Friday, March 24, 2006
PMS
pre-moots syndrome. a condition every law student encounters at least once in his/her lifetime. lately, law school has been seeing a surfeit of such symptoms, ever since the month of march began, with a large number of young law undergraduates spotted wandering around school in a daze, dressed in white and black , ready to pick an argument or to defend their stand at a moment's notice, to the bitter end.it begins innocuously enough, with a 3000 word written assignment that has law students breaking into cold sweat, sleeping a scant 3 hours a day for an entire week, while they ponder on one of life's greatest mysteries...how can 3000 words take so long to squeeze out? or, how do i make 5000 words shrink into 3000? amidst the tears, caffeine addiction, bloodshot eyes and much prayer, such miracles are founded.
then comes the temporary reprieve, the calm before the storm, where you are lulled into believing the worst is over, punctuated by intermittent bursts of preparatory moot sessions, and amidst the dull monotony of hearing the same arguments over and over again through differing perspectives and through the endless drone of litany, you begin to believe again, to have faith in a fading, failing argument.
and although you were expecting it, the rewrite for the memorial still comes as a cold shock, an affront to your very being, that what you had thrown together in a panic weeks ago had, with the benefit of hindsight (that most unforgiving and critical of views), failed all expectations and plunged your soul into darkest despair. so again, onwards you trudge, the end closer in sight, each day bringing clarity and focus to your argument and rewrite (or so you think). come the deadline, you find yourself having procrastinated for too long, and again the panic, again the horror, the cycle of caffeine and glazed looks repeats.
through the memorials, we have endured, through the arguments, we have persevered. the worst is over, or so we would hope, the last moot session closed. ahead remains the final reckoning, mere hours away, and yet we falter, yet we fail, and with the doubt and hesitance predominant in our very characters, we wonder, have we really researched enough?
and so you toss and turn, shift uncomfortably, and in the cold folorn darkness whisper a prayer, that the weaknesses you see so clearly can be glossed over, that the tiny flaw in your argument will not widen into a gaping abyss, that somehow, someway, the judges will be charmed. and amidst all this worry and nerves, all this doubt and fear, our sole defence is hope.
P.S. it started off decently enough, but somewhere along the lines i think it got away from me. so yeah, if it doesn't make sense, i'm sorry.
wen was dreaming at 2:30 AM