Something you may or may not know about me - in addition to harassing writers for articles and throwing together the layout every other week for Nota Bene, I am also a Dean's Fellow - hi's to section 4A, you'd better be doing your citation homework right now. Although this distinction may be dubious after the lambasting presented by this year's Law Revue (shout-out to the cast!), it is one of the most fulfilling things I do here at law school. It is also informative because I tend to be connected to what is going on in the first year class. And what's going on is, well, a lot.

This weekend was the first skills competition of the second semester that was opened up to first years, the Mock Trial Board Spring Competition - many congratulations to those who made the Board. It is usually around this time of year that things start breaking down, devolving as students are tempted into seventeen different directions and are encouraged to sign up for everything and anything in order to have distinctive resumes. Therefore, as the journal competition looms large in every first year's mind this week, a word of caution.

It is not that big a deal. Do your journal competition. Turn it in. Chill the ____ out.

Ok, I could end this editorial here, but that would just be a cop out. Really, as the semester break comes up this week, I think that everyone - not just 1Ls - needs to get the heck out of Dodge for a bit. While we all love this school, it is vital to take time to step back and see the big picture, relax and recapture what may have been lost during the weeks of studying and slaving away. Find a place that gives you peace and go there, for the love of Friedenthal.

I'd like to be pretentious and leave you with a poetic suggestion from William Wordsworth. Back in the day (1798 to be exact), he composed a poem on a walk through Tintern Abbey, a place that reminded him of better times before he became all angsty and stressed out.

"These beauteous forms,/Through a long absence, have not been to me/As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:/But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have owed to them/In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;/And passing even into my purer mind,/With tranquil restoration:--feelings too/Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,/As have no slight or trivial influence/On that best portion of a good man's life,/His little, nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,/To them I may have owed another gift,/Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,/In which the burthen of the mystery,/In which the heavy and the weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world,/Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,/In which the affections gently lead us on,--/Until, the breath of this corporeal frame/And even the motion of our human blood/Almost suspended, we are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul:/While with an eye made quiet by the power/Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/We see into the life of things."