Gift from afar

A few weeks ago, I arrived home from work and checked my mailbox (the one where you have to physically open) and to my surprise, tucked in there was a pink package sent to me from Korea.  Finding this was like the sliver of sunshine that comes through the clouds after a storm... I had had a tough week preparing for the miserable final.

I was so giddy with excitement that my friend from halfway around the world kept me in mind enough to send me a package.  So you'd think I'd ripped open the thing as soon as I got inside my home.  No such thing.  I left it sitting on the table for a solid week, willing myself to wait until after the test to open it, so I could really savor the enjoyment of the present.

That was the plan anyway... however, as it turned out, after the test I felt so miserable and self-loathing that I felt I deserved no present from afar.  A person who just failed a final exam doesn't deserve to open any presents.  It took another day of the gift staring me down and also thinking that my friend's thoughts would be for naught if I kept it unopened before me to actually open it.

 The contents:  A lovely note intricately folded, cellphone charms, & BB cream samples (because I'm vain).

The cellphone charms were supposed to signify my SO and me.  Because the package was jiggled around a lot in transit, and also because I wanted to guess what was in it, the charms were slightly askew.  When my SO finally opened it, I took the girl charm and inspected it.  It had a magnet on one side of the charm. The conversation that ensued went something like this:

Me: "What's the magnet for?"
Him: "Refrigerator?"
Me: sticking it on the fridge for show.... "No.... It doesn't look right.  I wonder what it's for..."
Him: "Koreans.... I don't know how it works, dear."

We left it at that, and it wasn't until a full 10 minutes later when I got to cleaning up the packaging that I actually held the two charms together.  Of course the magnets on each charm stuck to each other that I had my brilliant epiphany...

Me: "Ohhhhhhhh... DURH  they're supposed to stick to each other, just like you're supposed to stick to me!"
Him: ROFL

Then....

Me: "But why are they scratching their heads?"
Him: "..."

Another 10 minutes....

Me: "Ohhhhhhhhhhh.... they make the heart shape with their hands!  DURRHH!!!!!"
Him: ROFL

The girl's dress has rhinestones on it - so adorable!

My SO and I, we are special people, special indeed.  Thanks to my friend for the love and the laughs.

Bitched-slapped

Have you ever been slapped by a random stranger, who immediately ran away after the assault, leaving you with a painful searing sting not only on your physical being, but also in your inner-core being?  You're left feeling like: "WTF?!  Who would do that to me?  What did I do to deserve such uncouth malice?"  This was the general feeling that invaded my soul as I left the lecture hall after turning in my first real exam of my graduate school career, like I was just slapped in the face by this test.

The lead professor began by saying that the test was unusually long, there were no "trick" questions, and there was a 3-hour limit.  Fine.  Deep breath.  I'll be okay.  I studied hard all week long.  I drew diagrams and know the processes/mechanisms.  I made sure to to study mutations that can perturb the normalcy of the system, because I predicted that since the course is Molecular Biology and Genomics, the cell and its perturbations will come up at some point.  I practiced with previous years' exams.  I was prepared.  Even before going into the exam, I was trying to calm a fellow classmate.  "You'll be fine," I told her.  "We can't know everything, but we know enough."  I had no intention of lying to her (or to myself), but in the end, I did tell lies, because when the 3-hour limit was up, not only did I not know "enough," I was not "fine."

My calm and collected self wilted into a heap of shakiness and nausea.  The exam was 18 pages long, all short answers, all required multiple steps of thinking to arrive at the answer.  That is, if you understood the question to begin with.  On my first pass, I could answered maybe three questions at most.  I kept cycling through the exam, each time hoping that some new information would surface into my brain and help me arrive at an answer - ANY answer.  No such luck.  At the 2-hour mark, panic set in.  No longer did I care if the answer I put down was the right one, I just wrote words.  And yet, for some questions, even that criteria was too high - I had no idea what words can be put down.  I have never not finished a test before, until today.

It is true that afterwards, my classmates reconvened and it seemed that my reaction was shared amongst everyone else, i.e. we all felt like the exam was on crack hooked on morphine. A lot of people also admitted to not finishing the test.  Everyone felt it was way too extensive to be finished in three hours.  Practice tests were moot, as our test bore no resemblance to any previous tests.  Perhaps they (the group of professors for this course) thought that since we had done so much better than previous years on Problem Sets (i.e. homework) that the test would need to be scaled up in difficulty to match our abilities?  Or more cynically, they all went on a manic rampage with an evil desire to feel our pain of being bitched-slapped? 

Whatever the cause may be, I can't erase this feeling of inadequacy.  It is one story to tell if you didn't study and failed, and it is entirely a different novel when you studied (hard) and failed.  For the former, you failed because you didn't study.  In the latter, you studied and still failed... so where does that leave me?  The test won't be handed back for at least another week, and it will be graded on a curve... so I have a whole week to ponder the misery of retaking this course again next year.

What a way to end the first real course with a bang. Bang.