Prioritizing

Today I called in sick to work, the result not of illness but of an emotional breakdown two nights ago, when I suddenly felt the full force of the realization that I actually didn't have enough free time remaining to properly study for tomorrow's early-morning GRE literature test. This is my fault, because I tried to squeeze too much studying into too few weeks. But I'm not used to having so much of my time eaten up by inflexible commitments like work. Since I started college (seven years ago), my schedule has been fairly malleable: if I desperately needed to get something important done, it was always possible to ignore or put off something else. That doesn't work with retail, where I pretty much get paid just to be there 40 hours a week. As a result, I've been forcing myself to ignore some things, like cleaning, but that doesn't normally take up enough of my time to make an appreciable difference in this situation. Also, the fact that I always have to move something over to write a check on the coffee table or make a sandwich on the kitchen counter is making me crazy. (Eric has been helping a lot, but I'm a little OCD, and have been known to wash a load of about six dishes, just because they were there. He doesn't do that.)

So today I've been studying. And for this thing, I'm finding out, a little studying goes a long way. I took my second practice test yesterday, and my score was far better than the first one--respectable, even. I think this is partly due to the practice test in the Princeton Review book being extra hard so that you think their techniques really worked when you get a much higher score on the ETS practice test and the actual test, but I also noticed while I was taking it that I knew a lot of the answers because of things I'd committed to memory over my lunch breaks earlier this week.

So today I'm cramming my brain full of names, dates, and famous lines. And the guilt of calling in sick when I'm actually perfectly healthy is basically gone. I've never called in sick before, except for a couple of times when I was actually too sick to work. I can usually guilt myself into going because I hate to inconvenience my coworkers and because I'm dirt poor and need every dollar of my paycheck. It took a lot of pep talks for me to decide that the money I would've made today is a teensy-tiny concern in relation to the extra points I'll be earning on a test with such powerful implications.

So tomorrow I'm going to do well on the GRE. That's my promise to me.