Send In Your Skeletons; Sing As Their Bones Go Marching In Again · 6:35pm Jun 10th, 2023
In what might be the most hilariously on-brand move on my part, I am currently facing a lot of hardships because I was too stupid to be stupid. I was too good at studying, and now I'm in deep shit. Classic Aragón, let me tell you.
Anyway! Explanation under the break, but tl;dr: Sorry the next comic is taking so long! I swear I'm still alive, and I'm working on it, but I'm very busy and it's going very slow so you'll have to probably wait until October or so for the next installment of... anything, on my end. I'm really sorry, and I wish I could produce stuff sooner, but it's not exactly my choice. Hope you don't mind!
Aight, so if you're new to these blogs: Hi, I'm Aragón. I'm currently studying to become a judge of law. Gavel and so on, right? Huge deal, lotta responsibility, it'll be super cool when I get there. Here's where shit gets funny, though.
I've talked before about the process to become a judge in Spain, and it is extremely stupid, so I'm not going to repeat myself. The important thing here is that to become a judge, I need to pass three exams. They're like this:
- Exam One: Multiple choice test, 100 questions.
- Exam Two: Oral exam. One hour to recite five lessons.
- Exam Three: Oral exam. One hour to recite five lessons.
Exam One is "easy". This year I took it for the first time in my life, and I expected to pass, and I passed. It required a lot of effort (shit was convoluted!) Out of, like, 4k people, I think? Only the first 1,300 passed. So it wasn't a sure thing, but I was confident enough.
Then came Exam Two. Exam Two is where the sausage is made, it's the rite of passage. I have been preparing for years. And as soon as they published the date in which I would take it, my tutor -- the man who's been mentoring me all these years, whom I see every week to recite my lessons -- called me, and went "Yeah, you're going to fail. This is not your year."
The reason is, he didn't think I had the time to study everything. Luck of the draw went against me, and I was summonned to do the exam super early. On top of that, my grandmother, yknow, passed away somewhere around here, and thus my studying time got cut off. My tutor essentially gave up on me and just went, hey, study enough to do four out of the five lessons they'll ask you, and try again next year, right?
I didn't do that.
Like, I mean. I asked my loved ones for advice here, and the answer was unanimous: if you're going to fail, at least fail while trying to pass, you know? Don't give up before even going to the exam. So i just hunkered down and studied everything. I was like, fuck it. I can do this. I know how this goes. I devised my own studying schedule, and followed it, and went to the exam.
And I passed.
Which is good, it's great, but now I gotta prepare for the third exam. And guess what! My tutor was blatantly not expecting me to pass at all!
Listen I've got no source on this, right, but my tutor -- happy as he was when I told him I passed -- went into a panic immediately. He hadn't been scheduling my studies for me to pass this year. He told me he had, he assured me he had, but turns out he hadn't. So now that I went and passed, he's like. You have three months to study 140 lessons for Exam Three and I don't know if it is physically possible to cram them all in your head in such little time.
And I'm like, wait. I've been paying for your services for years. We knew I was going to take the exam this year and planned accordingly. I thought the next lessons were easy, and that's why we were saving them for the last three months? I thought this was all part of the plan? That I would pass and then take Exam Three?
And he went, okay, I hear you, right, you have a point, we can do this, you can do this. Uh. What do you think about studying 16 hours a day for three months without breaks. Please say you're okay with this.
...So yeah.
if you're thinking "Wait, how did you not notice that you were prepared for the Exam Two but not Exam Three", that's a great question. I made the mistake of trusting my mentor, since he's a recognized figure in his field (everybody knows him for his lessons, he's a Big Deal when it comes to preparing to become a judge), and also he didn't give me the lessons for Exam Three until the very last moment, so I couldn't fucking check if I was ready or not.
(Small sidenote: Every "lesson" is essentially a small disertation on multiple legal topics -- for example, one lesson can be "Theft and robbery: definition, penalty, and special cases" or something like that. Every year, the Supreme Court publishes a list of all the lessons that will be part of the exam, but they only publish the titles. The actual contents, you either buy books and write them yourself, or you pay a mentor to give you the ones they themselves wrote; this is the most popular option, and it's the one I personally follow.
However, mentors are EXTREMELY secretive about the lessons; they won't give you digital copies, only physical, and I'm pretty sure they're copyrighted. This is because they're expensive as shit and they want to avoid piracy. Which means, even though I have access to the title of the lessons in advance, I don't know the content of the exams until my tutor gives me the lessons so I can study them.)
So anyway I am currently studying like a madman cause I went and passed Exam Two, and that wasn't part of the plan. As you can guess, I have mixed feelings about it, and my relationship with my tutor right now is. Interesting. I'm very annoyed. I appreciate the humor of the situation, but holy shit.
That's why I've disappeared these last few months! And why I won't really post much in the coming months. I'm active on my Discord still, you can see me there often, and the next comic is started and it's written in my head, but like. I am only human, and some stuff takes priority. Don't expect much Aragón this year, folks.
But wish me luck! Here's to me passing the next exam, and becoming a judge for real. That'll be a fucking riot.
Now if y'all excuse me, I gotta go back to studying. Ta-ta!
Apologies if I repeat myself or if I don't explain myself properly! I'm very tired and I had to fight to find a moment to write this down -- while I do have a bit of free time every evening, I usually don't have the energy to write. Been wanting to do an update blog for weeks, but only now I found it in myself to do it, so like. Hope I'm not fuckin' undecipherable here.
Studying is hard and I'm busy, is the moral of the story here. Don't study Law, folks. Study something that actually contributes to society.
You've got it! A estudiar se ha dicho! No me falle!
Too smart for your own good, as usual. Good luck and godspeed!
I will never let go of the fact that he told you straight up that you shouldn’t try. Just give up. Go home. Fuck you for studying 3+ years of your life and not having an extra one (1) month to study for it. You’re the hardest worker and smartest one in class? Surpassing the teacher’s pets? Whatever I guess.
If I ever meet this man it’s ON SIGHT.
Bloody hell.
Umm, I might've missed it, but is there any particular reason you can't just defer Exam 3 to the following year instead of burning yourself out trying to pass it this round? Or do you have to pass all three exams consecutively in the same year?
Also, regarding your tutor... I think you're entitled to a piece of his soul for leaving you in this situation.
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You have to pass all three exams consecutively in one year. If I don't take Exam Three this year, I gotta start from scratch next year from Exam One! It's part of why this process is so brutal.
As someone who's had to get a DNI every year I was there, I'm kinda not surprised, but I'm sorry that happened to you.
Best of luck, man!
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Oof. Best of luck to you, mate!
I know I've previously described you as clearly the protagonist of this series we call life, but that is quite frankly the most protagonist thing that could have happened with that setup.
I'm a little worried about Mousse and Numbers, because this arc is clearly you at the height of your plot armor and that tends to be bad for the health of the rest of the cast.
Students, fight for the best!
You have a life outside of pony and you goddamn deserve to become a judge after all this.
... wow. It's not surprising that people do dummy dumb dum dum dum and make everything harder than anything needs to be, but this is one of the worst cases of it that I have heard of thus far. Holy fuck.
Here's hopin' that you somehow manage it. Cheers.
Jfc, this may be the first time ever "suffering fromsuccess" actually applies. Hope things go well, and good luck!
"and I'm pretty sure they're copyrighted"
Spain is a party to the Berne Convention, which means (among other things) once a copyrightable work is created it is already 'copyrighted,' in the sense that it is officially protected by copyright. REGISTERING copyright on the work probably provides advantages for enforcement through infringement suits. (It certainly provides such advantages in the United States, but not only am I not anyone's horsewords IP lawyer, I am EVEN MORE not your lawyer for Spanish copyright law and you never asked me to be anyway.)
In practice, since these lessons are treated with such secretiveness, trade secret law is likely to apply also.
Now if you pass your Exam #3 partly because of this comment, we can both get a good laugh out of this.
¡Dios, qué ganas tengo de quemarle las pelotas a tu tutor!... Bah, al cuerno con él; has pasado la prueba del fuego, también puedes pasar la prueba final. Y no te preocupes por no publicar más blogs ni ficciones poni, lo que todos queremos más que nada es que seas juez. Te deseo lo mejor, máquina. ¡Forward unto dawn!
Best of luck.
Passing the third exam, despite your situation, would be the funniest thing possible for you to do here. You know what you must do.
(Really, though, I offer my heartfelt congratulations and condolences both. Here's hoping you don't explode.)
If you pass the third test, we're gonna add 'The Legendary' to your name.
Hard work pays off?
...one thing for sure: Aragon, you definitely know how to deliver the speech. So, lets hope this talent will not be wasted on petty cases.
Break a leg!!
(Er, y’know, not literally)
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Hard work is footing the entire bill at this point.
Holy crap I do not envy you. I mean, I reckon you can pull it off, but you are going to be physically exhausted for the rest of the year lmao