"What To Do Now That Lindsey's Back" or "Abigail the Rescue Dog"

As many of you already know, very well perhaps, I tend to get a little stressed. Usually over things not worth stressing about. This is why my phone is constantly speed-dialing Lindsey, my mom, or my sister, to find someone who can talk me down and assure me that no, the sky is not falling, calm the hell down.

Last night as I finally arrived back in Tuscaloosa from braving a terrifying, albeit short, rendezvous with a giant storm on my way home from Sheffield, I found my syllabus to start reading for class. Much to my chagrin, this revealed that my midterm was the next day, not Friday as I thought it was, and this led to a panicked search for my textbook which came up empty[I think I may have left it in Sheffield, can you look Lindsey?].

Immediately I'm in a frenzy. My notes are good, but many of them are actually in the pages of my book, not to mention that our syllabus refers to page numbers, not titles, so there is no way for me to look up titles of pieces that I missed class for. I was relying on reading the titles that I had missed classes on as my studying, seeing as how the class barely touched on the texts anyway, and now I had nothing for those days I had missed. No notes, no titles.

My first instinct is to tell my teacher I have cancer. No, bad idea. I then throw myself into a full-on pity party that is full of tears of frustration and me convincing myself that I am going to get a sure C on the paper I turned in because I know it sucked and was thrown together, I should just drop the class, maybe I should skip tomorrow, and then I get back to the cancer thing. Car accident? My gramma died?

I am all ready-at-the-helm to write a completely fabricated e-mail to get myself out of this mess when I think, "No, this is ridiculous. You're an adult, Genevieve, and you deal with this like one. You messed up, it happens. Study as much as you possibly can tonight, go to class early tomorrow, and suck it up."

So I did, and this morning I actually only had 2 questions on the midterm that I didn't know the answer to [and this was a hell of a midterm, too, 20 questions, all short answer ID's of author, piece, and historical context]. Then I get my paper back, A-. I apparently forgot that I'm an English major, I'm smart, and my shittiest papers still get A's. Sheesh.

So, all in all, I'm proud of myself for pulling out of this myself. Not even a tearful call to my mother at midnight! I also think that things happen for a reason, and if I had stayed at Lindsey's for even the 5 extra minutes to search for the book, I probably would have had a much nastier meeting with that storm last night than the one I had, and the one I had I hope to never have again. So I think this all turned out fine.

What gave me the idea that I even knew HOW to fail an English course?

<3gen