Slow It Down

Adorable snail photo by Terri...

It was way too hot yesterday. I didn't get the brunt of it, sitting in my nice air-conditioned office as I was. Poor Terri and the kitties just melted at home in the oven of our apartment. I had even brought home an extra fan, and still at 10 pm we were all panting (literally... little furry kitty sides heaving in and out rapidly... so sad).

I did badly on my test. The fact that most people did badly, and felt that this test was extra hard, does little to ease my good-girl heartache and shame about doing not-so-great on the test. The teacher says, "Don't worry about it -- everyone did badly for some reason, and the grade will be curved." I still feel bad. I should have studied harder... but I felt prepared, I felt okay about it. For some reason, the facts in my brain did not line up with the questions posed on the test. I feel kind of awful about it. I'm going to try to get over it because I have a massive final to study for now, but it's very hard on my sensitive good-student heart to have such a failure. Ugh.

Oh well.

I have decided to implement a new measure of success (timely, no?) in my life. This is not a new idea: rather than measure my success by external events or facts, I'm going to measure 'success' by how peaceful and 'OK' I feel. If I feel okay about things, then it doesn't matter what my house looks like or what my grades are (to a certain extent... one must have some standards).

So the fact that I don't feel peaceful (at all) about my test grade is a signal to me to slow things down a little. I thought I was handling things okay, but the fact that everything fell out of my head tells me that it's a little too full. I have a little less than two weeks to study for my final. I'm going to concentrate on studying (and keep up on work and my little family), and let everything else sort of slide until I'm done with this class. I really want to do well on the final so I'll create a space for myself to do that.

I hope the heat eases a little in the next few days. It's just too hot to think.