Thursday, May 17, 2007

Mets and MCATs

When it's really hot outside I do really strange things in my sleep. In terms Psych. of Sleep I seem to be aroused (not like that!) while in the middle of REM sleep. So when I wake up I can't tell the difference between the brain activity of REM sleep and the brain activity of reality.

The night before my MCAT I had one of these episodes. It couldn't have been more opportune timing. First let me share a past episode that shows exactly what I'm talking about.

It's my second year of college and I'm sleeping during a particularly hot night. In my dream I'm back in freshman year of college during orientation. At freshman orientation (the real one) we were given things called "passports." You would bring your passports to different activities and get it stamped. If you had enough stamps then you could submit your passport for a prize of some sort. So in the dream I didn't have a passport and needed to print one out. At that point something woke me up, which I suspect to be the heat of the night. (that sounded dirty..)
I got out of bed and walked over to my roommate's desk where he was on his computer. I then started tapping his printer telling him to "print it out, com'on print it out." He looked at me wondering what the fuck I was talking about, and rightfully so. I went on insisting that he needed to print out the passport now. He continued telling me that he has no idea what I was talking about. I then went over to my bed and sat down trying to figure out what was going on. One half of my mind was like ummm Dr. Wannabe, that was a dream. Another half was like no, that was real, I really need to print this out. This internal struggle went on for about 20 minutes, no joke. I then begrudgingly accepted the fact that there was no passport to print out. It was one of my more embarrassing moments.

Now back to the dream I had before taking the MCAT.


I'm in the car on my way to the testing center where my MCAT is held and who's in the car with me? None other the New York Met pitchers Tom Glavine and John Maine. So we're driving and we come to an intersection that I had specifically made a mental note of earlier in the day (real life). I go to cross the intersection, but not it's not that simple. This part is a little hazy, but evidently my crossing the intersection was contingent on John and Tom throwing specific pitches in a specific time interval. Needless to say they couldn't do it. My brain just wouldn't allow it to be that easy. I'm then left sitting in the car waiting for them to do it and they can't. At this point I'm panicking about getting to my test on time. I then enter this weird vortex of thought where I'm trying to figure out how they can get these pitches thrown at the exact moment they're suppose to and this is the part where I wake up. At this point I'm flipping out. I don't understand what's the matter but I know that it has to do with me not knowing baseball well enough to take the MCAT. I'm soooooo strange. Again half of my brain was like that was a dream, it's not real. The other half keep panicking about baseball and the MCAT. It's a very weird feeling when your brain is thinking two different things at the same time. I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn't stop thinking about baseball. The only thing I could think of doing was just getting out of bed and fully waking up. So I went on my computer for about an hour until my braing fully "restarted."

Yeah, I didn't get much sleep that night.

Oh, you want to know how the test went? Well I actually wasn't tired at all, but I sucked it up big time anyway. There were two biological science section passages that I just could not wrap my head around. One had to do with the reptilian renal system (I've never even learned about the mammalian renal system) and the other had to do with some specific protein synthesis and an experiment to see how you could inhibit it, but a certain mRNA was found to replicate DNA incorrectly or something.... I don't know.

What really sucked is that I think I did much better in Physical Science than normal and it'll mean nothing. The verbal passages weren't that hard, but there were a couple of tricky questions.

In about a month's time I'll have my results. A friend of mine just got her results today and it wasn't pretty. I feel really terrible for her because she has like a 3.85 GPA and she was convinced that this was going to happen. I haven't spoken to her since her text message ended with "don't anyone call me" and she hasn't been online, which is irregular. I don't know when she plans on taking them again or if she'll wait to apply next year. I hope she just takes them again and applies this year cause I know she's quite capable of getting a competitive score and she's worked too hard to deal with this stress. As for me... if I get a 23-24 then I'm only applying to one specific school; 25+ I'm applying to all the schools my heart desires. Lower than 23 and I don't know what I'll do, but I have a feeling that's going to be the case.

Screw it all. I'm going to Italy in 11 days and I'm not going to allow this to plague my mind.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'll be holding thumbs for a 25+! You must be glad that it's all behind you and that you can trip off to Italy and have a fantastic time.