No snappy headline, but I have been oriented.

I have endured and mostly recovered from my three-day law school orientation. I'm currently listening to Patti Smith's "Space Monkey," reimagining it as "stress monkey," and thinking not-so-fondly of certain of my future classmates.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. All the faculty and administrators were quite calming. "Look to your left. Now look to your right. All of you are going to graduate." We heard that at least four times on the first day. Most of the stressed-out 22-year-olds were calmer on days 2 and 3. Honestly, our 2L and 3L "peer mentors" were far worse. I had an "Inside Voice" moment on Tuesday when one of them was talking about how during her 1L year, she used to go to bed worrying that someone else was still up studying. My comment: "Um, did you get some help for that?" (Yes, I said it out loud.)

My other Tourette's-like episode happened during the interminable Myers-Briggs presentation late on the afternoon of day 3. The question: "If you're a J, what kinds of situations are really upsetting for you?" My answer: "When you're working with someone, and they're hemming and hawing and they just can't seem to get their shit together, and you just want to strangle them." I did get laughs.

There's a special student group for decrepit old law students. I'm not sure what this group does. Perhaps go out for beers with no pressure to stay past 9pm because, you know, we'll all be getting drowsy.

So, that was orientation. Now evidently I'm going to go buy 85 billion color-coded office products and disappear for a year. This highlighting-in-four-colors thing that everyone recommends seems ugly and painful. And like you'd really be spending half your reading time capping and uncapping pens. Maybe that's the point.