Honeymoon's over

Ohhhhh... okay. Now I remember why I'm not supposed to be relieved to be back in law school! Today I started back up at my summer (now fall) internship. I'm going to be working about 12 hours a week. At first I was excited about it. For a few hours, it felt like I was back to being a regular working woman, instead of just some girl who decided she hadn't had enough of school yet. Well, that lasted about until I met T on the sidewalk for the walk home. Since then, I've recalled...

1. When you come home for the day, the day isn't over. By a long shot. You gotta figure out how to feed yourself (and your family, of course!) and make up for the long hours that your dog has been languishing away (if you have a dog, of course!), without losing all momentum to get work done.

2. After taking a break to [a] walk the dog and/or [b] cook dinner and/or [c] eat dinner, you can choose to either sit down to resume reading assignments that automatically get 1000x harder to understand after the sun has set or take a REAL break by watching Hulu and blog-stalking guiltily.

3. Eventually, you will notice that it's nine or ten or eleven o'clock, and you will feel vague, lazy panic. That is when it's time to close the browser and go back to the books. Regardless of whether you WANT to finish the reading tonight or not, you WILL read until you can't keep your eyes open, because even if you don't get called on in class tomorrow, you're going to have another 100 pages to read on top of whatever you don't get done tonight.

4. When the love of your life comes in to ask if you want to watch a movie, you must recall that promise you made about law school not becoming your entire life. You must engage in the kind of ad-hoc balancing test that would make Scalia's toes curl, weighing "good night's sleep and more productive day tomorrow" against "positive deposit in the love bank and higher quality relationship (that will be more likely to last through the end of law school)."

5. You will put the books down eventually. But you won't feel done. No. You won't feel done until the air is freezing cold outside, there is snow on the ground and you are about to spend the last of your student loan money on Christmas gifts that double as "sorry I haven't talked to you in 5 months" friendship bribes.

When I remembered all this, I wrote it down here. Because I will want to come back to this before next semester starts. Before I get too giddy again.