A Day in the Life of Jessica

3:00am

Gaelic Storm starts ringing in your ears as your alarm goes off. You listen for a minute because it's a good song, then you sigh and shut it off. You literally roll out of bed, and since you have a really cheap dorm mattress this causes your bed to howl in protest. You glance over at your roommate to see if you've woken her up, but she's still asleep. You fumble around in the dark all morning (yes, you get dressed in the dark) and you shove some WheatThins into your mouth for breakfast. You don't have time to do anything with your hair, so you make a face at the mirror and leave.

3:50am

You're noticing that the weather is a little chilly this early, and you wish you'd put on a jacket. You walk your bike to the nearest bike rack and look out over the hillside down into the beautiful lights of Provo City. You admire the moon for a while before heading inside the secret basement entrance. Except that your card won't work today. You bang on the door for five minutes and eventually someone comes to let you in. Glen, your boss, is late again. You sit down in the hall and pull out your Book of Mormon. You have to get to page 200 today and you're only on 173.

5:30am

You still think it's so cool that you have a master key, even if you don't always know which way to turn it. Glen found out that you counted all the trashcans on the first floor yesterday (133) and now he wants you to name them all. You give it a good try for the first 15 or so, then give up.

7:00am

You're in the preschool, and you know the tarantula is watching you. Every time you have to turn your back on it to empty a trashcan you get all shivery and you have to keep saying to yourself, "It is NOT crawling on me. It is NOT crawling on me." When you leave the room you swear you can hear it chuckle menacingly.

8:00am

Finally you've made it to school. You're sitting in Honors English learning about claims, reasons, and assumptions. That kid Jake is sitting behind you again, so when she says to get in groups Jake immediately asks to be in yours. Christie (your Professor) gives you a story about a princess who ditches her Lord of a husband for a vagabond, is abandoned by same vagabond, has to walk home alone through the enchanted forest and almost makes it out before she is devoured by a fire-breathing dragon. It becomes your new favorite fairytale.

9:30am

Sociology. You're sitting by Heather (you think) and try very hard to pay attention to the exceedingly boring instructor talk about Obama getting called a liar yesterday. She starts the slideshow about statistics and you groan because you just got out of Statistics a couple of months ago. For the second time in this class, you fall asleep in your chair. You wake up half an hour later to see that she's still on the same slide: Mean, Median and Mode. You go back to sleep.

11:00am

You use an "open access terminal" to finally get on the ACT website and have them send your scores to BYU, hoping that you'll be able to test out of some classes. You get distracted answering email and the terminal - which has a nine-minute time limit - kicks you off before you can finish everything you need to. Feeling sly and dishonest, you sign right back in for another nine minutes. (You little devil.)

12:15pm

Your Book of Mormon teacher keeps reminding you that your chances of passing this class are 37:1, but he always says it with a smile on his face, and you begin to picture him as a sadistic gremlin. You're taking more notes in this class than any of the others and you keep wondering how there can be so much you didn't know about a book you've been reading your entire life. There's a pause as everyone's scribbling notes and Brother Merrill takes advantage of it by saying, "I hope you're all caught up on your reading. You should be near the end of Mosiah today." You start to panick. You only reached Mosiah last night.

1:00pm

You should be able to head for home about now, but instead you have to go to the computer lab and do a couple assignments. It takes you almost two hours. Then you begin blog-posting just for fun - and to distract yourself from the fact that you're starving because all you've had to eat today are some WheatThins - when you suddenly realize that you have to book it to the testing center because you have an exam that starts at three, and it is now 2:39.

2:40pm

As you start to pack up, you begin to wonder if anyone is going to read any of this stuff anyway.