i cannot begin to wonder why you had to tell me this

I am chronically tired in law school. Maybe that's just the nature of the game. It was in college, but then I graduated and went off to other things and got enough sleep. I feel like I could get enough sleep in law school if I did nothing but school and did it well and steadily, but I don't. I have fun. I study, but not always enough ahead of time. I talk to people. I babysit for the kiddos.

Ah yes, the kiddos. I was babysitting one day when the kiddos had a playdate. The other mom and the other little boy came over. The boys were playing and we were chatting. Some moms refuse to converse with nannies, but this one is nice and anyway I get some exceptions once they find out that I'm in grad school and said grad school is law school at a fairly well-known place where, perhaps, their overworked lawyer husbands went. Not enough exceptions to get asked to their coffee sessions while the kids are at school, which I'm sure I would not want to participate in anyway because they are all about who bought a townhouse where and what kindergartens they are applying to and where to find a new nanny and other particularly New York too-much-money topics of conversation, but enough exceptions to be tolerable to chat with when there are no other moms around. But Nice Mom talks to me anyway because, you know, she's nice. So Nice Mom and I were talking about the busy-ness of life and she said, "I kept thinking it would get slower or easier, but it just doesn't." I looked at her in complete disbelief. This woman, in one sentence, destroyed all my hopes for a better tomorrow. I was shaken. Very shaken. Alarmingly shaken.

But then I took heart and thought to myself, "I'll move back to Africa and it will all be okay." After all, if there is no power, you just end up going to bed at 9 pm, right? And you get hours and hours of beautiful sleep. I'm sure I did that at least, say, four times in two years in Rwanda. We shall ignore the unfortunate fact that more and more of Africa has reliable power. NOT IMPORTANT. (And if this is just me lying to myself and Africa will be just as bad, please just leave me to my delusions. We all need some of them to stay sane.)

Meanwhile, at occupational therapy today, where I got new wrist braces fitted because the pain is not going away and I daily want to gnaw my arms off at the elbows (the fact that I don't give up typing isn't helping, of course), the OT kept saying, "RELAX your arm. RELAX your palm." Which I was incapable of doing. Why does no one warn you that the side effects of law school include a chronically furrowed brow and arms that actually will not go limp?

Oh, and yesterday, in perhaps the last straw, someone (not a law student) told me that he doesn't like hypothetical questions. Is that even possible? Is that allowed? I don't know if I can associate with people who don't do hypothetical questions.

I love the word "shall." It's so much more pleasant than "will."