Don't give me that look; you're not studying either!

Monday

• Wake up (at 3:00am, as usual) with your heart pounding and sweat across your forehead. It takes you a minute to get out of the nightmare and realize that no one is throwing knives at you. At first, you're relieved. Then you remember it's Finals Week.
• Work from 4:00-7:30am. Everyone has a taut grin plastered to their face. Even when no one's talking about it, everyone is thinking about Finals. You try to shove it to the back of your mind and focus on the glitter embedded in the preschool carpet.
• After work, go to the library. You hurry and send off an email to your New Testament teacher that has your final essay attached to it, getting it sent 3 minutes before the deadline. Phew! Then you print off the copies of the midterms your teacher has posted online, hoping they'll help on the comprehensive final you're taking today.
• New Testament study group at 9:00. You get there and pick your way through the crowded room. Even though the study room only fits 11 students, over 30 desperate students have squeezed into spaces on the floor, some of them underneath the table. Some other group has reserved the room at 10:00, so you only have an hour to cram in a semester's worth of notes. Speed reading and scratchy handwriting dominate. You find that your loud voice and tendency to be bossy lead you to take charge the discussion unintentionally. But it's all for the best, since their answers were wrong and they needed to be told so.
• Kicked out of the study room at 10:00, you wander the library looking for a desk to study at. There are no spaces left. You end up hunkered down in an aisle full of Chinese books, waiting for your next study group to start.
• At 11:00, you're in a new room, studying for your Fundamentals of Literary Interpretation final. There are only four people at this study group, but collectively your notes still take up the entire table, an inch and a half thick. You have two hours here, but most of that time is spent in communal groaning. "Explain Barthes's reasoning when he argues that a writerly text is a text before the text is written," one student says, reading off the study guide. A girl at the end of the table interjects, "I don't know, but I'd like to punch him in the face." Everyone agrees loudly. It's the only thing we're sure about.
• After the study group, you head over to the CougarEat, because your mom told you that you had to have a full meal sometime today, and apparently Zesta crackers don't count. You find a table to yourself somehow, and shove food toward your face inattentively while trying to remember if it was Herod the Great or Herod Antipus who ordered infanticide to try to kill Jesus.
• Sometime around 1:50pm, you decide that you're as ready as you're ever going to be to take your New Testament final. You pack up your things and run over to take your test, feeling antsy now. But you run into a very long line, which you follow back for a few hundred yards before you find the end of it. Great. A lady walks past you, calling to the line in general, "Forty-five minutes from this point! Forty-five minutes!"
• Miraculously, it only takes you half an hour to get into the room to take your test. After wandering around looking for an empty seat for five minutes or so, you end up stuck on the end of the table by the door, so you can hear the proctors laughing in the other room. THAT'S not helpful.
• An hour later, you come out of the Testing room and hand your paper over to a proctor, who flings it around as if it's nothing, apparently not realizing that she holds your life and death in her hands. You cringe as you walk to the screen that will show your score. At first you can't look; you close your eyes and mutter one last, desperate prayer. When you open your eyes, you can't believe it. 99%! You gasp in surprise and won't move from that spot, holding onto the fantasy, waiting for the number to change to a low 80s score, like usual. But it doesn't. And soon you're skipping back past the line of students still waiting to take their test, and they look like they want to spit in your happy little face.
• You plan to study when you get home, but you pass out instead. When you wake up, it's almost six o'clock, and you still have to study for your British Literature final tomorrow morning. You find your notes and textbook and get to work.
• Four hours later, you still don't feel ready. Everyone else has gone to bed, and none of them have to be up at 3:00 the next morning. You sigh mournfully, looking down at your pile of materials, then decide you can't pass the final if you don't sleep. You consider going downstairs to your bedroom, but instead you collapse on the living room couch, falling asleep in your clothes.

Tuesday

• You wake up at 3:00, but you feel so lousy that you call your boss and tell him you can't come in to work today. That buys you three more hours' sleep, but you still have some more to study and have to be at school by 8:00 to take your final. You curl back into the cushions of the couch and you're out like a light.
• Your dad wakes you up at 5:55, worried that you've slept through work. You thank him for waking you up 5 minutes before your alarm was supposed to go off, and then growl some more until he leaves you alone. Eventually, you get up and study for another hour.
• It's 7:00. You've got to leave soon, or you'll risk being late for your final, but you haven't done anything but study. You pull your hair up into a sloppy ponytail while you're eating a banana, then rush into the bathroom to brush your teeth and put on some deodorant. You're glad you slept in your clothes, because now you don't have to get dressed. (You hope no one will realize you're wearing the same clothes that you wore yesterday.) You pull on your boots, grab your backpack, and run out the door, completely forgetting your flash drive.
• You get to the classroom early, which gives you some time to breathe and to really get nervous about the exam. It's a strange one, oral instead of written, but in groups, and you're not sure what to expect. Your professor gets there and gets you started. For two hours, you talk about Beowulf and Lanval and Shakespeare and Protestantism and George Herbert and Samuel Johnson and Queen Elizabeth and Jonathon Swift and Lady Montague and Metaphysical Poetry and The Royal Society and on and on and on until you think you're going to self-combust.  But the test ends, and you're allowed to leave. Even though you don't get your score immediately, you feel like you did your best and you're just SOOO glad to have that test over with.
• You find a free space on campus with an outlet, and you plug in your laptop. Two finals down, four to go. You want to take your biology final today, so you pull up the internet to start studying. But before you can start thinking about phytochemicals, you decide to visit your blog. Once there, your fingers hit the keys and you start spewing out words, a fountain of letters and phrases. It lets your stress fly away, people like to read it, and it keeps you from studying for a while. But soon, you've run out of things to say, and you know you've got to put that rubbed-raw nose of yours back to the grindstone.
• Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.