So I'm a 3L.

I just finished my last exam. In a couple of hours, Shelly and I will get into the car and head for the Manchester airport (it'll be my first time in New Hampshire, an amazing feat considering I've lived 45 minutes from the border for nearly two years now) and fly to Baltimore (the Manchester-Baltimore flight is oh-so-much-cheaper than the Boston-Arlington flight). Tomorrow Shelly will graduate with her Masters of Legislative Affairs from GWU. Her parents are coming out and of course her sister Lissa will be there. Sunday she flies back here, and I stay. I start work on Monday, and Shelly and I don't live together for 11 more weeks.

We've both been in sort of denial about our pending separation. We've just been going on with our lives pretending it's not going to really happen. We joke about it, we plan for it, but it's not really going to happen. But here it is. We went through this in our dating and engagement, so it's nothing new. In fact, we'll still see each other more often this summer than we did last fall. That still doesn't mean we have to like it.

I'm excited to see what law firm life is really like. I started law school with great dreams of public interest, like everyone else. Someone (I forget who) in the public interest office, after talking to me a little bit my first semester here, anxiously pleaded with me not to waste my ambition and dreams on a firm. Yet I'm doing it. It doesn't like selling my soul to the devil as much as it did a year or two ago. Maybe that's one of the clauses in the contract of sale--forgetfulness. I don't know if I'll like it. But I don't know that I'll hate it either. Watch this space.

I am excited to get back to DC, though Boston is just warming up into a hospitable region again. I have a lot of good friends there, though I'm leaving my best friend behind.

Most of all, it's crazy that I'm 2/3 done with law school. This time next year, I'll be a juris doctor. Whatever good that will do me.

Why is my stomach churning?