Wine for Test-Related Meltdown

Oh dear. I had planned to return to the blogging world yesterday, but instead I wound up blubbering away to Steve in the car on the way home for no apparent reason. I believe it would be safe to call it a Stress-Related-Blubber-Fest. I hiccoughed, I sobbed incoherently, I took shuddery breaths, and told Steve: "I...(hiccough-breath) wa (hiccough-breath) famma (hiccough-breath) wanna (hiccough-breath) flabetharathblu. Waaaaa." To which Steve replied: "Wait.....What?!"

This seems to happen a lot, this sort of test stress build-up that results in some kind of sobbing or massive panic. I have had a couple of doozies in this department. When I got accepted into UCLA as a transfer student, i had to take a math placement exam to figure out which calculus class I should be in. Now, you may not know this, but I hate math. I HATE IT. It makes me cry. And that evening at UCLA extension, as I stared at this placement test and realized I had no idea how to do any of it, I had a massive freak-out in which I imagined that my failure in this test and subsequent class would mean that UCLA would withdraw my acceptance, my parents would disown me and my life would be over.

So after staring at this test for 5 minutes or so, I got up from my chair, went to the bathroom where I hyperventilated and cried like a four year old, and then went home. The next day I called a lovely admissions woman at UCLA, and with shaking voice that devolved to quavery weepiness, I explained that I just was not very good at math, and could in no way, under any circumstances, possibly make it through a calculus class, and this sweet lady very wisely put me in an Algebra II class instead. Bless her heart.

Flash forward to my last few exams at UCLA. I was in the final for my required Statistics class, and I looked over all those pages with all those numbers on them and felt my heart beat faster, my breathing speed up, my palms sweating, and my eyes welling up with tears. And I realized that I had no idea how to answer any of the questions on the exam, was going to fail the exam, not graduate from college, get disowned by parents and wind up being the crazy lady who danced outside the clothing shops on the Venice boardwalk.

In full-on Blubber-Fest mode, I dragged my poor unsuspecting TA outside where I proceeded to panic and cry all over her, at which point she promised me that no matter how badly I did on the exam, she would still pass me. I'm not sure if she did this because she took pity on me, or if she did this because she was a little bit afraid of me, but either way, I graduated from college.

Tomorrow the fun begins. We have a massive all-day wine lecture tomorrow, then a half-day lecture on Thursday followed by our Introductory exam, If I pass that, I will return on Friday for the Certified exam. Hopefully I will manage to get through all three days without crying, though as I think I illustrated above, my track record is not so good.