Waiting

Waiting, waiting, waiting. I thought I had mastered the waiting game. I am a Peace Corps volunteer, we spend the better part of two years waiting. Waiting for buses, waiting for the rain to go away, waiting for projects to take shape. But here I am checking my email every half hour, trying to fill the time in between with tasks like washing clothes. I am waiting for my LSAT score to appear. I feel like I need to know my score. It is pretty important. It will help determine where I should and should not apply to law school, whether or not I will receive scholarships and of course my self worth for today, that is if it comes out today.

But I also don't want to see it. Every time I hit refresh my heart and stomach do somersaults. Will it be there? Please let it be there! No, no, I don't want to see it. I fear that my score will be lower than the one I got in 2005 as a college senior. In five years I must have improved my logical reasoning and reading comprehension, right? Or maybe I have been out of school too long and my rusty study habits failed me.

I made the trip to Buenos Aires in December to take the test way back on the 11th. It seems like ages ago. After nearly 24 hours on a bus and two days of walking around rainy Buenos Aires I took the test at a cultural center, where in good South American fashion the proctor turned up an hour after the scheduled time. The test takers, me included, had spent that hour trying to keep ourselves calm, doing breathing exercises, stretching, using the bathroom a million times. Air conditioning is a rather new concept down here and so of course it was cranked way up, causing the temperature to plummet. While my frozen fingers gripped the pencil, I silently thanked myself for bringing along a jacket and raced through the questions of the test. I did the best I could, I think. I didn't feel positive or negative about it when I left, just relieved that it was over.

Wow, still not posted. It has been nearly a month, of course the website states the scores will be released on the tenth, but every year they come out early. Here I am trying to keep busy, I even washed my tennis shoes, to keep my mind off my pending score. But I constantly ask myself, will today be the day? Will I be able to give myself some direction today? There are always those scholarship essays that aren't going to write themselves. But I know there's no point if I didn't do well on the test. I want to know, I need to know.