The Coast Guard is dropping SPAM. (It is not good as my Aunt's turkey)

OR

The time the rest of the country calls the holidays and Law Students call exams.

My trip to my aunt's for Thanksgiving was lovely. I was able to leave a day earlier than planned because my contracts class was canceled and Amtrak is amazing. (Another reason to love train travel, it only cost me $3 to rebook my ticket, it never ceases to amaze me how much more civilized train travel is, even during a delay in Philly everyone was okay, there was so much less stress and upset then when I fly.)
My break was just the respite I needed from the insanity this part of the school year brings with it. I was able to go for a couple of nice walks, eat WAY too much tasty food, catch up on sleep, and generally bum around getting my head ready for the insanity that descended as soon as I got back to school. I even caught up on the last of my readings (for the whole semester)! I didn't think that was going to happen.
Should I have, in all honesty, probably come home early to miss the craziness of traveling the Sunday after Thanksgiving and work more on my outlines, which are woefully unfinished. Well, the insane 1L in me says yes, and I should have been working the whole time. But mostly my philosophy is that the insanity doesn't really help anyone and that calm focus is such a better way to go about things. This is not how most 1L's feel. Most of my classmates seem to be surviving on coffee and anxiety alone. Even at Cal, where there was a fair amount of exam anxiety, I never saw anything like I see from my classmates now.
It is hard to explain exactly what it is like using anything but a long silly over extended metaphor. It feels like we are all on a boat together an I am aware that everything is fine. We are floating along and everyone needs to keep doing their jobs and there won't be a problem. But then about half of my ship[class]mates are running around screaming that we are sinking. They are running around, screaming, jumping into life boats (and leaving the safety of the boat for the dangers of an open ocean in a dingy.)
Mostly I am fine, I can see the insanity of only getting three hours of sleep a night, or committing a case book to memory, or completely cutting myself off from the rest of the world. But there comes a point when everyone around you is screaming and yelling and a little irrational voice in the back of your head starts saying, wait what was that, are we sinking? I know that it is irrational but you can only block out so much of the crazy. And it is nearly impossible to convince people that we are on the Love Boat and not the Titanic. (Okay well maybe not the Love Boat, although with the amount of inter-classmate dating it is getting there. I guess it is more like that Carnival cruise that was adrift for a week. Yes its stressful and the generators and water system have failed, but the Coast Guard is dropping spam and we will get through this.)
The level of stress and crazy running back and fourth wares on you, and you wonder when we are going to push piggy off a cliff. Which, is why I will leave a room when people are spinning themselves into a frenzy, and why I have committed myself to going for a run every day that I don't have class. (Dead week starts tomorrow so it is most days for the next three weeks.) Because when I am working out everything else falls away, I am not a 1L preping for my first exams, my mom isn't sick, I am not going back home to negoitate the tightrope of my childhood-self and friends with the person I am becoming; there is just music and breathing and (probably way too much) burring of muscles. (It is my Coast Guard SPAM- if you will allow me to take it too far.)
Talking to people about this time of year I get so excited for the future, when holiday stress won't have anything to do with outlining or exams,  because December will be just another stressful month at work and it will just be the added stress of parties and presents and decorations. Then I realized that it is sad that I am excited for the stress other people dread. It is hard to believe after a lifetime being in school before the holidays that I only have this one and then two more, then I get to be a grown up. (I guess?)

Anyway that was a rambling post which is probably pretty indicative of where my head is.

 Now onto studying!