I Know Why the Caged Bird Spends So Much Time on Facebook

If it’s not been painfully clear by now, I am deep in bar study hell. And what fluctuates between more hellish and a mild reprieve from pangs of death by bar is that I am doing it alone in my room with an iPod. That means that every morning I get up, make coffee and sit at my breakfast room table with an iPod and the 40 lbs of books that BarBri sent me. I wear little headphones, even though I’m the only one in the house, and sometimes I chuckle a little to myself at the things the voices in my head say. I was trying to remember some of them so that when TF asked me how my day was, I could say, “Well, I’m listening to torts and the lecturer had this hysterical story about trespass to chattels. And yesterday the guy doing Crim Pro called the defendant a ‘little bastard’! Can you believe it? Oh, we just laughed and laughed!”

TF asked me what studying for the bar was like, if it was anything like studying for finals. I think he was trying to prepare himself for Barmageddon. “Will there by crying?” Yes. “What about wallowing in self-pity?” Very much yes. “Throwing things?” Mmmmaybe. “Including tantrums?” Oh. Yes.

Studying for the bar is kind of like studying for finals, if you were taking all your finals at the same time and some more finals on classes you never had because the thought of taking classes with names like Commercial Paper and Oil and Gas made you put sharp, hot, stabby things in your eyes.

And after a week of sitting at my desk, or the table, sometimes the couch, with my book and headphones, I developed pain in my neck and head so bad that I almost puked. TF made me get a deep tissue massage. Now I can’t move my head at all. I have had deep tissue massages before on my leg, when I was going to a chiropractor. I know they hurt and I know they can leave you bruised. But it’s one thing when it’s your leg, it’s another when it’s your friggin neck.

I will say (proudly) that I didn’t do one embarrassing thing during my massage. This may be the first. Although, I will say the moment I laid down I automatically reviewed all I had eaten in the past 12 hours.

So that is where I am and what I’m doing. I can’t say I expect too much excitement to happen here in my apartment, but I promise to be on the lookout. I do try to venture into modern society at least once a day, but I’m sort of embarrassed by the number of times I visit CVS in a week. Last time I was released in the wild, I ran into one of TF’s coworkers. I was standing in CVS (of course) wearing the same sweatpants I had worn all week and an oversized hoodie pulled over my unwashed hair, and holding a box of Cheerios. I can’t say for sure, but when I caught his gaze, I might have hissed and skittered back into the shadows from whence I came. You know what they say, if bar review is going to make you feel stupid, it might as well make you feel ugly too.