There are several words and phrases that aren't in my personal vocabulary. My top two are can't and have to.
I can do anything if I want to. I can survive horrible real life stuff that sounds impossible, and I have. I can make stuff happen on a fluke because I feel like it, and things get done. I can opt out and take a nap for whatever reason I need. But something not happening isn't because I can't, and something happening isn't because I have to.
I play online with a variety of ages and backgrounds, and one of the things I run into sometimes is off the cuff comments like "I can't play singleplayer because I get bored from ADD". I guarantee if you couldn't move out of your bed to make your life less miserable and all you had to occupy you was singleplayer for a week, you'd conquer it out of sheer boredom. You f*ng do not know what boredom is until you have been stuck in a bed unable to move or even talk to anyone for hours at a time, weeks at a time, months at a time, and maybe even years at a time.
Don't limit yourselves.
While I was going through sackfuls of old papers sitting by a shredder the other day, I ran into my old GRE scores. Since they're from before 2011, I had to put them through a conversion chart. Old GRE Scores: Do They Still Work? And then I looked up what an average person gets on their scores so I'd have context for my own scores. Average scores on Graduate Record Examination (GRE) general and subject tests: 1965 through 2011
I talked about the time I took my GRE tests at don't stop believing, just dance. I didn't say what my scores were on that post. I focused instead on the weird response I got from the professors who finally decided to allow me into graduate college, since my scores were high on two of the tests and low on the third.
If you are unfamiliar with GRE testing, here are some brief descriptions.
- Verbal reasoning is the ability to comprehend and reason using concepts expressed through words. A verbal reasoning test is a form of aptitude test used by interviewers to find out how well a candidate can assess verbal logic, and how successfully they can extract the correct meaning from complex written information.
- By one definition, quantitative reasoning (QR) is the application of basic mathematics skills, such as algebra, to the analysis and interpretation of real-world quantitative information in the context of a discipline or an interdisciplinary problem to draw conclusions that are relevant to students in their daily lives.
- The Analytical Writing section requires you to provide focused responses based on the tasks presented, so you can accurately demonstrate your skill in directly responding to a task.
- Although the GRE® Analytical Writing measure contains two discrete analytical writing tasks, a single combined score is reported because it is more reliable than a score for either task alone.
Before I go on, the next relevant thing to know is percentiles. Percentiles are like the fallout list, how all the scores stack up in a population. If you fall into the 50 percentile, you score right about even between the highest and lowest scores that came back.
- “Percentile” is in everyday use, but there is no universal definition for it. The most common definition of a percentile is a number where a certain percentage of scores fall below that number. You might know that you scored 67 out of 90 on a test. But that figure has no real meaning unless you know what percentile you fall into. If you know that your score is in the 90th percentile, that means you scored better than 90% of people who took the test.
So I have 3 scores, I have a chart of average scores for the year I took the tests, and I have my percentile ranks. I can see how I did compared to other people, basically, and why this was a big deal to those professors. I took the GRE in 1992, so that's what I'm going by on the chart.
I got 520 on my verbal. Average that year among all test takers was 483. I wound up in the 63 percentile. I scored better than 63% of test takers.
I got 530 on my quantitative. Average that year among all test takers was 561. I wound up in the 21 percentile. I scored better than 21% of test takers.
I got 600 on my analytical. Average that year among all test takers was 537. I didn't see a chart conversion for the percentile, but since I scored above average, I'm pretty sure my percentile is at least over 50%.
You can see that one of those is not like the others. For someone who nearly flunked high school and had no support in my family as I single parented working overtime through college, those high scores aren't too shabby. Toss in a 60 on global assessment and autism spectrum and I can casually blow a few socks off over the story about driving there alone under all kinds of stress. But that's not the point.
The point is I could have said I can't, and the point is that I never ever told myself I have to do this. I decided I wanted to. And then I did it.
I had no coaching at all, didn't preview any pre-test advice or practice, had no idea what in the world I'd even be doing, missed one deadline and barely squeaked into a chair in another state in time for the last one, drove home miserable and worn out not knowing whether any of it was even worth it because it didn't make sense to me, and turned out it wasn't too shabby.
I almost didn't get into graduate school because of math. I was the all-time highest scoring math tester getting into a certain nursing school a few years after that, and not because I took any more math classes. Circumstances dictate some outcomes, but we can pounce all over whatever ball bounces across our courts if we care to. Ironically, I did just fine with analytical statistics in grad school.
~~~~~~~~~
Ok, that went in a completely different direction than originally intended, but I guess that was on my mind.
Power point since I wanna be done with this now-
- I'm tired.
- I'm really tired.
- I'm really super tired.
- I'm so tired that Tuesday I thought it was Sunday, Wednesday I thought it was Thursday, Thursday I thought it was Wednesday, and today I thought it was Thursday.
- I'm also so tired that the stupid overtook me and I nearly sliced my best finger's whole tip off on a stupid can lid.
- I'm so tired that I'll probably sleep through the pain of that just fine.
I used to get really good random youtube suggestions to help me walk off the page, but since I got into the Q stuffs, all the fun junk kinda fell off the radar. So I put in crazy search parameters to see if anyone got silly enough to make a fun David Wilcock fanvid (bad lip reading, auto tuning, crazy shipping, ~anything~ right, and I'm so disappointed in the serious crowd not being able to lighten up a little because I'm bored and want more) and immediately got this Sherlock in the middle of a list of some of the wildest alt pseudo world ending fun that I can only assume it's a note from my higher cosmic synchronized self letting me know it's ok, and I'm on the right track wanting more of David's brain on my laptop. (And David's going "Buy my books..." lol.)
