Roller Coaster Week

Yesterday was a good day (well, minus all the work I had to do). Today, not so much.

I interviewed with that publication, and it went really, really well. She was impressed with the internship I did last semester, which was with the government, and basically I've secured an internship for next fall before I've tied down the one for this summer. I also ran around campus getting all the paperwork signed to get my study abroad stuff approved, and very very surprisingly, I got it all done in one day. Seriously, given all the bureaucracy I've had to go through to get stuff signed in the past, I was shocked that everything happened so smoothly. I also mailed off my package to the publication abroad I'm trying to intern at, so hopefully I'll hear back from them soon.

Now for today's much crappier turn of events. First of all, I was fasting for a religious holiday today. Secondly, I only got three hours of sleep last night because I was working on my English paper. While both my in-class journalism assignment and my Spanish presentation went well, what most certainly did not go well was my web design exam. Half of the exam involved designing a really basic web page, and it turns out I memorized the wrong coding tags and basically got a ton of points off. And if you know me, you know I generally tend to freak out about all assignments/exams and say I did badly. But really, this time I'm not kidding. It's like with math, if you don't know how to do the problem, you simply don't know. You write in a random number for the answer and then hope for partial credit, which is what my hopes are hinging on.

Of course when I got back to my apartment, I looked up the coding that I messed up, but strangely, I didn't feel too bad. I guess I've finally begun to internalize the whole "hindsight is 20/20. During the exam, I sat there for about an hour just playing with the coding trying to get it to work. I finally decided to turn it in because this wasn't really an essay question that I could b.s. my way through. The thing that bothered me was the split-second look of surprise that passed across my teacher's face when she opened the web page I designed and saw a couple of the components missing. I knew she was disappointed in me, but there was nothing I could do just sitting there staring at the screen.

I guess that shows I've progressed a bit - I was angry of course, but I didn't really know what at. I guess I was angry at myself, but I kept thinking to myself, if I don't know this, I simply don't know it, so sitting there any longer wouldn't have done anything. While I could have studied more, for the last two weeks it's just been so hard to get motivated to do work. It's like I've passed over that mid-semester hump and I've got a pretty good handle on all my classes, it's just a matter of continuing the routine.

Anyways, once I finished looking up the answers I missed, I literally had absolutely no desire to do anything. I thought about doing government reading, but I simply could not get motivated and knew I'd just be staring blankly at the page. I laid down and tried to go to sleep, but that didn't work, despite last night's lack of sleep. I thought about how screwing up this exam might jeopardize my A in this class, but to my surprise, I wasn't as angry as I thought I would be. I mean, yes, I would be really angry at myself if I end up with a B, but I do still have time and there are other assignments worth more, and I don't know how much partial credit I'll be getting for the things I missed on this exam. I realized that grades are really arbitrary when it comes to the real world. This coding that I was tested on, it's all automatic nowadays, so it's not like me not knowing how to change the background color of a web page is going to shut me out of the job market. After all hasn't almost every one of my journalism professors told me that they aren't where they are because of their GPA? Seriously, 20 years from now no one is going to give a crap what arbitrary number supposedly quantified their intelligence. And besides, there is a reason why human beings are not perfect. And am I not a human being?

Okay I so did not mean for this to get that philosophical. What I mean to say is that I think I'm finally realizing that in the grand scheme of things, grades really don't matter as much as I'm telling myself they do.

Anyways, I couldn't sleep, and my stomach was howling at me. I called Mom to ask her when I could eat, and this is what sent me over the edge. She said the fasting is tomorrow, and that I didn't need to even keep it. I couldn't handle it. Not only had I had a terrible afternoon, but I had suffered for nothing! It wasn't for nothing, Mom said. God knew I fasted today and would reward me for it. But still, I couldn't help it and out came the tears. I didn't even know why; it wasn't because of the exam. I think I was just overwhelmed. I think Mom got kind of freaked out because I've never really reacted like that, although I know it wasn't the exhaustion but the food deprivation that triggered the waterworks. Needless to say I got off the phone and made myself a meal, and finally found myself in a normal enough state of mind to talk to my roomies again. (I had shut myself in my bedroom since returning from the exam earlier this afternoon). And then Sumegha gave me a big hug and I felt a lot better (I'm sure the teriyaki noodles I made helped too).

And now I just spent the past half hour catching the second-half of that awful chick lit series Gossip Girl. Oh God the wonders that terrible television does to your mood. So now I'm feeling better and figure my life is not over because I basically bombed an exam.