"Don't worry too much if you don't pass exams, so long as you feel you have understood the subject. It's amazing what you can get by the ability to reason things out by conventional methods, getting down to the basics of what is happening."
Twenty-five with a dusting of snow out there.
And thirty-two at dawn was our high for the day. Teens by early tomorrow morning. And quite windy.
In a couple hours I'll take the first of two exams over the next week in my tax LLM program. Nervous doesn't begin to describe it, which is weird because I've taken so many over the years, and the stakes here are actually sort of low. Back when I was in law school the first time, the entire arc of one's professional life turned on what happened during each of those one-week blocks every semester. The top ten percent went to high paying, prestigious jobs in big firms handling big things and earning big money. The rest scrapped their way through the next few decades. Some ended up doing quite well, looking back on it, but at the time this week of exams brought a heavy burden.
What are the stakes here? I'd like to stay in the program. I've always been too competitive for my own well-being, and this is a very challenging curriculum at a top law school, with students generally much younger than me who are almost guaranteed to trounce me in this exercise simply as a matter of retention and brain plasticity.
But I imagine they aren't going to head to one of their waterfront condos afterward to relax a bit before the next round.
I need to remind myself that I'm here for the t-shirt, not the trophy. I know several guys with LLMs in tax. I have no idea how they did in their program. And all seem to be competent and enjoying their work.
After the exam I'll pull out my tablet and peck out a happy birthday to Issac. I thought about doing it when I first woke up, but my recollection is that Peg always makes a point of being the first to wish him happy birthday at the exact time he entered this world, 7:32 if memory serves. She left the hospital that morning and went to work. A tough egg, that one.
Time to pull the chinstrap tight and get ready to test. As the late, great Karbo Kline would say as we left the chute shop back at the 27th Tactical Fighter Squadron all those years ago, "Let's do this thang."