Monday, May 22, 2006

Energy Drain - Bar Admissions and MuMu

I'd like to explain why I've had no energy for blogging or doing anything else these past few weeks.

I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about the bar admission course I'm taking. Everything we do seems to have a warning attached to it that goes like this:

Please note that all information prepared for this assessment process must be kept confidential. Failure to adhere to this paragraph may be regarded as "Academic Dishonesty" under s. 43(3) of the Licensing Process Policies.

For all I know, my sharing this note with you is such a breach. So let's just talk hypothetically. Imagine you're in a room with 24 people who have just completed their second or third university degree and you have an instructor asking them questions like "How do we communicate with our clients?"

And then the instructor waits for people to raise their hands. And keeps waiting.

And finally a hand goes up and the hand-raiser says, "on the phone? by email?"

"How else?"

I'm the guy who just shouts out "politely".

When the instructor didn't like that answer, I went back to being the guy who just shouts out the obvious answer right away so we don't have the long cricket chirping silences. Until the instructor asked "do we only write contracts so that the lawyers involved can understand them."

"No," I said.

"You don't have to answer so forcefully," said the instructor, "you could say, 'not necessarily'." Now we're back to the cricket chirping silences, because I'm not into unnecessarily equivocal answers.

Alas, as much as I've admired my fellow law student colleagues, I lost some of my optimism last week. Here's a sentence I used to begin a summary in a memo last week about a letter that our "firm" received by mistake:

This letter is like a live cobra that has been tossed through our window. It may have already bitten us, but if we handle it with care, we may escape further harm, get the anti-venom in time and possibly, but not likely, turn it to our advantage.

My fellow firm members deleted the sentence.

Do you see why I feel like my energy is being drained?

Don't play this game

MuMu: If you're smart, you won't click this picture.Then here at home, I came across that damned game MuMu because somebody asked if I could find something to occupy their mindNote1. I had my computer game addiction down to only about 20 minutes a day before this. A MuMu game takes me about 40 minutes. And when I finish one game, I want to play another. I must have spent six or seven hours playing it yesterday. And I'd promised myself I wouldn't play at all.

This morning I played two games and got a score of 653 on my second game. That's a darned high score and I'm hoping it will satisfy me enough that I never play it again. If you're smart, you won't follow the link I've imbedded into the screen shot.

7 comments:

zoom said...

Don't feel bad Dave - I've been on holidays throughout this monsoon, and I've been wasting most of my time playing Chuzzle. I'm hooked, despite the self-loathing and the promises to myself of "just one more, and then I won't play at all tomorrow."

zoom said...

I couldn't help myself, I tried your insidious little game. My high score is now 222. Do you think I'll feel better about myself if I switch addictions in the middle of my holidays?

Anonymous said...

i'm sorry, but i feel it is an educational game at least. i would like to point out that you can hardly claim to know who i am and stop at that. i know you know. you know i know you know. but nonetheless, we are lacking proof.

it's ok, though, i get special treatment for special times. though i guess they aren't that special if they happen all the time...

David Scrimshaw said...

PhilG, sorry, no new games.

Zoom, to avoid the self-loathing, try to think of these games as preventive healthcare. You're developing neural pathways to improve your resistance to dementia. Switching games is a good step to take.

Person with the ridiculously long pseudonym, when I know something, I don't need proof.

Anonymous said...

I don't think you're getting what I am saying...

David Scrimshaw said...

well, that's not surprising, I don't have a reference letter from the famous Professor Paciocco.

JuliaR said...

Well about the law - practising it is what kills your soul in the end. The study of it is great. I don't think it has to be that way but it is for now. Near the end of my stint at practice (9 years) I felt like someone was hooking my brain out through my nose, bit by bit. I still don't know how I would go about changing it but I think there has to be a way.