Closer to the beginning of the bar exam ordeal, I wrote about songs that have had relevance to me throughout this process. A couple new ones have revealed themselves over the last couple of days as we head into the final hours of this thing (I now go by hours since 96 seems larger than 4 although the other side would probably counter that the word “days” after the numeric amount would probably in the end make one feel better about the situation than the word “hours”). The first is “Hello Stranger” via an amateur music video featuring a girl whose actions and mental state, far from culminating in a crime, have undoubtedly induced at least a little sanity into the minds of current bar-preppers everywhere (sorry, my mind is just in overdrive and every word I utter can seemingly be linked to some sort of legal concept or theory).

I would also like to point out that studying for the bar has made me smarter in other realms simply by coincidence as this is the first time I have managed to place anything other than text into the content of one of my blogs (turns out it isn’t very hard).


And then there is “Spoon,” a Dave Matthews Band classic (I tend to regress towards my earlier tastes and favorite activities when faced with a challenge - the Beach Boys and in particular “Don’t Worry Baby” have featured prominently on my iPod in recent weeks). On first glance, the most relevant Spoon line would seem to be the one about being crazy and how laughing out loud makes it all alright. That would also tie into the themes of the above video and also the song “Brain Damage” referenced in the above post. However, the greatness of Spoon continues with the line “I thought of you/and turned to the gate/and on my way, came up with the answers/I scratched my head/ and the answers were gone.” That’s like every day when I think about the bar, realize an answer, think about it for a minute, and then the answers are gone!

Okay, enough analysis since I doubt any of this will be on the bar. Just taking a short break. I imagine I’ll have two more posts (one directly pre-bar and one directly post-bar before I transform this website into either a documentary on how I balance being a lawyer and an aspiring fiction writer or else a blog about how I failed the bar because I was blogging 96 hours before the exam.

-jd