Another Bar Review Status Update

There now remain only eight full days before the California bar exam. If you discount the Monday before the exam, when I will be traveling up to San Mateo and casing the joint, then there are only seven full days left to study.

So far I have:

• Written close to 40 practice essays, encompassing all of the subjects covered on the exam. (The number is approximate because I wrote a few of them by hand and they have gotten lost in my piles of preparation materials. But there are 33 typed up on my computer.)
• Written 4 practice performance tests.
• Answered just over 2,200 multiple-choice MBE questions.
• Written about 250 pages of outlines for all the subjects covered on the exam.
• Created enough flash cards to make a stack about two and a quarter inches tall.

I haven’t counted how many hours I’ve spent studying. It’s a lot. More than I have ever spent studying for anything. I lost track of how many legal pads I’ve used up but I’ve completely drained about five blue Pilot Precise V5 pens and about three Sharpie Accent Highlighters.

And now it looks like my trusty Apple Pro Mouse is dead. Or dying. (Replacing that before the exam will make for another annoying unforeseen expense, after the AC adapter for my MacBook and the earbuds for my iPhone, both of which died a few weeks ago and had to be replaced.)

Based on the Google searches that bring people here, I assume that some of you are looking to compare your bar review progress to others. I have no idea how my numbers stack up. But I am tired of studying and rapidly approaching the place I always tried to reach about a day before final exams during law school: complete and utter boredom with the material. Everything seems too familiar.

When I see a flash card that says “piercing the corporate veil” on one side, my inner monologue tumbles through something like “avoid injustice, alter ego, undercapitalization, shareholder personally liable, easier for tort victim, whatever,” which is pretty much a summary of what’s on the other side of the card, except for the “whatever” part. But the “whatever” part is pretty much a summary of how I feel.

Yesterday, I was so sick of studying that I actually spent a couple hours reading Heidegger. You know, to unwind. And if you know anything about Heidegger, that should tell you what studying for the bar exam is like.