Oh boy. No matter how much you read about how this test, nothing really prepares you for taking it. That is except the practice test. I woke up at 7 am this past Sunday morning, as usual. It's funny to think how much I love to sleep and how late I used to sleep before the word j-o-b entered my life. I recently recounted my high school habits to a friend: wake up at 7 to be at school at 7 thirty, no breakfast, skip lunch, eat once school ended, usually around 3, run around from place to place, and go to bed between 1 and 2 am. And I was never really tired! Or sick! But now I am an old lady that has to eat breakfast or I shrivel up and I fall asleep before The Colbert Report even comes on (don't worry, that's what Hulu is for).
After ten minutes of lying awake and one attempt to adjust the blinds (which I am convinced my sleep-til-noon-no-matter-what boyfriend moved) I couldn't go on. Up and Adam, that's the way. I was struck, for the first time since we moved to this funny little apartment complex, to visit the apartment gym. I guess that Wii Fit was pretty strict with me that morning. This, of course was preceded by frantic decisions about what I would wear and eat in preparation. Egg whites on toast, my favorite hot breakfast, seemed an obvious choice. I had recently read the side oof one of those huge cans of protein powder. It was very convincing. I like to put the egs right on the "toast" (I just stick it in the oven for two minutes on warm) and eat it without a plate.
I tried on many outfits for my big gym premier. I settled on leggings, a wrinkled brown track jacket with Oxford embroidered on the front, and an old, bright orange racer back from Old Navy. I haven't shopped at Old Navy since my no-breakfast no-sleep regime, so I'm not joking when I ay that it was old. And it had a considerable toothpaste stain down the front. I stood grumpily at the mirror considering the light white stain that appeared three or four times in a neat line from my chest to my belly. I rubbed some water over it so I had massive water stains with little white centers. Finally, I zipped the track jacket over top of the racerback so that I could only see a litte orange at the top. Clearly I was intent on avoiding my actual preplanned morning activity, the GRE Literature practice exam.
I did like 18 minutes on the elliptical at the gym; couldn't make it to 20. I'm sure that I spent more time getting ready to go than I did actually there, but that's just the way it rolls. I wheezed up the stairs and came back to the apartment to find it waiting for me: the ETS practice test. I printed it out at work on Friday because no one was in the office, all 90 pages of it. I just stood at the printer and smiled when the admin walked by and no one knows the difference. Apparently ETS has only released one practice test in the past 10 year so I knew that I had to make this one count. I rummaged around for a pencil, sat down, and set the timer on my iphone.
Question one was about Don Quixote; something, something windmills, not a big deal. In fact the first half of the test didn't seem bad until I realized that I'd calculated the wrong pace. There are only 60 minutes in an hour, not 100. So then I was behind schedule, not ahead. Rapidly becoming more frustrated I raced through the rest of the test. I was just bubbling in the last question when Marimba rang on my phone (not that I answered them all, but I did get to the end). I wasn't feeling bad until I realized that Question 225 wasn't the last question and I'd missed the five easy Paradise Lost questions on the next page. Then I was pissed.
I sat down to grade the test. It was actually kind of amazing because I got the instant answer to the "How did I do?" question. I guess that I've never taken a practice test before... The answer was not so gratifying. I'd made a lot of educated guesses. And a lot of them were wrong. Not terribly wrong, but wrong enough to be wrong. That's how scantrons work. I felt awful - how could this be? I'd taken lots of extra literature classes at school and I'm always reading something. And then it hit me how much there was to learn.
I went to a feedback session at the end of my last semester of college to report on my thoughts about the English major. I had a lot of positive things to say about it It was only really in my final year that I began to realize how much I didn't know. I never took a course on Romantic poetry, or the Gothic novel. There were big gaps in my knowledge time line.
I spent the rest of the day online reading about studying for this monster-test (well after a three-hour depression nap). It turns out that this seems to happen to everyone. No one has ead the entire 'canon' by the time they're 22, there just isn't time. Apparently it is, despite my natural instincts, a test you can study for. So I went out on my lunch break this week and bought two packages on big index cards. I carefully wrote "Daniel Defoe" on the front of one as I ate a haphazard salad in my cubicle. I'm going to try to keep my momentum up and I still have the Princeton Review's practice exam to help me out. But I need a study partner. Someone who is also taking this bitch of an exam. So if you're interested, hit me up. I'm pretty tough and I could totally help you, but I need someone to stay on me force me to learn whatever it is that Caxton did. LET'S DO IT.
