M. Mellow was off the grid

I'm convalescing at home at the moment. That's overly dramatic, of course, but this second year of law school has been very busy, such that I've been writing and studying about 14 hours per day for the past two months, weekends included, and I had no energy left for blogging. Given my limited readership, I'm sure my absence has hardly meant anything but to a few people. (To those of you who it meant something to, you have my simultaneous thanks and apologies. I'm still alive, that's all I dare say for the moment.)

The semester started off unhappily enough, with loneliness and job-hunting taking their toll. As a coddled native Californian, I'm spoiled when it comes to the weather and thus don't transplant well to other climes; I didn't insist on finding an internship in the Bay Area, but that's the way the interview process turned out. The interviews themselves weren't horribly grueling... I've been through job interviews before, and a 20-minute interview, though it has its attendant difficulties, is nothing like a 6-hour technical interview replete with enough programming questions to suffice for an undergraduate computer science final. Nothing like a difficult economic climate to make for stressful job hunting. When the economy got sucked down the whirlpool at the end of shit creek, a lot of us engineering types just happened to be lashed to the bowsprit on the Nantucket Sleigh Ride to hell.

No bitterness in the end, though - the job search came and went, and I have an internship for the next summer. The first half of the semester - at least as far as mid-October, anyway - was defined mostly by having to put classwork to the side for the sake of the upcoming summer, and by running around for a couple of weeks on end jumping in and out of business suits for interviews and civvies for study. It was necessary, ultimately successful, and not a whole lot of fun. Plus, hearing about half of my friends announce wedding engagements wasn't doing anything for my mood. I'm not a selfish person, and I feel happy for all said friends, but when I'm handling 18-hour days at school wallowing in solitude and unappreciation, hearing about everyone else's happy relationships rubs a little unintentional salt into the wound. (Well, one friend broke up with her boyfriend and that was quite sad... she took it well enough, but it seems to be further proof of how hard law school can be on relationships. People either get married and stick it through, or break up. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground.) Well, no matter. Like I said - it was the first half of the semester, and it wasn't fun... but when that was over, I more or less dropped off the face of the earth in a struggle to get all my papers written. If I were any less a compulsive student, it would have been flat-out impossible for me.

I made a bunch of new friends in the second half of the semester, though (Mostly outside the law school), and felt like I had managed to reclaim some sort of life - and youth - for myself in the month and a half preceding finals. Those two months seemed about as long as an entire year, which scarcely surprises me given the raw number of hours I had to stay awake and working. But it was a fun year. I watched a lot of movies and listened to a lot of cantopop and jpop. I did a lot of writing, ate a lot of warm porridge, and drank a lot of tea. By the time finals rolled around, I was on top of my work and happier than I'd been in years. Someone had once asked me what it was like having Berkeley as an alma mater, and the best analogy I could come up with was that it was like having a horrible ex-girlfriend that you still loved anyway (not that I could speak from personal experience). It's nice to come back here, as a graduate student, and feel like I had found the home that I never found here as an undergraduate.

I've found a home. Things aren't so bad... no, not by a long shot :)