First Finals

It’s all over. The final circle on the scantron sheet was the exclamation point to everything that had happened that week. I released the form into the TA’s hands.

To make any sense of this, I need to go back to the beginning, back to when the pain started…

Going into finals week , I was in a bad place. Novel grading systems and verbose syllabi were joining my frazzled mind, already cluttered with thiol reaction mechanisms and negative feedback loops. I was getting a 63.7% so far in Anatomy. The two hours on Thursday would be two tests, bringing the total up to five. One a traditional final, the other would be on the material we had done since the last test; Endocrine and Autonomic Nervous systems. Autonomic was not exactly a topic I would easily relate to everyday life. Endocrine is basically hormones, and you know all about me and my hormones. Endocrine was the lesser of two evils, but it wasn’t a saint.

The lowest of the five tests would be dropped, and I hoped that it would be old 67.5% test 1. To pull off a B, I would need to miss no more 5 questions (of 40) on either test 4 or the final.

And so for the last week of the semester, I switched it into SuperAzn mode, forsaking all the FPSs and Xboxs and going to the library at night, every night. Lucky for me, the libraries cater to my crowd. The Hicks UG library is open 24 hours a day for the last two weeks of every semester. I would walk over after dinner, stay until the early hours, walk back in a post-apocalyptic ghost campus.

I added to the atmosphere of desperation of my fellow Azns. Our anxiety was audible: pages turning, Rockstars being opened, the marathon yawns that were small naps in and of themselves. Then I did something I never did before. I don’t know if it was too make me alert or just a placebo, but I started drinking coffee.

I stared into the dark reflection as the last bubbles imploded into nothingness. So dark, all I could see was my silhouette. Dark as the 2:00 AM night into which I was to walk.

The Bio test was at 8:00AM, my only morning test. Only, it didn’t feel that way to me. My joints, my bones cried out at me. Louder than even the ancient alarm clock screaming 6:00 at my stubborn eyes.

But by now, thanks to Kemp and nine months of early physics sessions, I don’t feel it. My circadian rhythm no longer follows the sun. It can scream all it wants, but control doesn’t belong to the sun, or the Earth, or Comedy Central’s morning lineup. It’s mine and mine alone; me, a captain steering his ship to the brink of catastrophe with no contingency plan.

It was all a dream. Walking there, getting an 89 in the class, walking back and falling asleep again. Just another bad dream.

My Ochem exam was at 3:20 on Wednesday. Meaning I could stay at Hicks until 3:00AM. Filling my head with glycol synthesis methods and epoxide ring-opening reactions. I continued the process after lunch at the Lily Life Sciences library. I picked a desk in the corner in the far end of the third floor where I could slump on the walls and sleep/cry if the need arose.

Cramming right up until I went downstairs for the test. Much of it was multiple choice, which serves only to heighten my anxiety. Things could turn out very good or very bad. I emerged out onto State amid overcast skies. The formerly white snow in the streets was blackened and messy. Thrown into the dirt and beaten to slush. Like how I felt.

My next test was at 7:00PM on Thursday, meaning I could set a personal best: 4:00AM. Mostly memorization of receptors and hormone actions. I would fall into a pseudoconscious minisleep for several minutes, staring at a knot in the wood of the desk. Then come back with a rush of anxiety-induced epinephrine and study for several highly productive minutes due to high blood glucose concentration. Repeat until unconscious.

The test was in one of the warmly lit and lightly warmed sub-theaters on campus. Or maybe it was my muscarinic receptors. Either way, my perspiring palms stuck to the varnished armrests. The method I’ve developed for these tests so far involved blazing through and getting all the easy questions. Then going through the questions again word by word and making sure they’re right. Then finding the hard ones and second-guessing, griping, and agonizing over them until the time limit expires.

I walked out of the theater, fell to my knees in the snow and cradled my head in my hands as an operatic aria crescendoed above.

I went back to my room where I beat the last level of Max Payne.

2 Responses to “First Finals”

  1. Chris says:

    didnt we go up to gregs room and play guitar hero at one point during that week? i believe not ALL xboxes were turned off, thomas

  2. Larry says:

    how’s your result?

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