My Friend's Foolproof Plan to Get into Law School

My friend Travis had a funny idea of how he plans to get into law school that I thought I would share:

I have thought of a foolproof plan to get into the law schools that might not otherwise accept me.

Step 1: I will feign my own death. I'm imagining the scenario something like this: I go on a road trip that takes me through some very rural areas during a blizzard. The car breaks down, and I start wandering aimlessly in the snow. The falling snow covers my tracks, making it impossible for the rescuers to find me. They conclude that I froze to death somewhere. Something like that. In reality, I had a friend follow me, and rode back to their house with them, where I will spend the next couple weeks hanging out in the basement and reading Calvin and Hobbes.

Step 2: I make sure that someone notifies all the schools I applied to. They also request that the schools notify them about the acceptance decision, so that they can say, "He had just been accepted to Harvard Law" or whatever, in the eulogy.

Step 3: The law school admissions people, moved to compassion, decide to grant my posthumous admission. I'm dead; what harm can it do?

Step 4: I miraculously reappear, alive, with a remarkable story about being rescued by a family of wolves during the blizzard and living in a cave for a week, answering the Call of the Wild.

Step 5: The law schools feel obligated to let me in, since they said they had admitted me.
It's foolproof! Nothing could possibly go wrong!

Let me know if you have a free basement I can borrow. And lots of Calvin and Hobbes books.

C.S. Lewis

I am staring at a plate of dried fruit. In the background my family is discussing where we're going out to dinner. Needless to say it seems futile. Just like the fruit. 

You might say I'm waxing philosophical and metaphorical with what I just wrote. You would be in part correct. And, C.S. Lewis is partly to blame for you being partly correct. I read the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia series today, napped on the couch and ate more than a pound of shrimp. They were not coordinated activities, and my day was not planned out at all. However, it was a very restful day.

Stop the melodrama!

Melodrama. Ideally, given how it sounds, it should be a moderate or 'mellow' type of drama. Of course even more ideally, it would be nice if there was no drama at all. But alas, melodrama disappoints. Again. And again.

In my family, I am proud to announce that we are very good at melodrama. Molehills become mountains, mice become elephants, and a stain on a shirt becomes a ruined life (there is oxiclean).

Generally, most of us in my family are pretty chill. I would even say 'mellow'. And some of our coping strategies, like mine are: "I'm not dead, I'm moderately healthy, I have friends and family, and I'm doing the best I can right now with what I've got." Then there are other strategies like this one: "I need everything in my life to run like clockwork; because I have absolutely perfectionist standards nothing ever goes right and I will take my self-induced stress out on everyone." It is very difficult to choose which is more healthy. I prefer the latter. Why? Because I can compare it to my life and breathe easy. 

I don't like to see people stressed out, and I don't like to see people suffer (especially close family), but it is nice to see that I have developed successful life-coping skills. Armageddon is not upon us because we are 6 minutes late to lunch, or if we get stuck in traffic. Life happens (while we are making other plans). Now, that does not mean we all should be lazy and unproductive, but it means we need to have balance. When some load of crap gets piled on our plate, instead of whining about it, pouting, and throwing a hissy fit, we can grin resourcefully and dump it on our garden, using it as fertilizer. As cliche as it sounds, when life gives you lemons, squeeze them in the eyes of someone who is stressing out for no reason, and laugh at them. Then maybe you'll start a fight with them - win or lose - they will probably forget about what was stressing them out in the first place.