To hell with the hill crowd, and life or death parties....

My first final is tomorrow. I think I might die. I might also do quite well because it's Crim Law, and I'm fairly clear on most of the concepts. I'm just really nervous. The awful ones are still coming up. Torts should be all right, and I can probably at least make a showing of myself in contracts, but Property is going to be awful. I know nothing about property, and I only missed one class all term. It's a closed book exam, and I have to remember things like names of important cases, and the Rule against Perpetuities, and the difference between a prescriptive easement and an adverse possession where you get to keep the whole damn thing. I can't even remember if that has a special name, but it probably does and I've forgotten it. I hate covenants and easements. They don't make any sense.

All of the other classes I'm taking involve law that revolves around one central theory. Criminal law revolves around the purposes of punishment, retribution, rehabilitation, incapacitation, and deterrence. So you can pin your understanding of the laws to that theory, and if one doesn't fit, you can remember the exception. Contract law revolves around the idea that if one party breaches a contract, we want to put the other party in the same position they'd be in if the contract hadn't been breached. That's an easy one, though it can get tricky in practice. Tort law revolves around the idea that we transfer loss suffered by an innocent party to the one who was culpable, except in a few oddball strict liability cases. Property law, on the other hand, descends in long, sticky spooge-strands from English common law, which was fucked up to begin with. Courts have interpreted it in all different sorts of ways, usually assisted by huge wads of controlled substances, I assume, and none of it really makes any sense. You end up with laws that say "If you leave the words "and his heirs" out of a deed, you haven't actually sold the property, you've just rented it out for life," or "If someone says you can use their land to make a path, you have no legal right to do so, but if they say you can't and you use it anyway and they don't call the police on your sorry ass, then you have the legal right to use their land." It's really stupid and irritating.

In other news, my studying was interrupted this weekend by an untimely bout of the Flu from Hell. We went to see Rent on Friday night, and by the time we got home, I was not feeling so good. By 1 am I had terrible stomach cramps and diarreah, and by 3am I'd thrown up everything that was still left in my stomach. We called the dial a nurse at 6am because I was throwing up clear fluids, and she said "Oh, it's something that's going around." Argh. Luckily, by 8am the worst was over, mainly because there was just nothing left in my system. I was pretty wrecked on Saturday, couldn't eat anything but crackers and Sprite and could barely get out of bed. Didn't do much studying that day! Yesterday was a little better, and I got several good hours of studying in, but the flu was still sneaking around. I felt pretty good as long as I didn't eat anything, but everytime I put anything in my stomach, even crackers, the cramps came right back. And I was getting pretty hungry! Today I feel all right, but I haven't had anything this morning but half a can of Sprite. I really hope this goes away by tomorrow. If I'm still spending ten minutes of every hour in the bathroom, I'm pretty fucked on a three-hour exam that is the only grade I'll get all semester. Here's hoping...