One of the challenges of law school for me is to remember that I'm back to trying to learn the stuff in books, rather than trying to pick apart the books that I read, which is the grad school mode. Yet one more way grad school ruins you for life is to destroy your ability to read text for its face value rather than for its gaps, omissions, and other problems. Casebooks, on the other hand, and meant to be read, absorbed, digested, and spit back out. I'm still getting my head around it.

An almost contradictory problem comes when I read the cases themselves and the logic behind them. I'm kind of a Roland Barthes/death of the author guy who believes that a text is created by the interaction of words on the page with the reader, and not based on any authorial intent that we can speculate may have underlay the work at its creation. Decisions, however, often hinge on reading in the intent of authors, and it's just something I have to accept for the time being; next year I can take some classes with more of a critical, theoretical perspective.

The other major adjustment I'm making is back to dorm life and dining hall food. The dining hall food is actually about as good as institutional food gets; the Lawyer's Club has its own dining hall, so it's not as if we're sharing with undergrads. The biggest practical upshot, actually, is that I've radically increased my intake of things like fruits and vegetables; so radically, in fact, that I may be eating as many of them as the USDA and such people recommend, quite possibly for the first time in my life. And so far I'm doing at least OK at getting to the gym, so perhaps positive changes will being accruing again.