If ye are prepared...

So I'm a grad student, right? And we have these big exams at the end of our second year of classes, and a big reading list to prepare for the exams. So the four of us who started the program this semester get together every two weeks to discuss one of the books on the reading list. And we had a meeting today, and the last couple of weeks have been so crazy that as of Wednesday I hadn't done my reading yet - eep!

And this time we decided that instead of us all attempting to read the whole book, we'd each be responsible for writing up an outline for certain chapters that we'd then share with the rest of the group. So that meant that if I didn't do my reading I'd really be letting down my whole group, since they were expecting me to fill them in on the parts that I had been assigned - double eep!

So on Wednesday I went to the library, in a big rush, and scanned the pages that I was supposed to read for today, and I was bummed because I thought this one section was 100 pages and it was actually 150, but with all my other work I didn't even touch the reading by the time I fell into bed last night, so I got up at 4am today to at least outline the chapters and read the intros and conclusions. And after a group meeting this morning for another class and the interview I had to film for work, I sat down and did some more frantic reading and outlining so that I would at least have SOMETHING to share with my group this afternoon.

And I quickly typed all the headings from all the chapters, and read the intros and conclusions to a couple of the chapters, and 10 minutes before the meeting started I printed out 4 pages to read on the way to the meeting, and I got through 1 of them and was actually feeling pretty good about things...(I know--that's pathetic. Moving on...)

...until I discovered that I had read the wrong book.

Yeah, I had frantically read and outlined and GOT UP AT FOUR IN THE MORNING to blast through selections from a DIFFERENT really fat reference book, from which we read selected chapters for our LAST group meeting, two weeks ago. In my rush on Wednesday, I'd grabbed, ya know, the familiar-looking fat book off the reference shelf. In my defense, the titles are almost the same, and this book ALSO had 7 sections, and there WAS a section 3, with several chapters whose titles looked familiar, and yes, that one section was 150 pages instead of the 100 I was anticipating, but hey, I never claimed I could do math, so I just figured we'd subtracted wrong when we split up the reading.

Nope. Wrong book.

And one of my group members looked at me and said, "Aren't YOU the one who sends the email out to everyone about what book we are reading?"

...

...

Why yes, yes I am.