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fearlesstempReached epic levels of crankiness this evening. I could tell because all day I was short with anyone who talked to me, and then tonight I found myself standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring into space, shoulders slumped oh-so-dramatically, as if wearing the Weight of the World on my back when, in fact, it is simply the weight of the GREs and a variety of self-created stressors.
To backtrack:
Have I mentioned that we're having thirty people at our house for Thanksgiving? Because we are. Okay, so really it's 29, but I know an extra person will slip in somewhere. Every weekend in November is devoted to making the house presentable, and my duties for today were two: (1) raking the leaves, and (2) clearing out the basement. (1) was awful wretched bad – I hate hate hate raking. It's so boring and strenuous and, as much or more than anything, futile, because at any point the wind can gust up and send the leaves flying, rendering everything you've done kind of pointless.
And it was really really cold!
Task (2) was not nearly as bad as feared, in large part because clearing out the basement involved discovering boxes of things I haven't looked at since we moved into the house when I was in high school. One item found: a black notebook from when I was seventeen, which had the following on the second page, reproduced here only slightly edited – I cut the second paragraph, which was boring, but left everything in the first paragraph exactly as it was in my own notebook, questionable quotation marks and all:
So. Today daddy dearest threw an idea out at me – "The Way I See It" by Jessica MyLastName. "A Collection of Essays," I responded. Why not, right? As dad was so eager to point out, I have a lot of free time over the summer – what with my best friend going away to school in a little over a week, my only boyfriend living in my mind, and Price Chopper ignoring my application for a summer job. The only other commitments I have are to my soap operas, and my father's office, which is where I'm sitting as I write this.
What happened next? From what appears on later pages, I took some annoying phone calls and wrote a letter to Oprah, among other things.
Ah, my Seventeen Self! So similar to the Self of Today, except the Self of Today can no longer do math. The GREs are kicking my butt, people, in a scary way. I forgot how to get the area of a triangle! More egregious: I was honestly surprised that they expected me to remember this! I haven't had to find the area of a triangle since, I don't know...high school? I took calculus my freshman year of college and did pretty well, but I can't remember triangles being involved in that. Lots of wavy lines, sure, and derivatives, but triangles? Nope!
Other things I'd completely forgotten: PEMDAS, how to deal with exponents, how to solve two equations at once, some parts of long division.
In other words, I forgot lots of stuff! Almost everything! I spent a bunch of yesterday and today going over things and re-testing and I'm making some progress, but it's slooow and infinitesimal. It's a good thing I started reviewing five days before the test! Way to give myself plenty of time to limit the stressage. Yay me.
I also discovered that while I'm considerably better at the verbal than the math, I'm still not all that, with a particular not-all-thattiness appearing in the reading comprehension section. That surprised me at first, but thinking about it later? There are so very many things I read and just don't get. Such as Faulkner.
Speaking of books: Another stressor today was my application to the bookstore. I want this job so bad I can feel it in my bones, so bad that I have several drafts of possible application questions already written and competing to make it onto the actual application. I want this job so bad that it's hard for me not to desperately scrawl PLEASE HIRE ME, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE across the application in red marker.
The weird thing is that I'm not sure exactly why I want the job so much – I'm not exactly rolling in the dough, sure, and a part-time job would help with that, but I'm getting by and busy enough already that it would jam up my schedule until January. After that, my temp assignment runs out and I could just work at the bookstore, I guess, but the pay wouldn't be great and, you know, retail. I've done retail before – it made me doubt humanity's worth. After the most recent election, could I really handle that?
I'm just so sick of temping. I don't know. We'll see!
Tomorrow I tutor R again. May talk about that tomorrow (and B. Jones, which I saw on Friday!) if I have time to post at work; right now it's almost 1AM, a full hour and a half after I told myself I'd absolutely, positively be asleep so that I can get up and exercise before work tomorrow. Doubt that will happen now. Probably wouldn't have happened even if I had gone to bed earlier; there are few things that will get me out of bed early. Exercising isn't one of them.
And now, to bed!
To backtrack:
Have I mentioned that we're having thirty people at our house for Thanksgiving? Because we are. Okay, so really it's 29, but I know an extra person will slip in somewhere. Every weekend in November is devoted to making the house presentable, and my duties for today were two: (1) raking the leaves, and (2) clearing out the basement. (1) was awful wretched bad – I hate hate hate raking. It's so boring and strenuous and, as much or more than anything, futile, because at any point the wind can gust up and send the leaves flying, rendering everything you've done kind of pointless.
And it was really really cold!
Task (2) was not nearly as bad as feared, in large part because clearing out the basement involved discovering boxes of things I haven't looked at since we moved into the house when I was in high school. One item found: a black notebook from when I was seventeen, which had the following on the second page, reproduced here only slightly edited – I cut the second paragraph, which was boring, but left everything in the first paragraph exactly as it was in my own notebook, questionable quotation marks and all:
So. Today daddy dearest threw an idea out at me – "The Way I See It" by Jessica MyLastName. "A Collection of Essays," I responded. Why not, right? As dad was so eager to point out, I have a lot of free time over the summer – what with my best friend going away to school in a little over a week, my only boyfriend living in my mind, and Price Chopper ignoring my application for a summer job. The only other commitments I have are to my soap operas, and my father's office, which is where I'm sitting as I write this.
What happened next? From what appears on later pages, I took some annoying phone calls and wrote a letter to Oprah, among other things.
Ah, my Seventeen Self! So similar to the Self of Today, except the Self of Today can no longer do math. The GREs are kicking my butt, people, in a scary way. I forgot how to get the area of a triangle! More egregious: I was honestly surprised that they expected me to remember this! I haven't had to find the area of a triangle since, I don't know...high school? I took calculus my freshman year of college and did pretty well, but I can't remember triangles being involved in that. Lots of wavy lines, sure, and derivatives, but triangles? Nope!
Other things I'd completely forgotten: PEMDAS, how to deal with exponents, how to solve two equations at once, some parts of long division.
In other words, I forgot lots of stuff! Almost everything! I spent a bunch of yesterday and today going over things and re-testing and I'm making some progress, but it's slooow and infinitesimal. It's a good thing I started reviewing five days before the test! Way to give myself plenty of time to limit the stressage. Yay me.
I also discovered that while I'm considerably better at the verbal than the math, I'm still not all that, with a particular not-all-thattiness appearing in the reading comprehension section. That surprised me at first, but thinking about it later? There are so very many things I read and just don't get. Such as Faulkner.
Speaking of books: Another stressor today was my application to the bookstore. I want this job so bad I can feel it in my bones, so bad that I have several drafts of possible application questions already written and competing to make it onto the actual application. I want this job so bad that it's hard for me not to desperately scrawl PLEASE HIRE ME, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE across the application in red marker.
The weird thing is that I'm not sure exactly why I want the job so much – I'm not exactly rolling in the dough, sure, and a part-time job would help with that, but I'm getting by and busy enough already that it would jam up my schedule until January. After that, my temp assignment runs out and I could just work at the bookstore, I guess, but the pay wouldn't be great and, you know, retail. I've done retail before – it made me doubt humanity's worth. After the most recent election, could I really handle that?
I'm just so sick of temping. I don't know. We'll see!
Tomorrow I tutor R again. May talk about that tomorrow (and B. Jones, which I saw on Friday!) if I have time to post at work; right now it's almost 1AM, a full hour and a half after I told myself I'd absolutely, positively be asleep so that I can get up and exercise before work tomorrow. Doubt that will happen now. Probably wouldn't have happened even if I had gone to bed earlier; there are few things that will get me out of bed early. Exercising isn't one of them.
And now, to bed!
