The Return of the Show

I imagine that those of you chancing upon this blog in the last couple of months may have noticed the lack of new content and wondered if some unfortunate fate had befallen me -- perhaps I had been imprisoned, killed, or worse, deported.

I'm afraid it was even more awful than that: The Bar Exam.

The Bar Exam, or Bar-pocalypse, as I like to refer to it, was the culmination of a full twenty years of occasionally useful education. Everything I ever worked for came down to one -- or rather, two -- tests.

The Massachusetts and New York Bar Exams were all that stood between me and a gainful future as an attorney, taking calls from friends and family at what I imagine will be dark hours of the night, where they will apologize for having lost touch, ask how I am doing, and then interrupt my response to tell me that there's blood everywhere, the screaming stopped 20 minutes ago, and then ask what they should do. And then I'll try to remember where I left that shovel.

But first, the bar exams. Actually, before that, the two months of solid studying where my fellow law students and I kind of fell from the face of the Earth, into a world of BarBri videos, endless multiple choice practice questions, and flash cards that littered our apartments like sand -- even now I find them in places they have no business being. So if I ignored you, your IMs, and your emails over the last few weeks, it's not because I was rude. It was because I was rude and busy.

Then came the time to take the actual bar exam. Three days. Two states. Nineteen total hours of testing. No survivors.

I exaggerate. Of course there were survivors, and we gathered at the bar like we made it out of some unmitigated disaster. I emerged blinking into the sunlight and never looked back. The mile-long walk between the bar exam site and the "reunion" bar took me all of 10 minutes to complete. I have never walked somewhere so quickly in my life.

But that first glass of Scotch was heaven. As was the first bottle. Eventually, most of my law school classmates made it to the bar, and I said to someone how this was like V-E Day. Everyone was shaking hands, patting backs, congratulating each other on somehow managing to make it through. That person (I wish I could give you due credit, whoever you were, but my brain was somewhere between mulch and mush) replied that it actually reminded him more of the ending of Lost where everyone was reuniting at the church and were finally able to leave purgatory and take the Magic Church Bus to Heaven.

That person hit it right on the head.

In any case, I'm happy to report that I survived the exam and also survived the celebration. I pray that I passed the exams if only because, while I think that I would survive another exam, I don't imagine I would survive another celebration.

I am also happy to say that this blog is back, and that I will now resume regular posting. As someone who is no longer a student and is now unemployed, I'm sure I'll have many exciting experiences to report. Try to contain yourselves.

More importantly, I am back. Hide your women and children, people. August is going to be awesome.