Giving Birth and The Fertility Vase of the Undabelli Tribe: Metahpors for Completing 1L Year

Just this very minute I printed out the last page of my last final, and as soon as I finish this posting I'll be turning it, officially ending my 1L year. It's a weird sensation, and one that I'm having some difficulty processing. Aside from losing 50 pounds when I came out of the closet, this has been the hardest thing I've ever done, the thing I'm most proud of finishing, and the thing that will probably make me the most financially successful (Tall Sicillian Stud's career, as a future doctor, will hopefully let me lead a life of leisure after we pay off his loans, so I don't have to do the lawyer thing for too long--and losing the 50 was an integral part of meeting him).

To help me process this challenging feeling, I've come up with a series of metaphors (or similies..who knows?) that illustrate the complex experience of being a law stud-ent. Susan Sontag, this post is dedicated to you!

Giving Birth:
For 9 months, we've had this legal creature growing inside of us, this monster of a child just waiting to plop out. Much as a parent-to-be would rejoice when they hear they're going to have a child, so too did we when we got the thick envelope or phone call from Hottie Admissions Dean. During the first twenty weeks of the pregnancy, there were a few miscarriages and a few abortions as familiar faces stopped showing up, but the rest of us kept our babies and plodded through. Last December during exams, we all thought we'd be giving birth to a premie, and had two awful weeks of labor. It was all for naught, though, and now we are in April, having gone through another hellish labor, and either enjoying the post-birthing glow or anxiously waiting for the ungrateful wretch to come out. When the writing competition comes this weekend, I expect it to be as slimy as a placental afterbirth, but instead of having my results frozen for the stem cells, I'd just assume sell them to a shampoo company.

Teenage Movie Star Bitch
If the birth metaphor doesn't do it for you, I can also see this experience as parallel to Lindsay Lohan's transformation in Mean Girls. The movie is a rich text that is instructive in understanding our communal experience as 1Ls.

To lay the foundation though, let's provide some similarities to law school and North Shore High. First, there are Mean Girls a-plenty in law school. You know who are you: pretty, peppy, and with 8 pairs of Uggs. Second, the social breakdown of school is similar to that of the cafeteria in the movie: we have Mean Black Hotties, Asian Hotties, Asian Nerds, Sexually Active Law Revue (Band) Geeks, and Attractive Wealthy Kids.

Second, our transformation from civillians to full fledged-almost 2Ls parallels that of Cady. Much as her, when we began, we were confused by the strange rituals of the new school: the socratic method, hanging out at the library, reading outlines, etc. As we progressed through and became adept at navigating the complex world of 1L-land, we lost our prior selves in the whirlwind that is law school. Much as Cady's mom, after finding the fertility vase of the Undabelli tride underneath the sink after her big party, yells, "Who are you?" I think we have all wondered who we are during this experience. Finally, as we prepare to finish this first year of law school, we have hopefully realized the sheer absurdity of being a 1L and will all learn Korean, play Lacrosse, date Indian math-letes that also MC and love each other next fall.

"Drowning in the Bathtub of Cum," or "Law as Cum: A Critical Analysis"
My final metaphor is also the simplest to explain the 1L year. Picture it: we're in an enormous jacuzzi tub full of cum, drowning, struggling to get enough air. The cum is overwhelming us and we can feel ourselves slowly slipping into the abyss. Then, right when we think we're about to go down, we realize that deep down we're all cumsluts, and we love swimming in this bathtub. It's not so scary anymore--it's actually kind of fun--and instead of stressing out, we just doggie paddle around. Law school is like the bath tub of cum.