Finally

It's official: I am THROUGH with my 1L year at Harvard Law School!

Truth be told, I have no idea how to feel about this. It's been trickling toward completion for so long- classes ending in April and exams spread over two weeks, half my classmates already done because they weren't going out for Law Review, and everyone leaving Cambridge at different times- that I have trouble believing it's really over this time.

At 1:30 on Saturday, I handed my competition materials over to the Law Review people in a small classroom in Hauser Hall. Suddenly, I was done with 1L year for good- but I couldn't really go anywhere, because one of my classmates was using my USB drive to print his case comment and another, who realized at the last second she didn't have any Crimson Cash to pay the Copy Center, was borrowing my Harvard ID. So I picked a table outside the deserted Harkness Commons, put up my feet, and waited in sunshiny peace.

Not too much later, my friends had turned in their competition packets too, and it hit all of us how long it had been since we last ate. So we headed for lunch at Cambridge Common, a good nearby pub with great outdoor seating. Three hours, one beer, and two glasses of sangria later, I was sitting in the grass of Harvard Yard with Phil, the one who'd used my USB, talking through the competition and our summer plans, when his excellent wife showed up with more beer and a frisbee. We threw it around for a while in JFK park, where we figured Harvard Police were less on the lookout for public drinking. When they needed to leave for a friend's graduation party, I headed home for a movie, late dinner, and much-needed early bedtime. The things you can do with an afternoon of honest-to-god freedom.

Since then, I've had one day in Cambridge- mostly spent entertaining some visiting friends from undergrad, which was great- and one in transit to Austin, with tex-mex and an Alamo Drafthouse movie on arrival. And presently, I'm sitting in the sun on my mom's gorgeous patio, waiting for my laundry to finish, making plans by text message with a couple of friends I'm attempting to see on this visit. The freedom to do these things is so unfamiliar (literally, the last time I was in Austin without bringing work along from Cambridge, this blog didn't exist) that I'm not even sure I'm completely enjoying it yet. When is the other shoe going to drop?

The answer, probably, is next Monday. That's when my internship starts, and I'll only have Sunday back in Cambridge to prepare for it. But even that- a normal, nine-to-five job with real weekends and no fifty-page reading assignments cutting into dinner- is going to be so different from the last nine months that I barely know what to think about it. Except that I think it'll be pretty great.