LSUC Grants a Holiday

In the middle of restitution class today, I received an email from the Law Society of Upper Canada, notifying me that I had an urgent message waiting to be read on their online system:

Dear Candidate,

Due to circumstances beyond the control of the Law Society of Upper Canada, please be advised that the Barrister and Solicitor Licensing Examination dates for June 2010 have changed....

Seems they've pulled everything forward two weeks, meaning I'll be writing the Ontario Barrister exam on May 25, and the Solicitor exam on June 8, two weeks before the original dates for both.

As class ended, students erupted with complaints. Most seemed to center around travel plans now destroyed, and deposits likely lost. "Travelocity is getting an email today," claimed one individual, sounding resigned. I made my own cursory objections via a status update and my MSN display name, bastions of lazy protest both.

But, really, this development might just play right in to my hands. How would I have used those extra two weeks? Studying? Hardly.

In all likelihood I would have spent as much time as possible sitting outside in the spring sun, resuming my annual game of chicken with the family history of melanoma.¹ Certainly I would have had my exam materials with me, but a good patch of afternoon sun demands an equally good nap, and the outdoors are not conducive to reviewing papers and books in an organized fashion. Now, due to these new time constraints, I'll have to find somewhere to get some real work done.

Best of all, the keeners are in the same boat! There was no way I would properly use the ample time I had been given. But the Other Half would have. Now much of their advantage has been wiped away. I've spent my life doing things at the last minute, with little preparation and even less review, while they went to office hours and asked questions of profs, and created multiple drafts of their work. Foolish.

In the span of one month, I will have to relearn everything I've forgotten over the last 6.5 terms (the silly dual-degree program requires a summer term of American tax law--also blissfully forgotten), the real estate law to which I currently pay negligible attention in class, the entirety of family law (avoided like the plague), and any number of other testable subjects I don't even know about. Daunting, certainly. But I've been training for this, while the keeners have not. By never doing anything early, wasting valuable study-time reading Batman comics and writing inane blog posts, I've developed a heightened ability to perform under time constraints.

I'm like a blind man with a refined sense of smell. Or like Jughead, when he claimed to have developed the most powerful jaws in Riverdale through disciplined food consumption. Now there's a guy who knows when a good nap in the sun is called for.

So here's to the procrastinators, the real beneficiaries of LSUC's erratic behaviour!

¹On the other hand, melanoma may have the upper hand this year, as some of the time I spend outside will shift from the comparatively weak sun of early-May to the burning power of mid- to late-June. By July, it will be time to book a new appointment with the dermatologist.