Advice on a Friday night

A brief foray into art

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who didn't quite understand the difference between an offer, agreement and a contract. In an attempt both to help her and to entertain myself during a four hour break between classes, I drew this comic strip type thing, which showed how a boy and a girl got together, labelled with the analogous stages of contract formation.

Anyway I was going to post it here, but it had an unexpectedly bad ending ("breach of contract: remember that specific performance is not an available remedy for personal service contracts"), which makes me seem more cynical than I actually am. Maybe.

My favourite insult

About an hour and a half ago, I went offline (shock! horror!) so that I could duraseal the three volumes of Tax Law legislation that I bought today. My parting message in one of my Facebook conversations was "ttyl dork".

A few minutes later, I received this text:

"Don't call me a dork, person durasealing their tax books!"

Good call. It is a rather dorky thing to do, prima facie. But they are massive and their covers are flimsy and if I took them to university in my bag twice a week then they would surely be destroyed, if left uncovered. So, my response (in my head) was:

"It's not dorky; it's sensible!"

However, having thought about it for a few moments, I realised that being sensible does not necessarily preclude something from being dorky. In fact, the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Depressingly, most things that I thought of immediately after making this realisation were both dorky and sensible. See below:

Almost back to full health

As, I am sure, most readers of this blog are aware, I'm currently at university studying for conjoint Law and Commerce degrees. Since I was very young, I've wanted to be an investment banker, so the Commerce degree has always been the 'main' degree and the Law degree has been more of the 'bit on the side'. Consequently, my Law marks have always been lower because it has never been the focus, and I've had a certain disinterest in the law, atypical of one of its students.

This year, however, because I am one paper away from finishing the Commerce degree, but many papers away from finishing the Law degree, I'm taking only LLB papers. The result of this is that I'm at Law School all the time, and so it is as if I am only studying Law. The weird thing that I've noticed is how, if you sit back, you get absorbed into the machine that is Auckland Law School. It's kind of like being back at high school, being in a factory which churns out thousands of copies of the same kind of person (that's actually quite harsh, because there's more critical thinking/intellect at Law School than there was at high school, but there's a strong.. culture (?) which makes all the students extremely similar (and the same kind of person that is churned out is ...lawyers). I guess the point is how quickly, if you let yourself, you get absorbed into this Law School culture. I went to Law Careers Day today, along with all the others, and I'm going to a mooting meeting tonight: two things that I would never have expected myself to have done, say, this time last year.

...and at the end of this thought process, it's dawning on me that there's something completely Orwellian/1984-esque about this. I love Law School.

......quite honestly.

This is comforting...

...because I am pretty sure that I'm at the bottom of my Agency Honours class.

So I got all that stuff done

and now I'm really sick. Fail.

End of holidays/start of semester

It's so weird looking back on the holidays to think of how fast they've gone, and thus another year of university starts. Woohoo. I'm sure you can all hear the joy in my (typing) voice.

I feel like for the sake of completeness (because, for better or for worse, I am obsessed with formalities and completeness), I feel like I should write some kind of summary of the holidays/something about the start of the new semester, seeing as I started using this blog (kind of) to document the holidays and rant to something that was not a person, so that I would not annoy people with my incessant talking/whinging/ranting. But as it happens, I've stopped talking/whinging/ranting about life incessantly, and so it's actually turning out to be a lot more difficult to write this thing than I had initially envisaged. Instead, I will write a list of good/bad things that happened, kind of like the pros/cons lists that we had to write for the year 10 Enterprise Studies achievement standard on decision making. Because obviously my analytical skills are fantastic.

Plus

+ Economics Department work: interesting work, paid well, excellent people, learnt a lot, left a million times the economist that I was when I started.

+ Grey Lynn Law Office work: reeeeeeally interesting work, also helpful for learning how to relate to different people, quite impressive/inspiring to realise how much lawyers can help people/the law can be used for good... which is something that a student of contract/commercial/agency law tends not to see very much.

+ Trip to Melbourne: I love Melbourne. The food and fashion and architecture is amazing. I want to go back again and again and again and again.

+ 20th and 21st birthday parties: because is there anything that I'd rather be doing on a Saturday night? ...nope.

+ Seeing family: it was good to have the extended family come and stay over Christmas.. and now I'm craving ravioli.

+ A (large) few individuals: who probably know who they are. You are amazing and thank you for everything and love you long time and so on.

+ V-Day: kind of self-explanatory.

Minus

- Having to re-learn the importance of giving (and receiving) perfect information, and how people's actions are suboptimal when they don't know the full fact situation. Which is actually quite an important lesson to know when you're dealing with people. I think there is a quote somewhere about how the problem with people who tell the truth is that they assume everyone else is doing the same. Apparently I cannot assume that.

So there you have a reasonable summary of my holidays, which were actually, if you average out the happiness, probably my most enjoyable in a long time (the deep pits at the start were outweighed by the gains at the end - graph to come soon). Alas, the university semester has restarted, and already people are starting to get tired and stressed, which is annoying. I have quite a lot to do but I am aiming to be less stressed than other people, and will achieve this by... actually doing the work/reading etc. So I guess I have to read my Equity casebook as a bedtime story. Oh well. I think that I am on the verge of getting a cold and I hope that it just stays away until the weekend is over because there are too many dinners/parties etc on over the weekend. Once the university week starts again, it doesn't matter. How slack. University seems like it will be less stressful this year, with no commerce papers. Or maybe just stressful in a different way. I am sure that there will be much panicking at the Davis in the future.

And on that note, I really must go, so that I can get all my reading done in time for the law school barbecue and go to Equity and Land and sign up for the General Moot before 4pm. Goodnight!