[Trekkin]

I'm...back...

Spoiler

I failed a test today. I haven't gotten it back yet, but I know I did. Just like the other one. This one's for my bioinformatics professor, though. The one whose recommendation I was counting on to make my grad school applications a bit less farcical. The rest of the class will, as one, have thought it was easy, which is going to make my life even more of a living hell.

This always happens. Every test, every homework. I can't even look at a returned assignment any more, and my GPA is a piffling 3.14. I'm always the dumb one out.

I haven't slept since. I can't. I can't even get out of bed, except for more classes. Which I know I'll fail, and which I inevitably will. My parents agree with me on this--I've spoken to them, and they inevitably go on about the energy you project coloring your endeavors. Which is nice, but doesn't help me not fail; I can't just be happy ex nihilo like they can, and it's pretty much destroyed my relationship with my father. I can hear the disappointment in his texts.

I have another test in 28 hours. I'm even less confident about this one.

None of this was supposed to happen. I was a straight-A student in high school. 4.0, ludicrous numbers of AP credits. I thought I was a good student. Then this school happened, and ochem, and biochem, and genetics, and I wasn't a 4.0 anymore. Nor was I attractive or funny or anything else that subverts that. It might be what you know or who you know; I total to zero on both.

I can't talk to my friends any more. The feeling of wasted time just builds and builds. Before, though, they mentioned not being able to find jobs. Assuming, as I think I safely can, that two years of useless research and a 3.14 from an engineering school will relegate my application to birdcage lining, where does that leave me? Besides, I pull stuff like this. Everyone else just gets on with academic excellence, not effortlessly, but smoothly. There is something wrong with me.

Professional help is not an option. I'm too poor for private help and wouldn't have the time anyway, and I know the school knows who's seeing the school counselor. There's records and things somewhere. Everyone has contacts and ins and things and secret ways to subvert the system, law or not. Rich kids get busted with drugs and not arrested all the time, idiot frat boys get plum jobs at their friends' companies all the time; someone with the capacity to decide my future will be able to look. It's not that I mind the prospect of 72 hours of monitoring, it's that I don't have three days to spare.

I haven't had a break, without something vital to my "career" due within the next three days, for over five years. I know I shouldn't complain. If nothing else, this is how the real world is. Others have it worse, and complaining just marks me as not able to handle it. So would therapy, or speaking to my professors, or anything. I'm whiny by nature, so there's no way any of that would work.

I don't even know what the truth is any more. It used to be simple. Mathematical. None of it is any more. It's not about knowing the course material, its about agreeing with the professor. I can't choose best answers any more. This just makes the process of grad school applications even worse. One professor tells me my near-perfect GREs make Stanford a good idea; another tells me some state institution might take me in. I don't know what to believe any more.

Sorry. I just wanted someone to know.