Friday, Day 5

I leaped out of bed this morning at 5:30 wondering whether the departure time had arrived. It would, I assured myself…. in ten hours. Oops.

I still can’t quite believe I’m running on one cup of coffee a day. My system thanks me, I’m sure, but I wonder what will happen when my steady supply of cold adrenaline begins to dissipate.

I mercilessly annihilated my first pair of socks yesterday. My clean little white ankle-length designer duds from Kohl’s with little pastel green and blue embroidery dots are now a pale shade of salmon. I thought washing everything in cold water would eliminate that possibility, but apparently not.

In Legal Writing today, the professor posted a paragraph from my homework assignment as an example of a correct answer. Things like that shouldn’t bloat me with happiness, but always do. It’s a nice validation, particularly when I had no idea whether I had completed the assignment correctly – I felt like I was stumbling about in the dark, plunking into objects every which way like a pinball trying to find the exit chute.

Twice! I got up on the board twice! She just put me up again!

Three times! Three times! Three times! She only put ten examples on the board, total, and I was up there three times! Rah! Rah! Rah!

My torts professor is the last one to be described… she’s about thirty years old, quite young for a professor, with straw-colored ear-length hair, glasses and a manner and build and skin color that reminds me remarkably of my childhood babysitter, Shelley. She even treads on her shoes in the same slightly cautious manner. She’s wearing a loose blue cotton-nylon suit with a red t-shirt adorned with vertical blue and white stripes. Were she a guy, I’d lament the lack of a female’s influence in clothing selection….

This class takes place in a discussion-type room as opposed to a classroom, so we’re all in our own individual wooden chairs that rotate and lean back, but their bases are so wide when one of us pushes back, the entire row of us are involuntarily shunted in the same direction. Thus, I elected to sit on the end, right in front of the professor. The chairs are arranged in a giant U shape facing her podium, and I’m on the end of the U right next to the door, directly in front of her. At least I have no opportunity to lose focus.

I volunteered for he first time in her class. “Does the law apply any significance to the fact that the defendant is five years old?” She pointed at me when I raised my hand. “No; the court applies no significance to his age.” “Okay, in what sense?” (insert fluttering flash of nerves and a split-second that seemed to span three minutes) “The conditions of for establishing battery are applied equally to adults and children, regardless of their age.” “Exactly.” Well, I guess I’m on my way. All the peer mentors said in orientation that if you don’t volunteer in the first two weeks of classes, you never will. I did. Yeah!