Welcome to 1L

The best part about your first year of law school is, hands down, the show they put on for you during the first month of classes.  Seemed like every day for a month, you would get an email with those magic words: "Reception to follow."  The food always tasted alright, but there is weird stuff that you would never order in your life.  "Bacon wrapped tofu?"  Why yes, good sir, and bring around another tray of the peanut butter broccoli.  Also in those emails were the two greatest words in the English language:  "Open bar."

I've never been in the real world; I went straight from under-grad (with a dry campus) to law school (two and a half times the national rate of alcoholism), so I had never been at a school or professional event with an open bar.  By the end of the first month, I had been to half a dozen.  I was used to getting sloppy drunk with my friends, sure, but there are lessons to be learned when drinking with new classmates and I didn't learn them until they stopped throwing the receptions for us.

It's one thing to drink around co-workers, because co-workers go home.  They go home to their real lives, and at the end of the day it doesn't really matter if Karen from Marketing caught you looking at her boobs, because really she shouldn't have been wearing that shirt, and her fiance likes your favorite team's rival, that fairweather prick.

In law school, there is no "go home."  The only people you talk to are your classmates.  The only friends you have are classmates.  The only people you could possibly date are your classmates, because no one else would possibly want to empathize with you about your boring life at school, and you're living on student loans so you can't even bribe them to like you.

At these receptions, when the pretty girl whose name you already forgot thinks you are acting like an ass, you don't just go home and worry about meeting the next one.  She is friends with all of your friends.  She is friends with every other girl in the school.  You act like an ass that one time, you are marked.  Sorry friend, hope your grades are good enough to transfer.

I suppose it's a blessing that they only threw a limited number of these things when we were first meeting each other.  The school stops picking up the tab just after there is enough time to find people who won't judge you.  It's a naturally pretentious environment, so there might only be 2 people out of 500 who won't, but you and those two losers can share a bottle and if anyone minds, you can always drag them into the street and fight them.  It's a solid back-up plan.  Don't tell the ABA.

D.C. writes "Reasonable Doubt" for The Bathtub on Tuesday mornings.  You can email him at dc.bathtub@gmail.com

Comments

[Lauren]

Hahaha. Man, if every e-mail we got in undergrad had been like that, it would have been awesome:

"Crime report: Robbery reported on the second floor of Cumberland Hall. Reception to follow."

[Caitlar]

True, Lauren, there may not have been an official invitation to a drinking reception after such seemingly non-celebratory events, but that certainly didn't stop you from holding one yourselves (See: tornado, something else that happened at maryland that i don't know about because i didn't go there).

[the mayor]

I've heard that medschools hold similar open bar events for their new students, which is terrifying. Liquored up lawers-to-be just isn't as scary to me as drunk doctors-in-training. Also, I think you should attend open bar events at other area law schools. Just tell those people you're a new transfer student. By the time they realize you're lying you'll be too drunk to care.

[Ryan Sommers]

Well until they bring around trays with little piles of blow I don't think it's really law school.

[Tori]

Speaking of med students under the influence, just last night I was hanging out with a med student friend of mine and she went off about how drugs are apparently "not that bad for you." Like, she had engaged in a legitimate conversation with a professor who told her that "the long-term health risks associated with heroine usage are minimal." She had little difficulty accepting this fact and with a flip of a wrist said to me, "Well, there goes years of DARE training." But for me this was so much more! I felt like we'd grown up together in small-town Nebraska, jointly attended church every Sunday, and then she'd run off to the big city and came home to inform me, "Tori, THERE IS NO GOD! EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT TO BE TRUE IS A LIE! PLEASE RECONCEIVE A WORLDVIEW!" So uh, I'm fairly shellshocked at the moment, but maybe if I do some good ol' shootin' up I'll chill out . . .

[the_mayor]

As a bonified doctor (If I'm going to say I'm a mayor, I might as well say I have an MD too) I will have to weigh in and agree with Tori's friend's professor. I bet that the actual damage one does to one's body through heroin use in and of itself is probably minimal. It's the sharing of needles and the whole being an addict thing that wears you down.

[Ryan Sommers]

I did some Googling to verify that, and it indeed seems to be the case, as the_mayor suggested. But most importantly of all, I found a site called "Heroin Helper" which is probably the most hilarious name one could come up with for something like that. www.heroinhelper.com

[Ryan Sommers]

Incidentally, the LD50 (lethal dose for 50% of the population) is "prohibitively high," meaning most overdoses result from a mixture with other drugs (personally I find it gives my Sudafed a nice euphoric kick).

[Lauren]

If heroinhelper.com isn't a place where you can buy boxes of noodles and casserole type things to cook your heroin with, then I'll be disappointed.

[Ryan Sommers]

Regrettably, life is full of those little heroin-related disappointments.

[Inactive account]

What is "heroine usage"? Dating Wonder Woman?

[Lauren]

I think it's what got Luke Wilson into trouble in that movie with Uma Thurman.

[Tori]

Damnit, Greg! You know how I abhor usage errors. I am so ashamed. (Not as ashamed as Luke and Uma should be, however. That movie was CRAP.)

[the mayor]

I like that people searching for information about heroin will, thanks to our comments, find D.C.'s post about law school. HEROIN!