I woke up at 2:45am to leave the house by 3:15 and drive down to New Jersey. That's always a fun way to start the day... I was supposed to leave the night before, but the clerkship applications took most of the day, which left barely enough time for packing. Once I finished that I was pretty much toast, so I decided to take a 4 hour nap before making the drive.
(On the upside, the traffic is great at these odd hours, except for this SUV that followed me from the Mass Pike to the I-91 split in Hartford and insisted on driving 1.5 car lengths behind me, despite there being no one else in any of the other lanes. This car REALLY liked driving right behind me. In fact, when we got to the toll booth, it got behind me in my lane, as opposed to the perfectly good toll lane next to me WITH NO WAIT. Very weird, but unfortunately "weird" is not really want you want to encounter when driving my yourself in the middle of the night...)
Arriving at my dad's in one piece, I parked the car and then walked to the train station, where I caught a train into the city (Manhattan). There I met a friend from middle school (herself a lawyer) for breakfast.
After that I went to Brooklyn to meet blogger Jeremy Blachman for coffee iced tea. It was nice to meet him in person, although I commented how with blogs you sometimes can feel like you "know" a person even before you've met. That's probably a bad thing, because no matter how prolific the blog author, it still won't paint a picture of a person as completely as an immediate acquaintance would. The mistake is to accidentally believe that it has.
But for an otherwise almost complete stranger... we had a lot in common and a good rapport. We talked a lot about blogging, law school, and blogging about law school – and it was nice to talk to someone who understood these things like I do. Normally I'm in "explain" mode, where I'm always telling people what law school's like, why I blog, etc. With him, he already knows, so instead we could compare notes from our experiences. Even though we had very different experiences in law school, and will continue to have very different experiences thereafter, our perspectives on it were, I think, remarkably similar. We both had a similar take on the institution and our participation in it. We participated in different ways, but that we also participated in different ways than many of our peers actually made us have more in common with each other.
Of course, we did have something specific in common from our law school experiences that most of our classmates do not also share: we both had photo shoots! Jeremy had a few, including one for the New York Times, and I had mine for the Corporate Board Member magazine. If you were listening in to our conversation you might think that EVERY law student had a hours-long photo shoot at some point during their law school career, but I think in actuality it's just us...
After meeting Jeremy I then continued deeper into Brooklyn to visit my grandma. After a two-hour nap I had lunch and then was put to work on the latest jigsaw puzzle. I like working on her jigsaw puzzles (although I wasn't crazy about the picture on this one) because I like the way it engages my brain. It gets to rev up in a way that sort of tickles my head, but without stress. I don't even have to finish the puzzle (despite the admonitions of my aunt...) and it's rare that I can use my brain in such an inconsequential way.
In the evening I left and went to Cardozo law school for a reception for my German program. I met a few people I will see again once I'm there. I had to leave before it was over, though, to catch a bus back to New Jersey. And that was pretty much the end of my day. Thank goodness...