“It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection.’
– Ann Patchett
Embracing the Suck[FN] one last time this morning. In a little under seven hours I'll sit for my last final this semester, in Corporate Taxation I. It's arcane, accounting heavy stuff, a jumble of equations associated with any transaction in which a corporation conveys something of value to a shareholder, or vice-versa. I see now why most people entering this program come from accounting backgrounds on top of their law degrees. I was a history major, and some of the steps that are probably intuitive for them--recalculating basis on a stock distribution, or earnings and profits when a corporation distributes in-kind property as part of a partial liquidation--are probably intuitive to them in a way they're not for your author. I'll slog through, but it won't be pretty.
And that's life right now. When I was a thirty-year-old law student at UGA, I fretted over every exam and what the outcome might do to my class rank and prospects for a decent job and life. I remember in the spring of my 2L year sitting on the deck of the little house in Bogart and weeping the afternoon I came home from taking my Municipal Corporations final, thinking I'd buggered it sufficiently that I'd never get a decent job in a law firm. I made a B+. As usual, I overestimated the competence of the folks around me. I reckon we all struggled that day.
The lead up to this exam has been similar, an exercise filled with dread compounded by the fact that I'm studying something I don't find particularly interesting. I also have trouble seeing myself doing any of this in practice, ever. And yet it's stock-in-trade for a tax lawyer, a series of rules and principles anyone with a Tax LLM should know and understand.
But what if? What if I tube this exam after, by my count, close to twenty hours of study for a three-hour, open book test? I reckon they'll take my money and warn me to do better next semester, or else. Been there, done that, after finishing my freshman year at USC with a 1.8 GPA after a lot of outside the classroom drama almost swallowed me. It all turned out fine.
So nothing substantively will change, regardless of the outcome, even if it means this marks the end of the program for me, which seems unlikely. But boy would it be humiliating to fail, after so many people know I'm engaging in this exercise of trying to learn a new song in my senescence.
Then again, people pay a lot less attention to what others are doing than we think. The worst would be among family who've never known the Marble Man to fail, now seeing I'm made of the same stuff as everyone else.
So it's ego, I suppose. I have to get over this hill to prove something to myself, that I've still got it after watching my powers and motivation fade alarmingly over the last couple years.
What'll most likely happen, really, is a passing but mediocre-at-best grade. That's what happens when someone with a reasonable IQ undertakes a travail in something that doesn't interest them all that much. And the law of corporate taxation falls into that category, unfortunately.
Either way, life will go on, and P and I will make our way back to the farm on Saturday morning in the snow, trailer towing roadster behind us, assuming I can find a trailer to rent. We have an ambitious plan of doing basically nothing for a couple weeks after that, resting and recharging after this exhausting and disappointing and emotionally fraught year. I would say we'll sit on the porch and drink wine, but maybe not so much of that now that we're old and the cumulative effects of every sip erode us at an accelerating rate. No wine last night as part of my pre-game day discipline, and I feel pretty good this morning. One could get used to this.
Six and a half hours until I open Exam4, cross my fingers that it works this time, and get after this test. Time to lean into my last bit of prep.
FN embrace the suck (third-person singular simple present embraces the suck, present participle embracing the suck, simple past and past participle embraced the suck)
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