October 01, 2002
suffering pre-exam jitters
Listening to: Etta James - At Last
Reading: study books & Jostein Gaarder
In school I was supposed to study logarithms in my huge quantities of free time, but I was distracted by the book Mollick brought to school as the subject of her English oral exam presentation (free subject, she chose to do a book review).
I think the book title was His Bright Light by Danielle Steel. I've never read any of her previous stuff though, but this was good, this was a biography of sorts about her son Nick and his life as a manic depressive.
It was deeply moving and in many places cheesier than Disney and a lot of Oprah put together, but like a lot of Oprah and some Disney it had good reason to be. And through the romantic cheese, the essentials did seep through to me; Nick Traina was one great guy, and that manic depressiveness wasn't self-inflicted, it's practically an illness since birth.
I always thought that manic depressives brought it on to themselves, like it's their fault they were upset all the time. I didn't even consider the possibility of it being a genuine illness, something unavoidable and permanent. The book was dead interesting. The pictures were lovely, though somewhat chilling because in almost all of them Nick was smiling as genuine and as bright as a 'say cheese' smile could get, when the readers knew that he wasn't happy at all.
This was meant to be short, actually... just a note to say that I won't be updating as frequently for a bit.
My end of the year exams are 6 days away and counting. I'm chicken shite. I'm not hoping for stunning 'A's all over the place, but I definitely can't start thinking about failures before I look at those damned papers now can I?
You know why I hate exams? It's the paramount of bad judgement. Your entire personality is reduced to a few letters of the alphabet and ink colours on a report card.
And that is how the teachers will judge you, and convince your parents to judge you, all for your sake, because as you go on the university and scholarship people will judge you by that too, they'll want or discard you because of your damned grades. When you think about it, a good number of jobs require cooperation for teamwork. What kind of teamwork skills will we get out of being on distanced table-chair islands of our own in the exam hall?