As I prepare to visit Austin for spring break my preparations for the trip are tainted by the fact that this is likely to be the last Spring Break I ever have. Being a 3L in the spring carries a certain sadness; a wistful acknowledgment that my days as a student are nearly done. I’m sure many of my colleagues feel nothing but unalloyed joy at the thought of never registering for a class or tucking a syllabus into a folder. They revel in the surety that soon they will be actual lawyers, walking, talking productive members of society who have jobs and salaries and wake up before 10:00 a.m. on Fridays. No more textbooks and no more scrotum-tightening fear of getting cold-called when you haven’t done the reading.

And all that sounds good to me, too. Don’t get me wrong. Just because I’m almost thirty and have spent the vast majority of my adult life enrolled at some institution of higher learning doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to tearing it up in the real world. Granted, I would be a little more psyched if I had an actual job lined up or at least a coherent plan for life after law school beyond “Take the Bar Exam and Pray”but I’m still excited at the grand vista of possibility that lays before me. I’ve worked hard and earned myself an impressive suite of skills and I do itch to make my mark on the world.

And yet… I love the smell of libraries and the thrill of an engaging class discussion when everything clicks and it really feels like I’m in a room with some of the smartest people around and we’re trying to get to the bottom of a contentious, thorny problem. Not that that isn;t what happens in conference rooms in law firms all across the country every minute of every day, because I’m sure that’s what lies ahead. Right? The life of a lawyer is surely more than mind-numbing drudgery and poring through thousands upon thousands of pages of documents looking for a single email. It can’t be, can it?

I spent New Year’s Eve literally banging on a gong and eating elk while I wore someone else’s fedora and talked about comic books with a man wearing the largest wristwatch in the Northern Hemisphere. I spent the first day of this decade traveling from one end of the country to the other in the fuzzy  headspace of a not-quite hangover combined with only partially adapted-to jet lag. My Amazon Kindle proved itself quite conversation-piece during my time in the wilds of holiday air travel and I spent most of the first flight reading PDFs of David Mamet screenplays, and most of the second flipping between Sun Tzu and a trashy fantasy-noir novel.

Back in San Francisco now; back at work. My hands are on the keyboard once again, ploughing through my student note before it hits the presses in between checking and rechecking my grades from last semester. I started back at work, so even before my final semester of law school begins I find myself staring down the barrel of deadlines and workloads. School starts next week and I still need to hammer out my final schedule, buy books, do reading, etc. That doesn’t include the long-term job search, for which I need to steel my resolve in the face of overwhelming (and overwhelmingly fierce) competition since I am a 3L earning my J.D. in the legal employment apocalypse.

Fortunately, I have serious time management chops and I have perfected the art of focused busts of pure creativity. The workload doesn’t worry me. The soul-crushing existential dread about my future? That might be s different story in the long run. But for now I am content to be back in San Francisco, prepared to wring the last drops out of my academic life. This new year, this 20101 is positively tumescent with promise. I have work to do, yes. But I also have movies and TV shows to watch, comics and books to read, video games to play, blog posts to feel guilty about not writing and maybe eventually writing. I will have visitors come to me. I will visit others. I will make and fail to keep some resolutions while others will change my life. This new year is shiny and great.

I like politics. I hate punditry. I’m interested in the way public policy is conceived, debated,  and implemented. The ins and outs of political sausage-making fascinate me. Theoretically, at least. In practice, the problem is that the only way to keep up with the K Street wheeling and dealing of our elected representatives is to consume some manner of (and I use the term loosely) news. And right now, there’s no such thing.

The tenor of the national conversation tends to be such that reasoned debate or thorough reporting never actually happens. The television replaces it with shrill, shrieking talking heads who take turns yelling at each other and making disingenuous attempts at “balance” by having shrill, shrieking talking heads from the opposing political party yell at them. And then they cry. I’m not calling out for some standard of objectivity, or news outlets. A certain amount of lean or bias is an inescapable aspect of the human condition, and as long as they own up to it I’m fine with that aspect of the media. I know that in the early days,  political reporting was done by the most viscious of partisan hacks and I don’t see a big gap between the libelous pamphleteers of the 1700s and Fox news, say. And that doesn’t bother me

Bias is fine, but at least give us some reporting somewhere in between the shouting and bullying. Even if it’s biased reporting, give us some facts and some depth not just regurgitated talking points and press releases. Whether its the conspiracy theories and calculated histrionics of the Glenn Becks, the aggressively dismissive shouting of the Chris Mathews,  or the smarmy condescension of the Rachel Maddows, watchers of news get nothing but punditry. Blogs are even more brazenly partisan, and the echo chamber effect means that links and links give lots of cross-pollination but outside of a few serious outlets there is even less room for actual reporting. Newspapers. meanwhile are heaving the last choking sobs of their death spasms.

As fake news becomes the only palatable outlet for keeping up with the day-to-day political landscape, Americans lose something important. As much as I love the Stewarts, Colberts, and (to a lesser degree) Mahers of the world they are a poor substitute for substantive news reporting, told in manner meant to educate more than it entertains.

The ferocious-looking tribe is “…comprised of 150 women of varying ages, primarily students, led by 30 year-old Katerina Tarnouska. Reviving the tribal traditions of the Scythian Amazons of ancient Greek mythology, the Asgarda train in martial arts, taught by former Soviet karate master, Volodymyr Stepanovytch, and learn life skills and sciences in order to become ideal women.”

Apparently that means learning how to use scythes and other bladed weapons, shaving each others heads, and hanging out by rock formations.

Just so you know.