One thing I regularly notice about law students (everyone notices this, I suppose) is their love to rip apart other people’s arguments. And not in the average way you’d expect someone to try and convince you that you’re wrong, based on emotional reflex and rhetoric. Instead, law students will pick at the very foundations of your argument until you’ve forgotten what you were originally talking about, why you have an opinion at all, or how you managed to urinate in your pants without feeling it. Main points get lost in the vomit of verbs and tumult of insults and you’re left feeling as though someone has violated you with the end of a baseball bat. A baseball bat with the incredulous words “And you got into law school?” carved into the splintering wood.

I’m one of those people who becomes so personally attached to her point of view that if someone tries to contradict me, I will vehemently defend myself. A week ago, I felt the urgent need to defend my point of view against two school friends who told me that emigrants who leave their home countries because of politics or corruption are less morally advanced than those who remain in the country to better the situation there for the rest of the population. My parents immigrated to Canada in the 1970s because of the state of affairs in the Philippines and to give their family a better life. I felt that this was a pretty moral decision on the part of my parents, who left everything and everyone they knew to start a new life for their children. Especially since my parents were relatively well off in the Philippines and essentially lost everything they built when they left; they had to give up their jobs, their years of education were not recognized in Canada, and they cut off their personal connections to be the first in their families to leave.

And so maybe I took my school friends’ statements a little more to heart than a regular person would have. I argued that my parents gave up a lot to leave their home country and was met with my friends’ rebuttal that saving one’s family is a “base instinct” which is “too primitive” to be considered a moral decision. They attacked my point of view, my lack of flow in argument, and my inability to properly communicate my position. I felt ashamed that I, a student of law, could not formulate my thoughts and experiences well enough to have my peers understand and agree with me.

Tonight was another debate, this time regarding the tenets of feminism. Arguing with three males who are telling you men never wanted to oppress women can leave you pretty exhausted, especially when you didn’t even want to argue in the first place.

Hanging out with law students is like placing yourself in front of a black hole of big words and pushful voices. You find yourself sucked into a vacuum of fruitless argument that you can’t pull yourself out of. It’s like that well in The Ring with the torn-off nails embedded along the walls and the jet black Japanese ghoul hair that wraps around you, dragging you to the bottom where you will join the corpses of law students past who have dared to argue their point of view and perished.