Panic? Me? Never...

2003-10-11 at 2:04 p.m.

Consider:

1. I have to get three references for the application. However, if one has, say, taken six years' worth of time off between the last time one were teaching kids, and this time, then it can be extremely difficult to find three different people who has seen one working with children to write a recommendation. I have two from Portland here, but I'm having difficulty coming up with a third. The only other person I can even track down, the guy who ran the Math Lab when I tutored there in College, hasn't answered an email. Or two. Or the math department secretary who printed out my email and put it in his mailbox. So now... I'm getting desperate.

2. Andrew, who never, ever, ever cleans up started cleaning up the office (which is mostly my office, since he does all his work on his laptop, which, since we have a wireless network in the house, means he mostly works in front of the television) and dumps a bricked bottle of beer all over my first two pages of my already-filled-out application. They've dried, mostly unsmeared, but still with a slight hoppy aroma probably inappropriate for someone applying to be a high school teacher. (What? What was a bricked bottle of beer doing in the office anyway? Never you mind that, nosy Parker!)

3. I was talking on the phone last night with Becca about Saturday plans. Just as I was telling her I didn't have much planned, I looked down on my (as yet un-beer-spillage) desk, and there in the middle is my admission ticket. To my exam. That I have to take. That I have one chance to take. That's tomorrow morning. If I hadn't looked down right then I most likely would have completely forgotten about this exam and not gone and not been able to apply at all for the next term.

4. So I went to the exam. But before I left I realized: I left my wallet at work last night. Work, which doesn't open til 9. So I don't have a government-issued ID. Unless I dig out my passport which... as it turns out, didn't work either. Apparently, the National Education Services has stricter requirements than the Federal Aviation Administration, even since 9/11. This passport, which has gotten me in and out of the country twice in the past two years, was not enough to get me into the California Basic Educational Standards Test.

Fortunately, they were able to take an oh-so-flattering Poloroid of me and I wrote out some sort of vow that I am who I say I am and promised to send them a photocopy of my ID along with a DNA sample, and I was able to take the test. Which was stupidly easy, by the way. The SAT was harder. We had four hours to take the test, and I was done in an hour and a half. I looked around and most of the people around me were only halfway through. I, of course, did not plan well (shocker) and hadn't eaten or had coffee before the exam, and so after a half hour review of the reading comprehension section (I was fairly confident of the math section, with questions like, "If Melanie is taking a 450 mile road trip and averages 50 miles an hour, how long will she have to drive?"), I had to get out of there or pass out from hunger. As I left about two people looked up at me with horrified expressions, but what was there left for me to do?

Maybe I shouldn't look at it as the Fates not wanting me to actually apply. Instead, I'll look at it as if they just want to make SURE this is what I want to do. Y'know, testing me.

Because I've shown myself to do SO well with remembering about tests SO far.

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