Under Pressure...Think I'm Going Crazy

Greetings and welcome back to The Un-Zone, the only known site on the Internet devoted to all things related to Un. If you haven't guessed by now, this means stuff that I find interesting that is going on in my so called life.
It's that time of the year when the average law school student is abuzz and being active. No, I am not talking about the law school weekend. I'm not talking about the holidays. No, I am talking about the season of madness. The brief two-week period that comes twice a year when law school students are actually reading the textbooks and statute books. It is the Law School Finals period.
I've just begun my journey down the pathway to perdition today. Nothing like a lovely closed-book final over International Trade Law (ITL), specifically over GATT. The textbook is thick, densely packed with a mind-bursting amount of information, and at times, becomes incomprehensible due to the overload of three letter acronyms. There is a certain amount of information you can pack into a sentence before the mind starts to overheat and burst into flames. This treatise on GATT and any federal statute will do this to you. Which reminds me, I have a Federal Income Taxation final on Monday. The only consolation I can give myself (and to put this into proper perspective), is that it can't be as bad as the Federal Income Taxation final. Which will involve slogging though the Internal Revenue Code. If you've taken a glance at the statute, you will know what I am talking about. Believe me, the 1040 forms aren't that bad. The freaking Internal Revenue Code it is based upon is worse, much worse. This isn't much of a consolation. Not at all. Forget it.
Anyways, the ITL final, as I said earlier, was a real doozy. The first problem was not that hard. It was straight forward, though very open ended. You could have written an entire book about one of the questions (multiple parts to every problem) in the first problem. Interestingly enough (note the sarcasm coming), people have written books about the advantages and disadvantages of free trade agreements with the Middle East. And I am supposed to give a precise, concise, well-written answer to this question and I have an hour? And this means using proper grammar, or as the professor would like to put it, "Queen's English?" He did, after all, get a British education while in the London School of Economics and I also believe, Oxford University. Which is true.
The second problem just got worse. It was a lovely Article III question involving like products. Are "men's dress shirts" like products with white unisex shirts made of a cotton/polyester blend? You have to go through Article III of GATT, the Japan Alcoholic Beverages test on like products, the rules on product descriptions with the Harmonized Trade Schedule, and a slew of other things. Once you do that, and the HTS doesn't work, you need to go on a different route of analysis involving comparing the subject merchandise and relatively similar items and see if that works. This is, supposed to take an hour, but of course, there is a second part to this problem involving the deep question of what makes a leather belt a leather belt. And of course, that involves another test that depends on some factors that depends on...you get the point. By this time my brain is burning out or just about past well done and going into charred.
The third problem was...well...not fun. Not freaking fun at all. There were very little facts to base an actual detailed calculation and some things just could not be quantified into hard numbers that neatly fit into the Dumping Margin calculation. How much is something like lost profits worth? Or the fluctuation of the Indonesian rupiah compared to a dollar during the year of 2002? Oh, you could add in some stuff about zeroing and the meaning of "relevant" information to the mix and well, that adds to the sheer impossibilty of giving a concise yet detailed answer in an hour.

Queen and David Bowie sum up the experience nicely (sorry for all those Queen fans who know I am taking this song way out of context) with the following excerpts from the song "Under Pressure"

It's the terror of knowing
What this world is about
Watching some good friends
Screaming 'Let me out'
.....
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure
Under pressure
Pressure

Or the following from "Think I'm Going Mad" by The Rolling Stones:

This season that'll pass
Think will be my last
I know my mind's afloat
Sometimes I feel so young and sometimes I feel so old
Yeah you want to see, you want to see all the things
And I'm thinking, they say that your crazy
They say that your insane
I think....and I think I'm going crazy
And I think I'm going mad
You ought to see my shaking hands
I think I've been drinking lots of cups of coffee
I think I've lost my head
I think I should be sacrificed
I think I should be put to rest
Save yourself
And I think I'm going mad
Think I'm going now
Think I'm going crazy

The fun continues on Saturday. Public International Law. Let the good times roll...
It will all be over soon. So soon.
That's all for now.