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Friday 28 November 2014

Late

It's still Thursday in some parts of the world.

I'm just saying.

*Minim with a busy/lazy face on*

I'll leave it for you to decide which of the two cases it is.

*angelic*

Thursday 20 November 2014

A Little Failure

Starting Sixth Form College was a new experience. Hardly anyone in my classes had known me before, my classes were half an hour longer (Now lectures have reverted to 50 minutes, for which I am thankful!) and I could barely recognize many of my old classmates because they were wearing completely different headscarves.


Classes were going well. In Further Maths, we tackled C1 (Or, what I call, Enhanced GCSE), the splendidocious C2, and the devillish D1. In Physics, we looked at things you can't really see with the naked eye, or even eyes with glasses on. English Language was, of course, very language-y and we were building up to the coursework element of the course. And then there was Critical Thinking, where we had to think.

This being Sixth Form, from the first minute on we were being prepared for exams. Going through work on the syllabus, doing mock exams, and so forth. The Mocks passed and, boringly, I got As and a Physical B.


The solution to this was simple: work on Physics a bit more, and all else could happily take the hit. The January season of exams rode into play, and it was all exam rooms and revision and the after-exam questions of "What did you get for Question 4?" (The answer to this question is is "Either a correct or incorrect answer,"). I walked out of D1 thinking that I had royally screwed up the final question, the most significant question on that paper. I walked out of Physics unsure. My other papers I walked out on feeling fairly confident. 

Cue six weeks time for results day, giving the examiners time to read the scrawls of plenty of silly students. I could hardly wait to log in to the student network and find my results.


I wanted to hide in my room until the end of Time (and it hadn't even started yet). Or until I became a zombie and so didn't care any more.


I forced myself out of my room and down the stairs. Moth was there, wanting to know how I did. I said I got As. I couldn't force the rest of the words out that the last exam had gone really really very quite badly.

The words loosened a little bit as I took the twenty minute walk to college. I kept on telling myself that I had to face up to it. I still had solitude when I arrived at English, my first class of the day. However, it soon became a babble of excited students going "What did you get?" "How did you do?" and feeling proud of their Bs and Cs. I held back tears as I bluntly told the others about the 4 As and the other one.

Reactions generally went along the lines of "WTF happened there?!" Gradually over the day the upset cleared and my normal state of emotional indifference returned.

Walking to Critical Thinking that day was tough. I was very reluctant to go, but I told myself I had to. At the beginning of the class everyone was talking about their results. Even the teacher was perplexed at my result.

Normal life soon pervaded. The deadline for paying for resits was about a week afterwards. I went up to the Finance desk while the area was not very full. The lady on the desk recognised me as my mother's daughter - Moth being a member of staff there at the time. And because of that, I ended up going to speak to another lady at a different desk and having to wait in the now growing queue for the finance office. So I could get a £1.10 discount which promptly went towards a bottle of Sprite in the shop.

I accepted it all, got obsessed with the xkcd Time (which had started not long afterwards), and prepared for the resit and the other Critical Thinking exam with vigilance, going to extra sessions and so on. I made sure to ensure I was prepared for the other exam or I'd have to resit that in a year's time due to the abolishing of the January exams. I tackled those papers with determination.

The resit relented a C. The other paper - which was on arguing - didn't argue and handed away an A.

Thursday 13 November 2014

Hello Readers

Hey readers,

I know you're out there. I can tell. I see your views, the returners and the first-timers, and all that jazz. A few of you have contacted me about the blog through forums. (Note that this is not optimal and that you really should use the comments section. There's a button under the title of each post. Note that this does not apply to Moth, who is special and also my mother. <3) I know you're listening and I quite like it.

I know last Thursday's update didn't happen. If anyone was disappointed then I apologise wholeheartedly. (I don't know y'all well enough to say whether any of you were disappointed. Maybe we could chat sometime? ;) ) Feeling grotty gets in the way of things, you know? But, this is just another weblog. There's a sea of them out there.

Sometimes I wonder why anyone would pick to read this little corner of the internet when there's a vast array of better-written, better focused, more popular blogs out there. I guess I must be doing something right. You're all awesome for reading this clutter of randomness, anyway.

Words are powerful in the right hands, and also in the wrong ones. That is a redundant way of saying that words are powerful. Lots of people seem to have picked up on that. Words are more powerful the more they're heard. Words can spread too, and I guess that means we all ought to be careful if we don't want to abuse the power these words can give us.

I don't know why I'm writing to you all, but I do know that you are all awesome people. Took me years to believe that I'm just as awesome as you are now, but that's how life operates sometimes. Love yourself, but don't be afraid to change yourself either.

We are living in an age where people are able to communicate almost instantly to people on the opposite side of the planet. Yesterday, a spacecraft landed on a comet for the first time in forever, enabling us to learn more about the universe that we live in. (And then the scientists had a big party to celebrate, but the rest of us didn't aid the mission and so weren't invited. And so it should be - they did good, the rest of us just observed, if that). And that is just brilliant and fabulous and awesome.

Guys, everything is awesome.

(Hands up everyone who has now got 'Everything Is Awesome' stuck in their head)