Being less cowardly than usual is, in some ways, harder

I've just walked out of my IAS midterm. It was an odd sensation, definitely more unpleasant than just not showing up in the first place, which is something I have done in the past. The upshot is going to be nearly the same; I did answer one of the questions, but that won't be enough to save my grade and I'll end up either dropping the class or just taking an NP. I was prepared for this possibility, and had switched to P/NP for this class so that it wouldn't matter much if I didn't pass it, but I was still hoping I'd be able to scrape a pass. Guess not. The really lousy thing is, if I'd been keeping up with the homework I would probably have been able to manage some kind of answer to the essay question, but I'd just not been at a sufficient level of functioning for enough of the time, and when I had been I'd had other things on my mind. Add to that the fact that I just can't pay attention to the prof's droning 90-minute lectures, and the fact that social science is the subject I have the most trouble getting interested in anyway, and the fact that she wouldn't tell us anything about what the test would be like so I had no idea how to study for it (when the subject matter of the class spans fifty years' worth of the history of half a continent and there's no textbook, it's tough to figure out where to find your information), and it was a lost cause.

I had considered not showing up at all, but it wasn't as hard as it might've been a year ago to bully myself into at least seeing what was on the exam and hoping I could maybe bullshit my way through it. But dammit, sometimes it's easier to just quietly disappear. Then again, I guess it wouldn't have been so easy in this case. Unlike the math classes in which I've done similar things, this class has actually involved a certain amount of communication with the professor, which means that unlike most of my math profs, she's going to notice and care that I didn't complete the exam (as it was, I was lucky she turned her back long enough for me to turn in the bit I had finished and slip out the door), and she'll probably ask me whether I'm going to stick around or what, which I can't answer yet as I won't know if I'll be able to drop until I finish with the administrative junk I began last week. Also, I feel guilty about the possibility of dropping because we've been doing group work and I don't want to abandon my group. But then if I don't drop, I still won't want to continue doing the work for no credit, so I suppose it'll be as if I'd dropped anyway. Ho-hum.

There's a slim chance, I suppose, that she'll let me make this up somehow--maybe take an incomplete or something. But I'm not holding my breath. She doesn't seem to be the accommodating sort, or at least not that accommodating.

On the slightly brighter side, I walked out the door right into someone handing out information about summer jobs with an environmental group. There's an info session tonight that I might as well go to. Yay potential employment.