Exams

I will be fine. I have revised thoroughly. I am going to give myself a mock exam before the real one. I will pass — but I don't know what grade I'll get.

I'm so worried I won't get a really good grade. Today I have my English Studies exam — almost a guaranteed pass (I need to get less than 2%).

I'm reassured by the fact that I got an A+ for my big assignment on Atonement. Woohoo! That's my first A+ for that paper... I'm really happy. But to be fair, we had to hand in a draft for that assignment, which was critiqued and then given back to us; so without my tutor's comments on my draft I probably wouldn't have got that grade. But an A+ for an assignment worth 30% of our final grade — that's fantastic.

If I'm going to get an A- or higher in any paper, this'll be it. But 40% of the exam is based on The Tempest. I hate Shakespeare. I think plays should be acted out and watched, rather than studied in reading. I loathe having to learn language four centuries old, language that I have to reread twice before I even understand it. And 40% of my exam mark is based on my ability to discuss literary-critical approaches to a text that I don't fully understand the face-value speech of, let alone the literary intricacies!

And I'm worried about the rest of the exam. I've been feeling more and more nauseous when I think about exams, over the last week and a half. I'm so much more nervous about my upcoming exams than usual. I think it might be because I've prepared so much more — I know I'll pass, but I'm so worried my hard work won't pay off in a good grade.

I feel if I don't get good marks, I'll have let down my parents, Dan, myself....

And today's exam is the easy one. I always do badly in history exams, which is going to pull down those lovely two A+s that I got for my medieval England paper; and my classic novels paper I didn't even get good marks in to begin with (well, B+); the exam won't help anything there, either.

And I really haven't revised for either of those exams as much as I should have (much more than usual, but still much less than I should have!). I'm going to have to rely on knowledge accumulated over the semester — something I've never been able to do before.

On the radio they're extolling the virtues of last-minute cramming. I've summarised notes to look over again before the exam, but I'm not cramming. I just hope steady work pays off as well....

#28: Diaryland entries

Wow. That took longer than I expected, and now I feel sadder than I'd have thought. I'd hoped to get my first task completed sooner; but hopefully I'll be able to start getting through them faster when exams are over.

It was interesting sorting through old entries. At the beginning it was cool: sorting through old memories, laughing at old jokes, remembering old friends, shaking my head at old scenes I'd blocked out.

But as I sorted through older and older entries, dating back to 2002, it got almost painful... certainly embarrassing. I was so juvenile, so self-conscious, so desperate to assert my happiness even when I was clearly miserable, so entirely boy-focussed, and most of all just so... young. Punctuation is overused horribly, and there are a few spelling errors. So many of the entries just display my teenage self-consciousness, a desperation to please, for everyone to approve, and utter dejection whenever anyone dares to say anything negative.

But in amongst the trash, there was a lot worth keeping — more recent stuff than old. In a lot of the old entries, I seem to be trying to test how many boundaries I can break and how much painful internal monologue I can dissect, while still desperately trying to appear somehow happy, Christian but "cool", popular with guys but not a slut. Ugh.

But disregarding aforementioned trash, I think I might create a blog of selected archives... there are a lot of entries which contain valid opinions and arguments that, while poorly-constructed and poorly-thought-out, are passionate and do have some valid points.

Of course, I can now label all of them, which makes it so much easier to sort through... most of the ones worth keeping are in pretty definitive categories. God, writing, internal monologues... I don't think there's much else worth keeping, but oh my god I repeated the God problem a lot! There are almost two years' worth of entries solely on the God conundrum; I don't know how I managed to stay sane through that.

I may post some of these less trash-worthy entries in a separate "Selected Archives" blog at some stage. If so... I'll let you know.

Kuwait

So, it turns out I may not need to worry about Dad going to South Korea. He's been offered a job somewhere slightly more appealing: Kuwait.

At least South Korea's a Christian nation, with people Dad gets on with and in a country he likes. Kuwait is, to be fair, one of the less radical Muslim countries, but it's still illegal to proselytise Muslims, so not quite as liberal as, say, New Zealand. Or, for that matter, South Korea.

Kuwait are offering him a financially better deal than South Korea. It would be uncovered territory for Dad: something new and interesting to do, somewhere new and interesting to be. And as he commented to me, he speaks Arabic every bit as well as he speaks Korean.

I'm not as upset as I was when I found out Dad might be moving to South Korea, but that's probably because I'm now used to the idea that my father may be leaving New Zealand to go to the other side of the world, alone, for a year. But Kuwait as opposed to South Korea is still a shock.

Mum and Dad laughed away my fears of a wartorn country (I know nothing about Kuwait). Dad told me, reassuringly, that the woman from the recruitment agency said she's been there three years and not yet seen a soldier in uniform. Well, if the recruitment agency say that, it must be true.

I suspect it's similar to Kyrgyzstan; basically a second-world country — what might seem third-world to many Kiwis and others who've never seen true poverty. I have no doubt that Dad will be able to cope with living again in a second-world country again.

My concern is for Dad, and for Mum and Sasha, rather than me. I don't think it will affect me that much. (I've told Mum to make sure his life insurance is up-to-date. She says it is.)

There are positives and negatives each way. Kuwait would is better financially and it's a new, unexplored country to Dad. He'd still have phone access and probably internet access as well, so he wouldn't be cutting himself off from the rest of the world.

And, to be honest, a year's not a long period of time.

We'll see.