Overwhelmed. Baking Cookies.

There's a LOT going on in the next 8 days.

• Thursday: Ugly Betty and Grey's Anatomy season finales
• Friday: classmate's wedding
• Saturday: Jon Stewart "concert" (or whatever you call a comedy tour stop)
• Sunday: Desperate Housewives and Brothers & Sisters season finales
• Monday: midwife appointment
• Tuesday: Religion & the Constitution final (CLOSED BOOK)
• Wednesday: American Law and the Rhetoric of Race final
• Thursday: Public Land final (partial CLOSED BOOK) and beginning the drive down to Texas
• Friday: finish drive down to Texas, watch baby brother graduate high school, spend the next 5 weeks in Texas working, and then return home to an entirely new apartment in Chicago in July

I realize it's a little ridiculous to include TV show finales on my list, but I'm going to watch them, so I might as well be up front about it and plan accordingly. But the point is, there's a lot going on. I had no idea my public land final was closed book. I already had no idea how to outline or study for that class and now I'm even more at a loss. It's a collection of topics that we voted on as a class to study with tons of statutes, cases, and handouts mixed in. How to organize? How to memorize? No clue. Religion is another mess. We weren't allowed to have laptops during class (SO painful) so I have no typed notes. I could never be bothered to take hand-written notes because I was too busy pining for my laptop, so I suppose I need to go through the casebook that we read almost in entirety and create a casechart that I can memorize. I don't want to do that because (1) I think memorizing things for law school is stupid, (2) the exam is only 1/3 of our grade because we also had 2 papers due during the quarter, and (3) he promises the exam will be "a really easy reading check." I'm thinking that I'll outline half of the cases and hope that's enough to get me in the middle of the curve- my paper grades are high, so the exam can bring me down a little. (I kind of love how any emotional attachment I had to my grades ran out sometime between winter quarter and now.) Rhetoric of Race is also a mess, but there's only so much I can worry about. It's open note and my notes are pretty good. It is only 1.5 hours (rather than 3) so there's less time to search through my notes, but I'm an expert at "ctrl +f".

At some point I also need to pack for my 5-week sabbatical in the Lone Star State, a.k.a. "The Friendly State," a.k.a. "The State Responsible for Making Bush a Political Figure and Inflicting Him on the Rest of the Country," a.k.a. "The State That is Hotter Than Hell in the Summer Especially for a Woman Who Is Seven Months Pregnant," and a.k.a. "Home." While I greatly prefer packing to outlining, there's not much I can do since I only own a certain number of maternity clothes and I need to keep wearing them until I leave. That's going to have to be a last minute thing- but not too last minute since we really have to get on the road within an hour or two after my last final (also my hardest).

After realizing all of this today, I was determined to come home and Be Productive. I ended up staring at my laptop for 2.5 hours trying to create my Public Land outline, but I couldn't figure out how to organize it and therefore couldn't start it. I didn't bring home any other books and since I can't start packing, I needed another way to feel productive without doing school work-- which is why there are now cookies baking in my oven.