It never ends!

I have not posted in a while because my plate is never endingly full. Jessup finished. Left a gapping whole of empty in my previously Jessup occupied life but then work filled it. Check out the post on survivelaw.com that pretty much outlines what happened.

I am only just getting into the Law Student Society where I am a competitions director this year (I underestimated the sheer amount of work that will need to go into this). I have started to try and get through the work but every time I go to log into an account the freaking password has been changed – this is bugging the poop out of me.

Amungst this I am Torts Peer Mentoring again, but it is something I genuinely enjoy. Law school goes back on Monday, I am so not ready for it 

I am still loving my job. Many funny little stories such as almost knocking myself out with the ‘dolly’ while moving floor in the building. I have been given a desk that is mine, ALL MINE! This is kind of a big deal, since I was sharing with someone who worked organised chaos! You know the type, a thousand documents on the desk but they know where everything is. Whilst I prefer the 5 file on the desk max rule.

Also and further, I will attempt to being posting once a week (LOLS).

Jumping Jessup Stress

Jessup memorials have been handed in, I have jumped out of a plane, closed a million dollar sale, been smacked down in court and yet the adrenalin that was pumping before it was due was just as insane if not more so.

Some highlights:

It expired when?

We have access to the tea and coffee room after hours, this is a good thing as we needed to be fuelled on caffeine beyond the normal end of semester/exam period. One morning a team member said ‘this coffee tastes like dirty Windex’ this particular brand of instant coffee is actually pretty damn good, so it needed some investigating.



Note the expiry on that bad boy …. It expired TEN years ago! No wonder it tasted horrible..

Why you no smell?

When you don’t leave the law library for about 4 days people tend to get a little funky. This team has hygiene down to a fine art. I was sent for supplies that included; towels, soap, tooth brushes and paste, conditioner, and other assorted shower goodies. However, by the time we have access to the shower it was only cold water. Fun stuff, it worked out in the end as after a cold, cold shower we were all WIDE AWAKE. Showering at about 3am at the university was interesting; it felt like some twisted academic boot camp.

I AM GOING TO KILL YOU

We are generally a pretty cohesive team, when the memorials are due in 1 hour and stuff is still not started tempers and thresholds for bullshit runs a little low. I am not, I repeat NOT a violent person, however this twerp was so close to pushing me over the edge. All is good now but I will never, ever work with this person ever again.

Not over yet.

Now the oral practice beings.
Again, it feels like we are starting at the bottom of a long climb up massive mountain.

In other news (Kitchen talk)

I finally did it, three years of silently copping my head chefs bad temper and snarky attitude and I lost it. This is the moment I have been playing out in my head for years. It went almost to plan, almost. I grabbed a huge roll of plastic wrap and SLAMED it down on the bench, got it attention and (here it where it deviates from the plan) said a few coherent words to the effect of ‘enough, stop acting like a child, enough throwing pans, fucking grow up’ then I started making sounds miming out the his bad attitude… yup any effect I had at that point was lost as I looked like a crazy person who had lost his mind. Smooth.

However I did save my dignity as a person afterwards, when he asked if ‘everything is all good’ I told him, in a calm even tone how this was not a onetime offence, his behaviour is grossly out of line and it affects everyone in the kitchen and to check himself.  There is much more to it but this is a law blog not a ‘I hate hospitality’ page.


Back to the wondrous fun that is Jessup (this is a lie, I am lying. There is nothing wondrous about this competition)

Also. Mr Ovum came out. Things went O.K not badly, not well either. The Mother is the issue, but she will come around in time.

Jumping Jessup

Jessup owns me

If I am not in the library working on the migraine that is Jessup I am at home thinking about how I should be at uni working on Jessup. Even my dreams have been pervaded with dreams of pleading tables, international law and how grossly under prepared we are.

Uni Results were released, I passed… just, actually 2/3rds of the year failed trusts but then they bell curved it and I only passed by 1%. That freaked me out quite a bit, usually I get great marks but this was a terrible experience I never want to repeat.

I know where I went wrong, I assisted in court for a few weeks full time in the pointy end of semester and worked extra days through SWOTVAC (because I was asked to). However I don’t think I would change it, the actual hands on experience was worth it.

My pitiful marks:

Trusts: Pass

Property B: Pass

Policing diversity: Pass

Crime Prevention: Credit

WTF! A credit for crime prevention? Two assessments where all I did was 2 days before it was due was look at the power points briefly, check the criteria sheet and then start bullshitting… what a joke.

Christmas was good, until I went to Mr. Ovums house and was introduced as the ‘house mate’, four years and they still don’t know, they should but they honestly don’t. Mr. Ovum plans to tell them in the next few days that should be interesting to say the least…

I have been voted onto the Law Student Society as a competitions director for 2012, if nothing else it should be lots of fun. Out of 40 something votes I got 30 something. All the people vying for the position got up and spoke for 2 minutes on why they should be elected. I had nothing prepared (why so surprised?) spoke about how much I enjoy mooting and how this excitement would come through in how I went about by position. It worked.

I find all the good things that have been happening to me a touch funny, you see these things were never supposed to happen, not to me. I am not a stellar student, I procrastinate and never sew myself being ‘one of those students’ but here I am. Trying to keep it together and not have it all blow up in my face in a spectacular manner.

Back to the mind rape that is Jessup – Obiter

More than I can handle

The job generally is really, really good. The team I am with is both supportive and fun, could not ask for a better position. However I was given the option of being sent to a different town for a month and being ‘instructing clerk’ for a large trial. How could I say no! Even though it is the pointy end of semester and I have more that I can poke two sticks at anyway. But I like to cause myself as much stress as possible so the obvious answer was HELL YES!

I regret that. Now I have the ICC moot, Jessup, trying to write weekly for Survivelaw.com, Exam notes and preparation on top of being in a different city 4 nights a week. If work was only 7-5 or court hours it would be fine, but as I am living with the barristers I am their bitch 24 hours a day. I loathe it. There are two barristers a Senior who has been practicing for 20 years and a Junior who has been doing it for a whopping six months. The Junior is making my life a living hell it goes beyond the arrogance of the barrister and solicitor crap to a personal level where he treats me like scum. I have worked with horrible people but this douche takes the cake.

I am so eager to make both of them happy tho, I do not have any carriage of the case so in court the best I can do is hand them pens or a folder if I can find it first. Because of my almost total uselessness I am going over and above in every respect and the Junior is abusing it and me. The result is I am very, very highly strung and it is taking its toll. I have managed to leave the Senior barristers luggage somewhere that was not the unit, so he had no clothes in the morning…oh yeah I fucked up.

Then the week was peppered with other minor mistakes the Junior has blown out of proportion in a bid to get me the sack (this guy is apparently a homophobe). But the best one is where I crashed the work car into the car front of me on the way to court, to be fair it was only a bump and there was no major damage caused. However the Jnr is crying whiplash, he even had me book a doctor’s appointment for him... what a cock. The thing that really gets me is that I was sure my foot was on the break! Stupid European car, my car may be a bomb but it least I know how firm the peddle is when you break to a stop.

I hate this so much. I have had a really good run of things the past few months but everything is now taking a turn for a not-so-good. I am sure I will bounce back, I always do but I am just not feeling it right now.

There has been so much good stuff I wanted to blog about but I have not time 
I have too much to do to be writing a blog – Obiter Ovum

Back to pushing shit up hill.

Uni is back on and is starting to gain momentum.

Assessment is not due for a month or so but as per usual getting started early because last minute essay writing and research sucks!

Recently ran into a past Jessup competitor and they have me freaking out! I am going to have a coffee with him in a few days so I can pick his brain. Still freaking out about it.

I entered into a Client Legal Interviewing competition with a great friend (we did the first year moot together) I am feeling pretty confident about our chances, this probably means we will be total crap. Looking forward to it nonetheless, at least the preparation involved is nowhere near the epic amount that needs to be invested into a Moot comp.

For one of my subjects I need to write a reflective journal on that weeks’ topic for the next 13 weeks. The Subject is Policing Diversity. I will be posting it on here. Maybe it will generate some discussion? Or totally alienate all 5 of my readers… Hi Michael! *waves*

My old man is a cop and my policing subjects have provided hours of discussion and debate. The best has been about policing discretion and how it is used, he is convinced there is no such thing… I could not even begin to wrap my head around how he can make such a statement. For that subjects’ final assessment it was an essay on whatever policing subject I wanted. I chose police discretion, not just because it is an interesting area but was guaranteed to tick Dad off. It was only after reading about the different theories of police discretion did I see where he was coming from (and still totally disagreed). I am hoping this subject will do the same.

And now I have Trust study to do.

Holding myself to a higher standard – My Jessup Journey.

It is no secret that I tend to have a lower view of my academic ability. I don’t know where this has come from or how it gained such strength. If I was to go back 10 years and tell 14 year old Me I would be at University, I would not have believed it. If you were to tell me at 16 I would be at law school I would think you were full of poop.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been blessed with a very, very supportive family who have always maintained I was very intelligent, and now have a partner who states the same (in his own way). I have never really believed them and a part of me still doesn’t. In the law library I often looked at the students who were participating in the larger moots with quite a bit of admiration. These students are the smart ones, the student I would never be. I had the same admiration for the peer mentors, and I still feel that I am out of place in that group.

Someone else, someone who has no vested interest in my self-esteem, a panel of three people has nominated me to represent the University in the Jessup. I am taking this as an invitation to hold my work to a higher standard than I otherwise would have.

How did I get this nomination? Trials were held over a period of time where each person interested in the competition got to talk to a panel of three academics on a subject of their choice for three minutes. The three minute speech I gave was centred around a section of an Act that denies parental rights to homosexual couples, in that short time I explored other aspects of the Act such as the reading of the bill to illumine the context of the Act and the broader impact on same sex families. I spent about an hour practicing in the park into my iPhone and did not use any notes. The other people trying out talked about topics that were more personal and not in any way law related. I also wore a suit; I only saw a few others who did the same. When I walked out of the room I was sure I had screwed it up and would not get onto the team for a national mooting competition that I was applying for. I was totally bummed out.

I think the combination of attire and topic choice is why I was chosen. I hope I do not disappoint.

After the initial elation of finding out I will be on the Jessup team the gravity of what this means started to weigh down on me. I am not smart enough to do this! Why have they chosen me? Surely I am going to let them down by being incompetent. I have decided to put these thoughts aside and give it everything I have, if I fail it will not be because I left anything to give.

I believe I finally understand the meaning of fear of failure, for me it is the fear of putting everything you have to give into something and still failing. The fear the very you have best is still below par.

Because of this fear I have thrown myself into mooting, international law and the Jessup in the only way I know how. To become obsessive about it, I have a long history of being totally obsessed with useless things. There has been a transition in recent years towards more useful obsessions (such as becoming a law student). I have hired out the recordings of the Jessup finals for the last 4 years and I am watching them more than once or twice. I have bought more mooting text books and have devoured them (another strange theme in my life is to explore and understand my world through books). When they become available I am going to purchase the international law study guide and text book and work my way through it, if I am going to pin the tail on the donkey I should probably know what a donkey looks like.

Let the obsession begin – Obiter.

Umm...Friking WOW!!

In the try outs for the different moots (outside of the just the uni comps) I only ticked the box for one HUGE moot beacuase 'hey, can't hurt'. I honestly believed there was 0, Zero, Nill, Null, None, Zip chance of being considered for that particular moot. I can't believe it. I have been nominated to represent my Uni in the Jessup Moot. The Ganddaddy of international moots.

I am so excited right this second, however I am well aware I have some seriously crappy times ahead with this moot...

Exams:

Property Law A
I think I did OK. Only time will tell.

Equity
Loved the subject, the exam was pretty good. again only time will tell

Other Subject
This subject was multipule choice, need I say more?

Can't sit still, what an amazing opportunity - Obiter