The misanthrope

It's official. I hate everybody in my LSAT class. Ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the people that I do hate, I hate them enough to make it seem like I hate the entire class. Don't tell me that I haven't tried. I've tried everything. Alternating deep breaths with my daily affirmation not to hate people and to be thankful for what I have, eating complimentary mints by the handfull, trying to focus on these hopeless logical reasoning questions that have been plaguing me for the past year. It's all useless. I'm a hater.

Like I said, I don't hate everyone. My teacher is incredibly sweet. She says "shucks and jive" and she has funky, thin dreadlocks that don't trigger my gag reflex like caucasian-dreads. And there is another man in the class who is always so earnest and eager to get the questions right, that it kind of makes me want to be a better person. He's trying to get into law school so he doesn't have to be a fast food manager anymore. And that's just about where my capacity for amity stops. It's just so frustrating because I didn't pay $1000+ dollars to spend 6 hours a day with a botched version of the brat pack. Sure it would be fun if we all shared sushi, danced on tables, and stuck it to "the Man," but instead I leave every class feeling like my heart is being pushed up against the front of my chest.

Allow me to illustrate...there's the recent college grad who overenunciates the beginning and end of his "ums." There's the overenthusiastic Indian man,who says "number A, B, C..." and premise as "pre-mice"(not something I hate him for, just an amusing quirk) and can't control the volume of his voice. There's the woman who always wears velour track/sweat pants and feels the need to tell us every superfluous detail of her life. She even told our teacher after lending her a dollar for a snack, "Don't worry about paying me back. I'm a financial planner. I make money for a living." Maybe that's how she's been able to take this course more times than the rest of us combined. And then there's my nemesis. I don't really know how this girl got pegged as my nemesis, but she is and I'm incredibly ashamed of it. She's smart. LSAT smart. She makes getting the questions right look as effortless as clipping toenails. Yeah, so I didn't say it was pretty. This girl, who unfortuantely is an alumni of my would-be alma mater, talks in monotone, laughs through the roof of her mouth, and blurts out answers before we've even had a chance to talk about the question. She smiles at me when we happen to make eye contact. I don't smile back.

I promise I won't complain about my LSAT anymore after this. I may have said that in a previous post; if I did, disregard it and take my word on this one. But as the course nears its end, I can look at it in two ways. 1) This is a clear sign that I will never be happy in a world of lawyers, both in training and established. Or 2) This is just another obstacle course in life for me that will end in what I hope will be me opening my email to find an LSAT score that will subsequently have me doing a happy dance in my apartment in Seoul. And it's obvious that there's only source of all this hatred. The church would have me call it the Devil, and I'm inclined to agree with them on this one. Ok, so maybe all this bargaining and making decisions in life for the wrong things wasn't the greatest choice, and the Devil may have gotten my $1000. But if all goes well--and I'm talking beyond the LSATs here--none of this will even matter.
*****
On a lighter note, I'm getting my hair cut tomorrow.

And Gwen Stefani's album comes out December 5th.