I have to go to LA tomorrow and take a full-length version of the SAT verbal section so that this company I'll be working for soon can confirm that I don't actually suck at taking the test. I don't suck at taking the test; I never have. But still, I'm managing to muster a fair amount of paranoia about it. It's not so much that I'm worried about doing well enough on the test for them to officially hire me; I only have to get over a 700 or so, and I can't remember the last time I scored under a 700. It's more that I'm a closet perfectionist about such things. You can miss a few questions and still get an 800, but I hate missing any of the questions. I don't want the "missed two" 800—I want the perfect score that really is a perfect score.

This kind of thing doesn't fit anywhere in the scheme of things I might identify as my intellectual value system. It's ridiculous. But it doesn't go away. I can sit around talking with friends about how I think people shouldn't obsess about grades and test scores, and I really do mean what I say. At the same time, I've never managed to break myself of my own tendency to be a score whore.

I don't usually talk about it. It feels like a dirty secret. Some people might get so wrapped up in publicly maintaining a diet that they find themselves hiding candy they intend to eat when nobody's looking. Me, I was the one who'd sneak to a phone (for the eighth time that day) and call the university's automatic reporting system until all my grades were in for a given term. When I was an undergrad, I sometimes called two or three times after that, too—grades at the UW were in numerical rather than letter form, so instead of getting a B+ in a class, you might get a 3.4. If you got a 4.0 in a class, the automatic voice on the telephone would congratulate you.

Yup, I called a machine just because I liked it when the voice said, "Four point zero. Congratulations!"

This is not to say that I wanted all my grades to be perfect. If, for example, I chose not to attend one of my classes regularly, I acknowledged the fact that I was probably going to miss some things that would end up on a test. With classes I didn't care about, I did a sort of informal cost-benefit analysis to figure out what kind of grade was worth the time I freed up. It was more that I needed to understand my instructors' rationales for giving the grades they gave, and I wasn't happy unless those grades were at or above what I thought I actually deserved (which was generally lower than the grades I got). And I always hated getting a 3.9 in a class. "Why couldn't they just bump it up a tenth of a point," I would think—to myself, because complaining about these sorts of things openly is a fabulous way to piss off your peers (yet another reason I don't usually own up to caring). "Give a girl a break. It's an A either way. Besides, you're making me cancel my 'congratulations!' date with the automatic phone man, and he was going to put out, I just know it."

So tomorrow I go do sentence completions and analogies, and I answer some reading comprehension questions. And I will not stay up extra late so that I can download another practice exam and take it, just to be sure I haven't forgotten how to do it. Because I haven't. And the exam doesn't fucking matter. The chances that I'll go blank and disqualify myself from this job are quite slim, and I already went to college. The exam doesn't matter. Right? Right.

I might just take one quick peek at that old list of word groups I put together for my students a few years ago. Just a quick one. Because it would be such a shame if I forgot what "ukase" means. Not that it matters.