My mom spent all yesterday evening and most of today helping me get my wad of clerkship applications out. What an ordeal. (And I'm not even done; there are still some other courts I'd like to apply to, although this was the bulk of them.) Mail merging, printing things out, affixing postage and labels... I wouldn't have been able to get it all done without her help, at least not in the available time.
Unpleasant though the task was, it did conjure up some nostalgia for things like fourth grade school projects, like the one where we stayed up making a model of Tenochtitlan out of construction paper and legos. Turns out those finely honed cutting and pasting skills came in handy...
(There really has to be a better way to do this. And there very well may be: OSCAR, an online system for applying for clerkships. However, not all judges use it. So instead I need to do TWO separate sets of application processes, a mail-based one like the one prepared yesterday and today, and the online one that I haven't had a chance to figure out yet. And these are just federal courts; state courts have their own processes.)