I'm back from Roanoke, and the bar exam is over. Hallelujah!

I really have no idea how well I did on the exam, and thanks to modern grading technology, I won't find out until "on or about October 13." Just enough time for me to start working at my firm the day after Labor Day, get my office all set up, get really involved in a couple of projects, and then get fired for failing the exam. Beautiful.

Jeremy has a couple of really long yet entertaining posts about the New York Bar Exam he took, and he even mentioned me in his pre-test posts. (Thanks, Jeremy. Every time you link to me my weekly readership triples in a day.) I wish I had some funny stories, too. Here's my attempt at a full description of it. I'm writing all this down partially to try to be entertaining for anyone who's reading, partially to keep friends and loved ones informed about the details of my life, and partially just as a personal record--a journal, if you will. (Of course, that's essentially the mission statement of this blog itself, so I don't know why I felt the need to point that out explicitly as it pertains to this post.)

I drove the four hours to Roanoke, listening to BarBri bar review CDs in the car. That's one more advantage to doing the home-study program, instead of actually attending the lectures. Not only did I get to skip the unimportant lectures, listen to the important ones on my own time, and not have to turn in any practice essays, but I also got to review in the car on the way to the exam.

Virginia is a very green state. If the bar examiners' intentions were to make us get to know the state by making us drive to a forsaken corner of it, they succeeded. It almost makes me want to come back to this area to see the Natural Bridge (reportedly Thomas Jefferson purchased it from King George III in 1774, it's listed as one of the natural wonders of the world, and now they charge admission (maybe it's the Utahn in me, but charging admission to see a stone arch seems a little shady)), The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library (you thought he was from New Jersey, didn't you? Well, guess what. He was born in backwoods Virginia.), Southern Virginia University (the barely accredited, unofficial BYU of the East), and about 421 different caverns, each with their own superlative ("The largest caverns in the East," "The only caverns with an elevator," "The caverns George Washington would have spelunked had he only known about them," "The largest cavern gift store in western Virginia").

I checked into my Super 8 motel, and learned that my room key card didn't work. The lady at the desk said the solution was simple: every time I needed to get into my room, I just needed to come get her, and she would use the master override mechanism to let me in. Of course, she pointed out in her Southern drawl, she was the only person on the motel staff who knew how to do it.

"What if you're not on duty when I need to get in?" I asked.

"Well, I'll be here till 12 tonight. When do you need to get into your room?"

"I don't know. I'll go out to dinner tonight, then leave tomorrow and come back sometime. I'm staying two nights, you know. Do I need to coordinate my arrivals with your work schedule?"

"Naw. I'll be here tonight, and then we'll have someone look at it tomorrow morning."

As it turned out, the next day, the different lady at the desk just gave me a universal key card. If I hadn't been so full of the ramifications of larceny and burglary (would entry into someone's hotel room be burglary at common law?), I could have been very dishonest.

Anyhoo, the test itself was unremarkable. Everyone there looked like a dolt, with their nice suits and Nikes. Actually, there were a few people who thought that the authorities couldn't have been serious about the athletic shoes, and insisted on wearing normal dress shoes. Those were actually the people who looked more like dolts, and they stuck out like a sore thumb.

At one point near the end of one of the sessions on the first day, a girl got up early to turn in her test. She was wearing huge wooden-heeled shoes. Clunk, clunk, clunk, she echoed throughout the cavernous testing area as wood struck burnished concrete. Everyone looked up and glared at her. At the beginning of the next session, the proctor announced that some people seem to be wearing high heels or other non-soft-soled shoes. If you're wearing such shoes and want to turn in your test early, please take them off. Ha. That'll show you, high-heel girl. Now you have to walk on the cold concrete in just your nylons!

I hadn't really written out very many (I think one or two) complete practice essay answers in preparation for the test. But now I was required to complete nine of them. By the end of the first day, my hand felt like it would never heal. My thumb had a permanent groove in it. I honestly cannot remember the last time (if ever) that I wrote so much by hand in such a short amount of time. It was so frustrating to compose a thought in my head and have to wait ten or fifteen seconds for my hand to write it out. I'm much too used to the near-instant gratification of good typing skills.

The second day, the multiple choice day, was less intense on my hand, but by this time, I was just anxious to leave and get on my way home. I had to keep reminding myself, "Spend the time you need to get these questions right. Getting to see Shelly fifteen minutes earlier isn't worth failing the bar exam."

My other problem was I started looking for and noticing patterns in my answer choices. It started out as a random mix of As, Bs, Cs, and Ds. But then I noticed that I hadn't marked C in about 20 questions. As I began to read each new question, I was thinking, "Please be C. Please be C. No, the answer has to be D. C is just silly. Crap." In the afternoon session, I picked four As in a row. Followed by four Cs in a row. Wouldn't that make you nervous? I left it, because I honestly thought those were the right answers. They say you should never pick an answer based on what the previous answers were (and I didn't, though I wanted to), but how random is it when the answers are A, A, A, A, C, C, C, C? It reminded me of once in my ninth-grade geography class when Mr. Wright gave us a true-false test where all the answers were "false." Devious.

All in all, the bar exam was a mentally grueling experience. A couple of days before the exam, I was a bit flustered in my studying and Shelly was trying to console me. She said, "You'll do fine. You're a really smart person." In my angst, I replied, "That might be true, but being smart has no impact on the bar exam. I got a good score on the LSAT because I'm smart. But the bar exam isn't about smarts. It's about memorization." And that's true.

Throughout this process, I've often wondered what the purpose of the bar exam is, anyway. I mean, I understand that you want the profession to have a certain level of competence. You don't want just any ninny defending you in court. But why am I unfit to practice law if, for example, I don't know that the statute of limitations for personal injury actions in Virginia is 2 years (I said it was 3)? Every single thing I was asked to memorize for this test is easily looked up in a book somewhere. And if I ever need to know these things in the future, I will look them up in a book. If I don't look them up in a book, it's probably malpractice. Isn't the fact that I graduated from law school enough? (OK, I know the answer to that question. The stuff I learned in law school has absolutely no bearing on what real-life lawyers do for a living. I may be miffed about having to learn statutes of limitations, but even I admit they're a lot more practical than the skill of making a good slippery-slope argument.)

Well, that's enough. Now it's time to set my mind free for a month and enjoy the last true summer vacation of my life. I have no big responsibilities till September 6. It was funny, but the night before the second day of the test I had a little trouble falling asleep. You might think it was because I was nervous about the test, or because the Rule Against Perpetuties was rolling around in my head and wouldn't get out. But in fact, I was enraptured with the thought of all the things I would be able to do with my life--all the free time I would have--once the bar exam is over.