update on finals week

I'm hanging in there.

Today--at 8am--that's EIGHT, in the MORNING, which is anathema to the college theatre student and just a godforsaken time of day in general--I had what I hope will be my hardest final this semester. I didn't study enough of the right material and it was just not a stellar experience.

I stayed up all of last night studying for it, and the consequence was that I knew a lot of the terms but fell asleep on every one of the five essays. I'd wake myself up shortly thereafter to read some gibberish I'd written in a daze... my favorite was about the "magical" post and lintel construction of ancient Egypt.

Post and lintel construction is a butt joint, basically--an architrave. While it's darn cool that post and lintel buildings stay up thanks entirely to compression and tension... it's scarcely "magical."

I spelled it "majical," too. That's how you know I'm tired; my spelling is the first thing to go.

I crossed out "majical" and wrote "magical." I don't know why I continued to describe post and lintel as "magical," but I'm proud that I made a choice and committed to it, even if it was in the haze of a mid-essay nap.

I got a finals care package today, which helps prevent me from kicking myself about making stupid spelling errors on my sleepless exam this morning. It consists of berry tea, cough drops, gummibears, and socks; which is to say that it smells like organic fruit leather. I'll probably give my cough drops to my roommate; she's been feeling under the weather lately.

My dad wrote a note inside, in his wonderful, familiar left-handed scrawl: "We laugh-ha!-at exams."

Give me a couple more days, and I'll probably laugh-ha!-at them, too.