Ha, how could I forget. Not just essays loom large over the horizon for the student. But equally, the prospect of exams. I worry how I will adjust to life after university, when evaluation of my performance won't take place in a disused canteen, in silence...with my phone turned off...in two hour blocks. I am not naive, and know whatever I end up doing after university, I will have to jump through hoops and present myself for the approval of those above me in the food chain. However, I do dearly look forward to it feeling a little less arbitrary and concentrated.
I only actually have two exams. I live with a girl who has 5. I don't mention people by name in this blog very often, so let's have a bit of trivia. Her name is Sarah. She hails from North Wales, and that rhymes. She has a hot water bottle and is a vegetarian. There we go. I hope you're taking notes by the way, there will be questions at the end. But two exams feels like a lot when you've only understood half the course. I know, I know, people make their own beds and lie in them. People who don't understand things by this point in life should understand the necessity of humbling themselves and asking for help. But when you haven't understood half the lectures, there becomes a point when it becomes both embarrassing and a little impolite to send your tutor an email telling him how inpenetrable and tedious his course is. And I love that guy, anyway.
The problem is that whenever I attempt the very difficult bits of philosophy, I always fall short. I should stick to Ancient Philosophy, when it was all very simple because they were the first people to say anything, or the wishy washy ethics modules. I do not have that extra motivation, intuition and intelligence to simply understand it. I will buy myself a really big cake and invite everyone I know to eat it, if I ever understand Descartes to the required levels as stipulated by my university. This cake'll be fucking huge.
But I shall return to Wales for a moment, like the devolution debate, or Dawn French. She's from Angelsey. Don't say you don't learn things reading my blog, Maxfans. My other housemate, whose name is James, has recently received two rather large pieces of post. Combined, they comprise seven separate brochures for holidaying in Wales. The Valleys, Carmarthenshire, Brecon Beacons, the lot. Glossy, slick and utterly unenticing. Who would ever want to holiday in this country? I'm not disparaging about the UK, and there's much to do here. But why anyone would want to spend a long weekend in Haverfordwest as opposed to Barcelona eludes me. The only way I can positively summarise my experiences of Welsh holidays as a child would be: character-building. And even that sounds ambiguous.
I've not posted much on this recently, having been somewhat deflated. Of the various rights of passage to becoming an adult, I consider some of them achieved for me, some not. Losing one's virginity, graduating from school/university, learning to drive, leaving home, that sort of thing. Anyway, I've been going through the "first serious breakup" stage of becoming a fabulous young adult. This is where relationships as represented through films, music and tele let me down. For all the representations of dizzying butterflies in the stomach, blazing rows and gut-wrenching heartache, I was taken utterly by surprise by the overwhelming sense of sad, heavy disappointment and heightened-emotion that sits on you like...a big elephant, sitting on you. But not like in India, where they go mental and kill people, and George Orwell has to write an essay about having to shoot it (though really it was about imperialism and the role of the colonist, clearly). See, the mood got light again? Anyone who has ever read Shooting An Elephant will be right on board with me here.
But yes, I shall endeavour to instead dazzle my reader(s), (I sense that pluralised form was optimistic) with my spunky resiliance, my gallows humour and psuedo-intellectual asides about people like George Orwell.
