Surprise!

I find myself sometimes amused by the things we choose to let get under our skins and the things we let distract us.

I let Chemistry totally get to me last night. I had my final tutoring session before the exam, and we went over the exam from last year, and I was totally lost. Utterly, totally lost and I let myself get overwhelmed and I started to cry. I started to think about all the time and energy I'd invested into the class, and into the tutoring, and about the things I'd had to stop doing in order to go to these fucking tutoring sessions, and how would I get into UPenn vet school if I failed chemistry, and what would my mother's new husband, the chemistry professor, think of my abject failure at his subject. Everything circled around me as I circled the toilet bowl of mental stability.

I didn't go to my next class. I instead ran down the hill and called booksymagnifico, tears streaming down my face, hyperventilating and probably close to vomiting. I sat in freezing cold Riverside Park and he talked me down from who knows where. I felt slightly better, though furious at myself for letting myself fall apart. I took a taxi home and talked to my roommate Dan, while I ate fig newtons.

I'm going over my notes from class and tutoring and everything else this morning. I couldn't handle any more last night. It's frustrating too because feeling Chem-burned on Sunday night as well didn't make me very active in studying for the French exam i had yesterday.

All I can think about is fresh mozzarella cheese. I could apply my new chemical knowledge and talk about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and attempt to make a formula for the lack of control that I feel. Delta-P times Delta-X, right? How does kissing tie in?

Also, it's Halloween and I'm not really sure what's going on, because the pre-existing five plans that were hypothesized seem to have fallen flat and so I might go to Jersey City with edgehopper. As a native New Yorker, I fear Jersey, but maybe the weirdoes from Jersey will be heading into the city tonight and leave Jersey free and clear.

I should go read over my notes. At noon today, this will all be over. I'm just not sure what I mean by "over" or what it will really apply to.

Practical Application

Do you ever find that, when one aspect of your life feels horribly out of control, you demand other aspects of your life to be more stable and sure?

I feel sort of guilty for spazzing this morning like that. I even bought a spookie to try and compensate [spooky cookie]. Ah well.

I do finally feel like celebrating Halloween now that my exam is over. Because it feels SOOOO good. Amazingly, I didn't leave this exam feeling like I'd failed.

Was it hard? Sure, yes. It was very hard. I went through the whole exam, systematically, and triaged the problems I saw. If I knew the formula that would relate to the problem, I wrote it down. If I saw the answer right away, I wrote that down too. I probably spent a good 30 minutes just doing that and going through the equations on the back of the exam and assigning them to the various principles and processes.

In typical sneaky fashion, 9/10ths of the equations were not even necessary for any of the problems. Assmonkies.

But overall, I felt like, after proper thought and deliberation, I knew what equation to apply. And, when I computed my answers, they were actually options in the multiple choice. You have NO idea how exciting this was to me. Last exam, nearly none of the answers I got for various problems were listed as choices at all.

It doesn't help either that my professor often asks for the "closest answer" so you won't actually get something that's listed. It's one of his more obnoxious characteristics.

I am relatively sure that I got at least a 15 out of 24. When I had 15 minutes left, I'd only left 4 problems blank. When I had 5 minutes left, there were just two problems that I had NO idea how to do (photons of light measured in nanometers? erg? that is, erg, the sound, and not the unit of measurement). So those problems, in my last five minutes, I made educated guesses about.


...So I feel really good now. I don't know if its the slow, comfortable numb of blinding insanity, the adrenaline of being finished, or the confidence in my knowledge, but I think, at this point, that I'm comfortable with any of the above or a combination of sorts.