Teh Week of Suckage
Well, okay. It hasn’t ENTIRELY sucked, but this last week has definitely had its ups and downs.
What seemed like the first school Monday is some time was pretty average. In RS Callum, Nico and I came up with a ‘teaching’ strategy for the rest of the class to tell them all about pilgrimage. Naturally, it ended up as a comedy thing with three biblical characters going on pilgrimage in a modern society and making many jokes that are either to do with the Bible or are in very poor taste. We still have yet to perform it, but it now seems that Nico will be absent when we do, so God knows how it’ll end up playing out.
English, Drama and German played out in a fairly predictable manner, then in the afternoon we nearly finished watching the Da Vinci Code, but had to stop just before the last shot of Mary Magdalene’s sarcophagus under the glass pyramid things. I don’t care if that just ruined it for anybody – it was the only good bit of the film anyway. In DT we did plastics and stuff.
Tuesday… Started with being able to do badminton in PE, which was nice. What wasn’t nice was that I was on a court with Simon, Ollie M, Tom C and, later on, Mr Harding. This meant one thing, going in my direction: PWNAGE. Yeah, my minor skill was kinda eviscerated by the crazy smashes of all those bastards.
In Biology I was BETRAYED from all sides: by both Chris and Ned, who were sitting next to each other. I didn’t mind ’cause I could sit next to Max, where we talk about real man things, like… um… Well, we do actually get work done, which is fairly surreal.
That afternoon nothing happened in English or Maths.
Wednesday was nerve-wracking at first since I (supposedly) had a German speaking exam at 3:30 – leaving me the whole day to worry. In fact when I woke up I found that I had a voice that sounded not dissimilar to Christian Bale’s Batman – i.e. a very husky voice that was completely useless for doing German orals with. On arrival at school I went to see Mr Heath, and informed him (huskily) of my situation, and asked if I could have a different day. He said that in fact because I was the final candidate to be tested on the Wednesday, he could fit me in at 9:00 the next day, before anyone else. Slightly elated by this news, I went on to go through a fairly hilarious electrolysis of brine in Chemistry, where Max coined the ‘Batman-esque’ voice and where no-one believed that I actually had laryngitis. I must admit that it did sound a tad on the fake side, but I really wasn’t enjoying myself, so I don’t exactly know why I’d do that deliberately. In DT we did some more boring revision stuff… it sucked. In RS that afternoon a bunch of people were missing due to Art exams all Wednesday and Thursday so we couldn’t do our hilarious performance, and so we did some ultra-fun revision papers… which we’d done before.
Wednesday afternoon we had planned to finally test my kayak properly on a small sailing lake near our house, so I got all of the necessary gear together whilst my father tied the boat to the roof of his car. As we were leaving, he turned round, as he normally does, by reversing under a low roof…
Bam. Sizable hole in bottom of boat. Son rather upset. Father very angry.
Well, I was pissed for about five minutes, but then I saw the funny side: more damage had actually been done to the roof (large chunk of solid wood broken off) and the car (very bent roof rack and busted fixture on roof) than the kayak. Ipikayay, motherfucker. My father, inconsolable as ever, immediately set to work on repairs. Currently the boat is actually fully working again, with the hole patched by a lot of glass fibre mat and filler and then repainted, but has still yet to be tested.
Thursday morning I woke up at 4am and didn’t get back to sleep until I woke up at 6:45. I had a shower, and ate breakfast, and my hands were shaking. I have no idea why; I’m good at German. I can say almost anything in German with ease. Well anyway, I didn’t revise on the bus – I didn’t feel that I needed to – and I didn’t revise in the time between when the bus arrived and when I went into the role-play preparing room at 9:00. I was given a sheet and a roleplay – it was my Austrian exchange partner’s mother’s birthday tomorrow. What should I get her, what is my ideal present, what do I think about celebrating in a restaurant – Standard stuff. I decided to jazz it up a bit, adding in some tenses and a few adjectives I wasn’t supposed to know. At 9:15 Mr Heath came and took me into the exam room, where I sat down.
The test began.
I breezed through the first three questions of the RP as I had them written down, but then the fourth, an unknown, came: what did I do for my birthday last year. Well… Um… I went to the beach with my friends, we ate food and listened to music. A complete lie, but one in decent German.
Then came my presentation, for which I was going commando without a cue card. That was also fairly easy, although I suspect myself of missing a sentence or two. After that was the general conversation questions, for which I had house and home and free time and entertainment, which are two of the easier topics. I breezed through both, making up much of the answers as I went.
The test finished.
With my heart beating ten to the dozen, Mr Heath suddenly looked happy. What the hell was going on? He said that I’d managed to talk for an extraordinarily long amount of time, and that if I didn’t get an A* he’d eat his baseball cap. I asked if he had a baseball cap, and he said no, but he’d buy one for the occasion. I was given a chocolate for my troubles, and was about to leave until Mrs Treeby, who had been standing guard outside the door, came in and told me that I had said one of the best roleplays she’d ever heard. Nice.
Having done that, I went straight into Spanish, in which I could remember nothing except German for the first half hour, then in double Drama we did awesome drama games for the first half of the lesson, then boring stuff on computers for the second half. German was alright because I had done my exam, and I got to sit next to Lauren again. We did a weird alphabet thing with some supply teacher, then Maths was average.
Friday… was jack. Maths was dull, then a timed essay in English was pretty darned crap (‘going green’), and then we had to take the school photo, which our year hasn’t done since year 7. We lined up for ages, with me standing next to Simon W and Calum, with Simon relentlessly perving on Helena Fairs and stalking Miss Westecot(sp?) – It was a side of him I’ve never really seen before. Then when we were up on the scaffold I was surrounded by JP, James Twat (can’t remember his surname), who was chewing gum in THE most annoying and loud way, and some other twats from year ten. It all took a long time, and I really wanted to punch someone by the end of it. We did get an extra half-hour of lunch time, however. I was actually having a pretty crap lunch time, but then Charlie threw an apple core at the back of my head (not deliberately – I’m told) so I decided that in fact I would go to the RS revision session after all. That sucked.
German was boring, English had strange Of Mice and Men games. End of week.
On Saturday I went down to our boat with my dad to do some maintenance work, where I dismantled, cleaned, greased and reassembled a winch. This actually took all day, ’cause I couldn’t work out how to put it back together again. When I got home I was pretty chuffed, because it seemed that my mother had stopped by Morrisons on the way back from the Norfolk Broads (she is a voluntary auxiliary navigation ranger there) and had bought me the new Wii game I’ve been ranting about to anyone who will listen, Little King’s Story. I’ll probably review it somewhere at some point. In short, it’s a life-sim RTS RPG with charming graphics, but some great humour and very solid gameplay. My favourite character that I’ve encountered was Kambell of the Sect of Soup, who says ‘Ramen’ at the end of every sentence. I built him a church.
On Sunday morning I went on a four mile walk with my mother in the morning then played Little King’s… ahem… revised for my Spanish oral very hard all afternoon. I should probably be worried about it, but I just don’t care enough.
I spent today, as it was a bank holiday, rooting through my laptop to remove a particularly annoying and malicious trojan (no idea how I picked it up) and playing LKS in the meantime when it the PC froze. No Heroes, which kinda annoys me, but I did revise some Español instead.
Musically, has Peter directed me to Ebben Flow, the soundtrack for a non-existent RPG. Listen to ‘New Sea’, cuz it’s awesome.
Oh, I’ve also watched the first four episodes of ‘Fringe’ on the internet, a sci-fi TV series about the FBI investigating happenings to do with ‘fringe’ sciences: telekinesis, teleportation, precognition, reanimation, etc. It’s an odd one, because in some ways it’s serious and original, and in others it’s completely generic and utterly silly in all aspects; the latter usually applies when trying to explain a plot line to someone.
Safe for another week… Phew.
Wish me luck in Spanish tomorrow.
I,Blog 