Balance

I miss law school.

I know that sounds kind of strange. But I actually enjoyed it. For me, law school was more about self-inflicted torture rather than the pain of the classes the school imposed.

I wasn't one of the people who got so insane about studying that I locked myself away in the library until it closed. I didn't study all night long. I rarely cared if I got an A as opposed to the B I could get without busting my ass.

I was one of those people who hung out in the back of the class playing classroom bingo. (We created bingo cards with common things you'd see or hear during the course of a normally pretty boring con law class. Like boxes was "Regan wanting to be called on so badly he stands up waiving his hands in the air" or "Amanda makes kissy faces at her boyfriend" or a less frequently observed "Prof trips and falls.")

I showed movies on my laptop. Action was best but sometimes we put on subtitles so you could read along with movies that required actual words. The professors did get a little suspicious when people who normally sat in the front of the room moved to the suddenly jam packed last row... But as long as they didn't scream at a particularly graphic war scene, they let us get away with it.

For three years, I worked hard but I worked at the things I wanted to work at... I talked the school into entering the only criminal law moot court competition in the country so I could be one of the participants. I represented clients in the clinics. My friend and I founded the school's law review.

Like I said...it was self-inflicted torture.

We always knew how to have fun. When the studying got to be too much, we hit a movie. Or we grabbed a drink at my favorite bar. It used to be the old jail and they still had the old jail cells. Drinking in a jail cell just seemed fun...and naughty... We rolled kegs into the cafeteria a couple times a year and the whole school would drink together. Including the dean.

No matter how hard we worked, we always played harder. The balance was important to keep us sane. But somehow, the further removed from law school we've gotten, the balance has become more than a little skewed.

Between work and family, there's little time left over for much else. This weekend, it was so nice to just escape for a few hours. Head into the city. Just be with hubby, while my dad watched Andrew.

We're always saying how we need to do that more often... Remember the lessons we learned in law school. Not the ones about books or the law. The real lessons about ourselves and life...

Balance...

I'm still trying to teach myself that one...