybe this could be taken for that. Maybe I actually did write that. Maybe you could see I meant that. Maybe you can be nice when grading and I can cut your grass over the summer?” Of course all this discourse is going on in my head. There is no professor around and I am wagering-sure she is NOT omniscient, so all my pleadings are wasteful endeavors. And one thing I do recall is that the law does not like waste.
I wish I was omniscient. Sometimes. Not always. Because I really do not want to know what y’all are thinking all the time.
“Woe is me. I am so sad. I am sick of all these tests. I give up. There is no hope. Why should I even study for my exam tomorrow? What is the point? There is no point. It’s hopeless.”
“Yes, I do believe I have accepted the fact that I suck at taking these exams. I recognize that although I may know something, I do not know how to adequately and effectively articulate it. Defend it.Organize and analyze it in a manner someone not living in my head would be able to understand. ‘Sloppy analysis!’ Whatever.”
(Hey now, that little bit of sarcasm with the “Whatever” sounds almost like you have not accepted this. You do not want to fail and not successfully complete this grief cycle, do you?”)
And no, processes are not copyrightable but the words used to detail the process are subject to copyright so I doubt Ms. Kubler-Ross hasn’t earned compensation over the years from her organization of the five (somewhat obvious) stages (so she says) surrounding one’s experience of loss.
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