In the years to come, I expect that my time in France will continue to affect me long after my final flight home in mid-October. I made friends that I will keep in touch with for the rest of my life, I gained fluency (or near-fluency) in a difficult language, and I learned that it’s […]
In the years to come, I expect that my time in France will continue to affect me long after my final flight home in mid-October. I made friends that I will keep in touch with for the rest of my life, I gained fluency (or near-fluency) in a difficult language, and I learned that it’s ok to have a glass of wine with lunch. Those are the types of long-term things that I’ll take away from my seven-month French odyssey.
In the short term, however, my career in France has one altogether undesirable effect… on my grades. See, flying from Chicago to Paris on Friday night and back on Monday morning not only required me to miss six consecutive Mondays worth of class (roughly 20% of class time in three of my courses), it also left me consistently jet-lagged for most of the first two months of my law school career. I had to rely on Ambien to reset my internal clock four or five days a week, I wandered around in a daze for most of the fall, and often forgot what day it was. Interestingly, this course of action is not strongly encouraged in the “Welcome to Law School” handbook that is distributed among incoming 1Ls. The picture below does a good job of capturing this bewildermen, as I wait half-asleep at Charles De Gaule for yet another international flight:
As a result, the last bills from my irrational pursuit of this dream are at last coming due. Exams start on Monday, and my chronic absences and general disorientation during my first exposure to law school will probably put me at a significant disadvantage in several classes.
In a way, HBWT was about sacrifices, about, as BB King would say, “paying the cost to be the boss.” I sacrificed a well-paying job, a year of my life, and the comfort of a steady paycheck in a familiar culture in order to make the dream happen. Those bills have already been paid, and now the spectre of suffering through exams while underprepared is the final payment remaining.
So looking back, I guess the obvious question is “was it all worth it?” Knowing what I know now, knowing how things would turn out with Savigny, how we would toil through a difficult year in Bois-Guillaume, with all the stresses of a team wracked by internal turmoil, and how my first semester of grad school would become essentially a write-off, all because I just wanted to get paid to play baseball… would I do it again?
You’re goddamn right I would.