who says caffeine isn't a real drug?
I don�t want to get into it, but I got sidetracked early in the week when someone close to me had a medical emergency, and then it was like dominoes falling and my week ended up unfolding in a way it wasn�t quite supposed to. Consequently, I lost precious time that was to have been devoted to my exam, because, sometimes life happens, and you have to put your priorities first, and, I don�t know about you, but my loved ones always come first, no matter how distracted and sleep-deprived it might make me.
In the end, I pulled almost-all-nighters on Monday night �til 5am, Tuesday night �til 3am, Wednesday night �til 4am, and Thursday night �til 5am. During the two hours I slept on Thursday night (or, rather, I guess, Friday a.m.), I was curled up on my living room couch, with my laptop folded up next to me, my sleep peppered with nightmares. In one dream, I was riding in a car with one of my classmates/study group partners. We were driving over a freeway bridge that looked sort of like a cross between the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and one of the Potomac river bridges in DC, and suddenly the water began getting choppy and turning from a murky sea-water color to a rust color, and then the road in front of us suddenly contained a sharp right-angle turn and began disappearing into the water, and I was yelling �Oh, shit! We�re going under, we�re gonna drown!� and the car began getting submerged.
I awoke all startled and panicked, sat up straight in bed, and took a deep breath and whispered to myself, �Relax, you know more than you think you do. You won�t fail�. I worked straight through until the Friday 5pm deadline. And you know what? Honestly, I don�t feel that bad about most of the exam, I think, BUT� as time ran out, I panicked and got flustered on the very last question. You know why? I freaked out because it included a MATRIX, and you know what? The last time I saw matrix algebra was in high school. Um, yes, that would have been when I was 14. And where were you in 1988?
Aside from that, life isn�t too bad. Seriously. To make myself feel better this weekend, I went to the local farmer�s market on Saturday morning, bought some green Albemarle Pippin apples, and baked an apple crisp with those plus some Granny Smith apples I got the previous weekend up at my favorite orchard. And I took the crisp, hot from the oven, and went over to Cindy�s house along with a pint of vanilla ice cream. And we sat and gossiped, and I listened sympathetically as she moaned about being in Statistics I this fall, which although it seemed hard last year, now seems like a piece of cake in retrospect. (She, too, is back in school, having started her Ph.D. program this year (different subject area, same university). We talked stats, and then, saving the best for last, we gossiped and ate.
