It Finally Happened

It finally happened: It's gotten to the point where I go to school so rarely that I forgot my locker combination.

Through the genius of library proxy servers, Westlaw, Lexis-Nexus, JSTOR, HeinOnline, and SSRN, I hardly have to leave home to do work. I don't like our law library, and it's a far enough walk from home (and I have stacks of files and books to lug around) to make it of limited utility. We don't have offices or even study carrels here, and so why should I try to bring the mountains of stuff I need to write my articles to and from school? I only have two classes, two days a week, one day finishing by 10 am and the other with such a huge gap between classes that I can go home or off to a cafe to work for four hours before my next class. None of my classes require me to enter the central part of the law school (indeed, one is in a separate adjacent building), and I have so few books that I don't really even use my locker much. I have a laser printer, a (mostly) working ethernet connection, and loads of tea and Vietnamese coffee. I never have to, or really want to, leave my cozy home office (the entire studio is a home office).

So it finally happened. I put book in my small, almost useless locker before spring break. Nine days later, I tried to retrieve it. And I forgot the combination.

More than my program-mates registering suprise at seeing me at school, or not really knowing where certain rooms are, this is the final nail in the coffin of my active participation in campus life. I'm pretty much just writing as much as I can, so I don't go to all that many public lectures and colloquia like I did back in Bourgie Metro Law School. I'm not in any organizations. I'm not really a part of the school, and that's my fault. It's the nature of the beast: the academic writing track at my school is pretty isolated and detached, and without enthusiasm for integrating yourself into school life, you can almost entirely avoid it. And I have enthusiasm for the latter. I just want to do my own work now, and have my separate personal life, and I'm happier now even though there's a twinge of sadness at realizing how I isolate myself on purpose because I feel no inducement to join the campus culture. Maybe if it were a different culture and if I felt more comfortable and eager about it--but I'm not.

I can't pretend I didn't expect this to happen, but there was a certain amount of optimism in my memory and my early hope that I would be a happy and active participant in law school life that I never wrote down the locker combo.

I'm writing it down now.