I miss my bed.

      I have never slept in my room since my very first day in law school. For almost five months, I have been satisfied with 3-4 hours of sleep every night in our sala beside toritz (my lappytoppy), textbooks and codals, and hundreds of photocopies of cases. Seeing my bed was just so disturbing while studying. It was hard. Definitely. Never in my entire life that I have been this busy.

      Allow me to quote Atty. Pablito A. Perez, the Vice Dean of the San Beda College of Law:
“This is probably the most complex, demanding but rewarding phase of your preparation for your chosen life career. Studying law, and becoming a lawyer, shall test each of you in a way that you have never been tested before. The Law School will demand diligence, unperturbed dedication and focus, mastery and excellence day after day. It will be a very long way before you rest.”

      I thought my study habits during my ‘pre-law years’ were the best. For this new mad world, though, that I just discovered, what I considered best a few years ago is nothing but a half-baked, pretty blah, and surely-will-not-get-you-to-top strategy. Before, I devoted my whole life to learn, but now, I realize I have to live and die a thousand times over. I was crying every weekend for the last five months. Law school is fat with both inspiration and frustration. I daresay, it was an overkill. I saw my classmate faint during a recitation. Someone got cursed by a professor for not reading a certain case. Everyone in class had studied exhaustively four chapters of the book and forty cases (one case usually consists of 20+ pages with a font size too small to ascertain) for just one meeting in a subject, and still many got bokya* during the recit. It felt like you were taking the bar exam every single day. It felt like you were defending yourself in the trial court every hour. As what a kuya in school told me, “Dito, hindi lang basta matalino ka. Kailangan nuknukan ka ng sipag. Palakasan ng loob dito.”

bittersweet

      I will forever be grateful for my classmates, Atty. Adonis V. Gabriel, my family, Marfeal, and Tolits. I survived the first battle because of you all. Thank you.

*Bokya/65 – this is what happens when you are unable to give any answer in class recitation or if you give a totally incorrect answer to a question and your professor thereafter calls someone else for recitation.