English, please.

I took my TOEFL exam this morning. The first reading comprehension article screwed me up. I guess I needed to jumpstart my brain into thinking mode, especially if it came from a night with Christian Bale (Dark Knight was on HBO last night). I didn't pace myself well during the first part, and probably missed a couple of questions. And it didn't help that people were doing their microphone tests while I was reading an article about the Pleistocene Era (This is for illustrative purposes only. I signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement, duh. Don't even think I'll let you have it easy by giving you clues when I worked my butt off in there.)

But I recovered and did better in the consequent articles. I did fine on the listening part, though some of the questions were a bit tricky. By the time the third listening test rolled in, I had trouble concentrating...I was getting hungry. So I just fought my way through the questions and took the mandatory 10-minute break where I ate my sandwich, took a pee break and mentally braced myself for the speaking and writing part. I started out shaky, cause I didn't know what to expect. We had very little time to prepare and gather our thoughts, and being the motormouth, I always went over the time limit, and got cut off. Not sure if that will count against me (for talking too much?). I'm pretty confident I did well in 2 questions. The writing part was a piece of cake cause I had a lot of practice (blogging included). Just struggled with the last part cause I had a last minute brain fart, and that rendered the concluding paragraph a bit loose. I'll find out how I did in 15 days. If i screwed up, well, I'll just take it again. No biggie.

One of the things I've learned is never take exams too seriously. By that I don't mean completely drop studying and hope your prayers will save you. Hit the books, take classes, do whatever you have to do but take the stress factor out. The more I stress about a test, the worse I perform on the actual test day. If you screw up, just take it again. It's completely useless to try and ponder why you didn't do well (mental block, too cold, too noisy, Christian Bale, etc.) cause what's done is done.

So, the 15-day countdown for results starts now...