Today, I feel strangely at ease and quite happy. It's been a while.

Despite having woken up at 2:22 a.m. and consequently not slept since, as well as taking that first AP exam in my life this morning for four hours, I feel quite happy. And honestly, I was not very terrified about the impending doom of the AP World History exam, even though I didn't study much. And I'll tell you--I'm not exactly a genius at AP World, either. But I think I can manage. But it was still so very strange that I was somehow so calm about it while I saw people madly studying the night before, and the morning of the exam.

It was all so wondrous to me--the juxtaposition and irony this morning. Here I was, in a state of unshaken calm, amidst the hoopla of fellow peers scurrying and bustling frantically (or spastically) swinging AP review books this way and that. (I brought my two AP World review books--err, one was a Spark Notes practice test book, whereas the other was a Kaplan review) It was as if I were a boulder under a waterfall, surrounded by the intensity of the crashing and all-encompassing water. Of course, I did feel a twinge of terror, no--apprehension, when I finally flipped open the booklet and stared at the first question.

But those feelings subsided after a while as my consciousness receded back to testing-mode, where concentration is at the max and little else matters (besides rocking the test). The essays came. I continued writing perhaps ten, fifteen minutes even after the proctor had advised us to move on to the other two essays (compare & contrast, change over time--can't remember which preceded the other). I felt a bit content with my DBQ, but as for the rest of the essays--I had no idea what point I was trying to make. I intermittently sat at the desk, staring at the essay and the jumble of words I had scrawled across the page for perhaps five minutes at a time. In the end, even though I desperately wracked my brains for all that it could provide, nothing would give. I didn't even finish a full page for either of the last two essays. But I didn't feel terrified. Still as calm as the morning.

The afternoon crawled by. By the time it was after school, I was hastily interviewing one of the most charming English teachers I've ever met. I wish she were my teacher instead. That aside, newspaper marks the remainder of the day. That is another story that I shall tell in the next post.