Dealing with “the bubble”

Maybe it was my 1L naïveté.  Or my ridiculously oversized ego.  Or just the fact sending and receiving several thousand text messages in a month isn’t that unusual for me.  But I thought I could handle the law school “bubble”… and instead it’s starting to handle me.  Grrr.

It all started with me trolling through the new blawg posts online (I <3 Safari’s Top Sites feature for this ) and reading this entry over at Fearfully Optimistic.  Although I don’t constantly hit the refresh button on my RSS feed — and actually never learned how to use an RSS reader until I started law:/dev/null and saw how much RSS feeds impact readership — my own procrastination vice is texting.  Hands down.

But I hadn’t really seen it as much of a vice up to this point.  Texting lets me stay in touch with people regularly, and between spending years as a Comp Sci undergrad and having a full QWERTY keyboard on the BlackBerry I can actually text about as fast as I can type (110wpm on a keyboard, somewhere north of 80wpm on the BlackBerry).

With my phone firmly in hand, I was going to beat the law school bubble.  Yes I had a ton of reading, but what’s a sporadic message here and there?  Sure I needed to brief those cases, but can a quick 10-text exchange really be that bad?  And I know that outline probably needs to be updated, but omg did you hear about what happened after the football game?! (We trounced Murray State btw, 65-0 )

Then I spent most of today split between filling out paperwork for a security clearance (every snippet of my life for the past 10 years?? shootmeplzkthx) and reading for CivPro and Torts tomorrow… and noticed how bonkers my phone drives me at times.

Never saw the movie, but I'm guessing it was about law school...

There were 50+ messages between one of my friends and I, with at least 1 every hour starting at 1pm.  There were 75+ between myself and another friend, with at least 1 every hour starting at 9am.  And there were at least 100+ back and forth messages with a 3rd friend over BlackBerry Messenger, which I stopped counting because it’s so much like AIM in that it’s ridiculously easy to send someone the slightest thought of even marginal significance that it can’t even really qualify as conversation.

At this point you’re probably thinking “Just cut off the damn phone.”  And you’re right, I should.  But I’m always paranoid the one time I decide to cut the phone completely off will be the one moment a friend’s in a car accident or drunk out of their mind needing a DD or in the hospital with acute appendicitis or something.

So then I set the phone to only go off when there’s an actual call — just for me to respond like Pavlov’s dog and habitually check to see if someone’s texted me but I missed it because the ringer was off.

Recognizing my addiction prompts me to make myself less available, force myself not to respond to texts, be “that guy we used to call a friend who’s now still a friend technically I guess but is really better friends with his law books and has no life because he’s always doing homework and reading and being all law-like” (actual quote)…

…and then realize I’ve essentially ended up as the one thing I tried to avoid.  Ugh.

Hope all of you had a good weekend, and have a good night!

Tags: #fml, 1L, CivPro, NCSU Wolfpack, Torts