Thank you, Mr. Cruise

I'd like to give a big shout-out of thanks to Mr. Tom Cruise. Before him, there really wasn't an adequate name to give this stage of studying for the bar exam. Psychopath Stage almost hit the mark, but nothing does it justice like calling it the Tom Cruise Phase. This Phase involves several stages:

1) The Panic Stage: You wake up one morning and are completely panic striken. Not only are you thinking of all the things that can go wrong in the next 2 weeks, but you're obsessing about everything that can possibly happen during the exam itself. You start to hyperventilate while trying to go back to sleep, so you decide to just get up and start studying. You do about 5 minutes of memorization which turns into repeating OHMYGOD I'MNEVERGOINGTOPASS over and over.

2) The 'Are You With Me' Stage: You start to feel foam form at the corners of your mouth. You start to write I'M FREAKED OUT emails to your study pals and find that thankfully, the Tom Cruise Phase has happened to them. You proceed to spend the next few hours feeding the psychosis by swapping "I'm crazier than you are right now" emails with these afflicted study pals.

3) The Mania Stage: Your psychosis is brought home by the fact that your spouse/roommate goes to buy you a bottle of wine at 10:30 am, which you seriously consider cracking open and downing in 2 gulps. But no, MANIA has taken over and you MUSTKEEPSTUDYING, MUSTKEEPSTUDYING.

4) The Stark Raving Mad Stage: This stage jumps in when you receive a sale email from Ann Taylor, and decide to open it because maybe a little shopping will calm you down. You don't care that you are in the middle of outlining an essay, you'll just check it out quick. What then happens can only be described as catastrophic. This little Ann Taylor email completely freezes your computer, so that your essay outline is lost. LOST. IT HAS BEEN RAPTURED AND IS NOT RECOVERABLE. Yes, Ann Taylor is a cheeky bitch for crashing your computer and making you lose your outline. This is the point at which your spouse/roommate may turn to you and say 'you're scaring me'. You may have started jumping on your couch and pounding your fists in the air, although this isn't in the spirit of proving your 'love' isn't just about publicity, it's more along the lines of I'M GOING TO KILL THE BAR EXAMINERS, all the while laughing like you've gone cold-turkey off your meds because it's such a crackpot pseudo-science and is just masking your problems.

5) The Straightjacket Stage: You manage to get yourself slightly back under control enough to keep studying and decide to have a glass of strawberry lemonade instead of wine. You have a few sips and then, in what can only be described as completely debilitating, YOU SPILL THE ENTIRE GLASS OF LEMONADE ALL OVER YOUR STUDY DESK. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You manage to keep your wits long enough to whisk your computer out of the way, but now everything will forevermore reek of strawberry lemonade. Good thing you just bought the 40 quart container of it at Costco, because you'll never again be able to drink it. And another good thing that your study desk is actually the dining room table, which will now forever reek of strawberry lemonade. Thank you, Ikea for making scratch-n-sniff furniture. It's at this point that you start to think that maybe your spouse/roommate has called 911 and that every emergency-vehicle siren you hear is really intended for you and you're going to be taken away, locked up, and highly sedated. And you're not sure that would be such a bad thing.

So THANK YOU, MR. CRUISE. Thanks for giving my lunacy a public face and enabling my spouse/roommate to have such an apt term for this phase of studying!