things i thought i knew but never appreciated about the bar exam until today

1) You take the exam in a convention center with thousands of other examinees. Some bring pillows. Some bring keyboards. Some bring anxiety. There are four women's rooms. The lines are thirty-deep in the morning. There are four water coolers, and hundreds of "bio-starch" biodegradable cornstarch cups that look and feel like plastic. You look up, and for the first time in your life, you can say, "I am looking at an ACRE of attorneys."

2) It is not six hours per day when you take it in San Mateo. It is twelve hours. You wake up at seven to your dog whining to be let outside, after an entire night of no sleeping but THINKING NONSTOP ABOUT THE OBAMA FAMILY WHY??? and daydreaming about defecating in ice fields, you drive slowly on 101 Northbound to San Mateo, wait 20 minutes to park in the Expo lot, wait an hour for the instructions to conclude, exam in the morning, lunch, exam in the afternoon, then you wait another half hour for the concluding instructions and then you wait half an hour to exit the parking lot, then you wait 90 minutes on 101 Southbound for the accident at Willow to clear. Then you get home at 7:30 p.m., you are hungry and you want to die!

3) Whatever happens at the bar, it's not as bad as having a light fixture fall on your head and kill you during an earthquake, cf. CH's blogpost about the LA exam.

4) You'll be ecstatically happy when your second package of Gushers reveals more blue sugar-filled hexagons than green sugar-filled hexagons, because anything is delightful when compared to how incredibly boring the bar is.

5) You'll stop caring halfway through the first performance test. You'll go to the cooler five times to drink from the little starch cups, and you'll do all of the arm and shoulder stretches you remember, before returning to your seat and panicking because the proctor just called the one hour warning.

6) You'll see people freaking out. The computer screen of the woman sitting in front of me turned into one of those Stereo-3D vision posters at 8:45 a.m., and she freaked the fuck out. She hit her head about ten times with the heel of her hand. She raised her hand. She lowered her hand. She called out for a most unhelpful proctor. She took her jacket off. She put it back on. But by 9 a.m., she was a human being again, and she just handwrote her essays. Then after lunch the 3D poster disappeared and her computer was normal, and she took the rest of the exam on the computer. Not so bad, but me and a few people in my row exchanged the "Yikes" face while she was panicking.

7) You'll wonder why you didn't take the bar in New York, where your friends have slain half the bar and seven of the thirteen subjects while you still have twelve hours of testing and still need to retain your memory of all thirteen subjects for two more terrible days. Your poor head, the leaky bucket!

More later, when I am not dog balls tired. I am serious when I say I did not sleep last night and instead spent the entire night thinking about the Obama family. Michelle looks lovely in purple!