Monday, 8th February 2010

To sleep, perchance…

Though I could do without the dreams.

I have entered a vicious cycle of non-work, whereby I go to bed way too late, therefore fall asleep in lessons/when I should be in lessons/when I should be doing homework/am too tired to notice teachers telling me there is homework, therefore have to stay up late to get done whatever was due in 5 days ago, therefore fall asleep…Okay I’ve probably sent YOU to sleep now. Note to self: deliriously recital of vicious cycles not best way to advocate exciting aspects of blog.

The point is, why can’t I drop Politics THIS week? I mean, I first thought seriously of dropping it like 2 weeks into January. And resolved to have made a final decision by the time I came home from Paris. Voilà, I decided on the Tube home from Paris that there was no way I could continue with 5 subjects. You know why? Because the only thing stopping me from getting off the train, crossing to the other side of the station and catching another one to Heathrow (literally, I actually considered this), rather than face the work for me at home, was the thought that I would have one less subject soon. So decision made. Final answer.

Next step was telling McC. I gave myself a week for that. Voilà, I told him at 8am on Friday. But he said I had to go away and think about it over the weekend (surely going to another COUNTRY over the weekend and thinking about it should have been enough?), and also keep doing it until half term. I was expecting that one — it makes sense — but he seems to be operating under the delusion that I may change my mind once I have had five days off school to clear my backlog. Well, make that three days since, in his typical patronising-you’re-just-a-tired-hormonal-teenaged-girl-who-overworks-herself-into-freak-outs-over-her-subjects way, he has instructed me to take two days off. This isn’t about backlog. It’s about BALANCE. There is currently no balance. I said I would do five as long as it worked for me. It is no longer working. I could do it. But not while also doing dancing and piano and rehearsals and sleeping and eating and travelling. Well. I could do that to. But at the expense of my social life, such as it is, meagre thread of weak laughter, and therefore my sanity. NOT WORTH IT. And NOT GOING TO CHANGE OVER HALF TERM. If he’d let me drop it effective immediately I could have caught up on Latin Lit before half term. And maybe got some sleep somewhere that wasn’t in the Study Area or the toilets or the bus or English Lit. (Don’t worry, we were only reading a play.)

I may have already written that in a previous post. I don’t even know. I litearlly have no recollection of being set 99% of my work. Not that it matters, since my current project is work that was overdue from before Paris. The Politics essay I am going to hand in tomorrow is in all likelihood the worst thing I’ve ever written (one hour of rambling about the rise of the SNP and the fact that the new electoral systems since 1997 have, in actual fact, had no other impact whatsoever, thereby heavily implying in my conclusion that the question was a STUPID one), and by the time he marks it I will no longer be a student of his subject. The Cambridge Classics Project site has decided to freeze so I am blogging while I wait for it to load.

I had some funtimes at the weekend, though. Friday night was the baffling start of LOST VI, which involved the writers not bothering to decide after all whether the perfectly reasonable plot to reset time back three years in normal LOST time, five and a half years in real world time and push it forward 30 years into the future in current LOST time, by chucking a hydrogen bomb into a pit of magnetic energy did, in fact, work. They just filmed two parallel situations: one where it worked and everyone is leading perfectly mundane lives of breaking out of federal custody at LAX and choking to death on heroin balloons, and one where it shifted them through time (AGAIN) but not back home, and everyone is dying in holes filled with metal crap, ponds in temples and fires in four-toed statues. Somehow, none of this confused me. The only thing that confused me — beside the sudden appearance of creepy temple people who partially speak English — was the following: if things reset to the plane journey, why was Desmond on the plane? If he had never come to the island, he would have just been in army prison at home. Or married happily to Penny, also known as the hot DNA lab tech from CSI:NY, depending on HOW far back things reset. Well, he has a cool accent and is rather pleasing to the eye, so I’ll stop complaining.

Saturday night was Helena’s (pictures soon to follow), where shockingly, despite our unprecedented exhaustion, we made it through two films and did not start drifting away from the biPodding (thank you Mme J for that wonderful phrase) and half-conversation until 4.30am. I think this was due to the presence of Andrea. As word spreads around the year group that yes, the girl does indeed eat like a savage dog which has been locked in an empty room for 50 days with nothing but pictures of food on the walls, a different question springs to the my mind: how can so tiny, tiny, TINY a person carry around such a gigantic fluorescent, vibrating, tune-playing, flashing lava lamp of energy? Okay, so that was a shit metaphor, but remember how little sleep I’ve had and forgive me. The point is, I doubt we could have gone to sleep earlier if we’d tried. She wouldn’t have kept us awake — Andrea is the epitome of consideration and politeness, except when it comes to food — but we wouldn’t have been able to do anything else in such close proximity (isn’t that an unnecessary adjective?) to one such as she. In the end though, even she succumbed. Tasha and I, who had been sharing an armchair, slept sitting upright, side by side, in said armchair. She couldn’t even slide down the floor to her sleeping bag. I couldn’t even turn 90 degrees to lie down properly on the chair. It was actually probably the best night’s sleep I’ve had for a good while (5, maybe even 6 hours?), so again, no complaints here.

Sunday was rather less successful. I wrote the shitty Politics essay, and fell asleep in my clothes on my bed at 7pm. I did not wake up until 6.15 the next morning. This morning. If my 5th and 6th hadn’t been cancelled (JOY TO THE WORLD) I would probably be on my floor right now. I did fall asleep in the car on the way home. Maybe that saved me. I am facing some long times at school this week; tomorrow I have to stay for a piano lesson in, most irritatingly, the second half of period 5, and on Wednesday I am not going home at all after double French 5th and 6th, but staying and working until the 6th Form Concert, which has crept up on us out of nowhere. However, 6th Form Choir is hardly the one I’m worried about (we had a rather efficient, if a cappella, rehearsal last week when Mrs McC failed to show and we all stayed anyway like the losers we are to note bash).

We may have six months to rehearse it, but Über Choir is scaring me. Rumbling through the rehearsal came the voice dreaded by every choirmistress, that of, as he called himself “the composer”. He suggested we do it FASTER. Those of us who can read music were failing to sing it at the moderate tempo Mrs McC had selected due to time constraints. She, politely, restrainedly, pointing out, “Well, I think they’re learning the notes just at the minute.” There was a strained silence, and then The Great Composer returned, “There are only four notes.” So our poor Head of Music gritted her teeth, faked a work-laugh (Chandler & Monica fans, anyone?), nodded tersely to her husband at the piano and faster it was. I think the only reason we weren’t stopped in this abomination after three bars was that most of the teachers (the worst culprits for having no idea what the hell is going on) were absent from this particular rehearsal.

So far this evening I have made it through a box of grapes (mixed, green and black seedless), a box of blackberries, half a box of bluberries, half a box of strawberries and a clementine. The clementine was not nice. Blueberries are Bea’s thing, not mine. You have to eat about a thousand before gaining the impression of actually having anything in your mouth at all. Apart from that, it was all very nice. I appear to have reached the point in the report where I start listing everything I’ve eaten (a common feature of my childhood diaires). I think I should stop.