My laptop stabbed me in the back—it took so long to figure things out and fix them that I didn’t have enough time for a long soak in the hot tub tonight. Man, life is poopy sometimes… I’ll write about it tomorrow.
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Okay, even though I usually write this stuff when it happens, I was a tad frustrated and also wanted to preserve a little more sleep that night if at all possible. It didn’t work out like I wanted.
I got into bed early enough that I could pass out for six hours. There was just one problem: I couldn’t sleep. I rolled around for a while, then turned on the light and ended up finishing the most recent Stephen King novel (“Cell”) in less than an hour. I wouldn’t have read for that long, but you know when you get towards the end of a book and you can’t stop reading because you just want to finish it off and see what happens? Yeah, me too.
So now I was down to five hours of sleep, but I was still tossing and turning. I eventually got up, surfed the Internet for a while, then crawled back under the covers for a little more than four hours by the time my alarm went off. So much for getting to bed early…
I had plenty of time to get dressed and head downstairs to The Liffey (an Irish pub that’s attached to the hotel—I put the tab on my hotel bill) to eat a nice, hot breakfast. I suppose I could have done a little more cramming that morning or skimmed through a book or something, but I figured if I didn’t know the material by then, tough noogies for me. When I was done eating, I headed out into the cold fully loaded:
Heavy jacket and stocking cap. Laptop. Black pens. Backpack with study materials that I didn’t use. A 6? Subway sub. A bottle of Mountain Dew. A bottle of Gatorade. An energy bar. A bad attitude. I was ready to rumble. That was the plan, anyway…
I got to RiverCentre pretty early for registration, got my nifty name badge, checked my bag and coat at the desk and decided to head into the testing area right away. Hey, it’s not like I was going to accomplish anything by sitting around outside. So I found my seat, plugged in my laptop and got it running (Yaaaaay!), then put on some headphones, crank up the tunes and play Solitaire while I waited.
There were proctors wandering around the room already and one of them stopped to ask me if I was listening to music to relax—when I said I was, she decided that was a really good idea. And then another proctor came over and told me I wasn’t allowed to run any program on my computer aside from SofTest, the one we use for testing. The song playing at that moment? “Cruel”, by Tori Amos. Boy, ain’t that the truth…
Oh, and as a side note, I found out that RiverCentre also had a wireless system that didn’t require a password. I just connected to the network, then took a peek at my e-mail before “Cruel” proctor told me to shut it down. Grumble grumble grumble…
Eventually, it was time for the instructions for the morning session. “Here’s what to do during the MPT [Multistate Performance Test or something] section of the test: don’t talk, don’t leave the testing area screaming like a crazed lunatic and don’t keep writing when I call “Time” or we’ll tear up your essay and use it for toilet paper (and still submit it if you really want us to).” Same old, same old, really… When she said “Go,” I went.
This time around, I felt like I knew what I was doing, like I knew what I was supposed to write and how I was supposed to write it. (I’ll feel much better if that was how I was supposed to write it, but that’s what makes waiting until the middle of April to get the test results so much fun!) Sadly, I still didn’t finish the essay, but I got closer and I’m happier with the results.
Same thing with the other two essays in the morning: it felt like I knew the subjects, I was writing decent material and explained what I was writing–I probably missed a couple things here and there, but that’s what partial credit is for, baby! If you get a bunch of “sorta-not-really-crappy” answers, you’ll probably get a higher score than if you write two really good answers and get no credit on the others. So overall, I think the morning session went better than the last two times.
After I left the room to pick up my bag with lunch ‘n’ stuff in it, I saw the back of a former classmate, so I snuck up behind him and flicked his ear. At least that was the plan… I was trying to barely catch the edge and completely missed. I didn’t try to be as careful for the second swing and definitely caught his attention that time. We got to say “Hi”, I found out he watches lots of reality TV, he found out that he missed my appearance on reality TV… he already had plans for lunch, but we decided to grab some food together on Wednesday so he could get some juicy details.
It was nice and sunny outside during lunch, but also really frickin’ cold (remember, we’re talking about Minnesota in February here…), so I found a nice, fairly secluded spot in the building that had some decent rays shining in and chowed down on my sandwich and other dining materials. When I got up to throw away my trash, I was confronted by two people, one of whom was a second former classmate. The first girl was asking if I played on her Frisbee team (she never specified whether it was ultimate frisbee or frisbee golf, but given that I don’t think I’ve played either of those more than once or twice, it didn’t really matter). The classmate then clarified that I was a famous TV star! She didn’t seem entirely convinced and mentioned Frisbee again, but I guess part of my being famous is that people recognize my face, but don’t have the slightest idea who I am. Woo hoo!
