Still Crazy After All These Years

One year ago today we had our Civil Procedure final. I remember the day very vividly.

More than the several times I've caught myself saying "but for" in general conversation. More than the mistakes I made that I later categorized as foreseeable. More than getting up to go to the bar and coming back to find that some schmuck had taken my table and then "joking" that I had been dispossessed. More than anything else that we as law students do that proves beyond a reasonable doubt (SEE???) that we've lost our minds was the night after my civil procedure final.

The final was a monster. The sea of sadness and despair that overwhelmed us when we started reading the test could not have been parted by Moses. I've seen more hopeful people at sentencing hearings. At the end, we looked like stockbrokers. At a wake. God bless shatter-resistant windows.

But that's not the bad part.

That night, I had a dream. And that's when I realized that I should abandon hope.

In my dream, I was sitting in a cafe. And across from me was some random blonde I'd never seen before. But, because you just know these things in dreams, I knew that she was my girlfriend.

So I'm sitting across from my random blond girlfriend, and I'm thinking, wow, good for me. Because she was hot. Some might say that this is when I should have known that I was dreaming.

But this beautiful blonde, she was crying. And soon it became apparent to me that I was in the process of breaking up with her. I was breaking up with her. And here is where those previous realists haters might say, really, bro, by now I must have known that I was dreaming.

So I'm breaking up with her. And then I realize that I'm breaking up with her by using the Erie Doctrine analysis.

"I'm sorry, baby. It's not substantive. It's procedural. You have to understand."

I awoke in a state of panic, and spent the following week mourning my sanity.

I have yet to regain it.