Differentiation & Integration.

Mechanics Massacre.

DISCLAIMER: It’s one thing feeling bad about not doing as well as you thought on an exam, and a whole other thing doubting whether or not you’re passing your national certificate examinations. It’s a little more than pressure, it’s a matter of psychological life and death, an occupational hazard. If you’re not aware of the how much the system affects your future or you’re not from around here long enough to get a whiff of it, I’d suggest you skip the comment box, take your “You’re being a pussy and a drama queen’ and effectively shove it. I, as well as a multitude of Sanaweyya casualties, have just FAILED an exam on our last detrimental year of the fucked up system that has taken education, aptitude and the worth of a person, mashed them together and produced a fucking monster that has zilch to do with either of the aforementioned sugar, spice and everything nice.

I’m sure a lot of you have seen this post coming, because just as I wouldn’t miss a chance to rant about a well-deserved cause on my blog, a chance that doesn’t come by ever so often in this mundane whirlpool that identifies with the more relatable oxymoron of ‘student life’, I equally use this as a sandbag knowing full well that most of you don’t even exist out of my head. This is not really a post as much as it is me using my Maths drafts for catharsis fully believing that it’s a better use of ink and paper judging the mechanics fiasco that took place last morning, one that I’m sure will have engraved itself in my head long after I’m well within my wits to register a lot more important things, like for instance how many spoonfuls of sugar I take in my coffee or my last name.

For those of you who are not as locally grounded as most, checking the news or the hash tag would fill you up on how the mechanics exam caused rallies and acts of rampage in schools everywhere, rendering the more friendly exchange of ‘how’d you do today?’ to ‘Are you passing?’ But let’s not get ahead of ourselves as I give you an impression of how it felt in firsthand experience. Not that you care, we all know that blogs do nothing but send the information out into cyberspace where nobody bothers to pick up the signals with their long term memory antennas.

Sitting there for two hours staring at an advanced Mechanics exam paper, knowing that within its folds lie my future, my options and everything I’ve ever worked for, one that could make or break my career choice and life as I know it really, not sure about one result in the whole goddamn paper, that is within the ones that I’ve actually solved, was nerve-wrecking. I kept it together till the last plotted minute, knowing  for a fact that I’d flunk but not giving myself the excuse of going out without a fight. Leaving the torn down class that goes by the more fancy semantic of an exam hall, feeling like a loser and watching life as I know it getting flushed down a public toilet, I’m surprised by the sight of not one, but each and every student breaking down as soon as they hit the gates. The spectacle, as put by my worrying parents waiting in the car, was described as ‘They’d wait till they hit the gates, wail and pass out, then get shipped into their respective cars, that deserved the title of hearses at that point.’ The more composed of us didn’t pass out or wail, but broke down in hysterical blubber as soon as they set foot in their little portable comfort zones. The feeling of being an absolute failure was elated when I found out that my fellow A students also weren’t sure of one result in their papers, as a matter of fact, most of which didn’t even have time to complete the exam and were pretty sure we’re not passing. The staircase was the hardest to get through, with people passing out and breaking down in every corner, and I was hurriedly ushered out by my mother who came to the rescue when she saw the state of the ones who took, or rather were taken, to an earlier exit.

I am sitting here, with the knowledge of what happened, the fact that the same dude who put the Mechanics exam is the one that put the Differentiation and Integration exam I’m sitting tomorrow, as well as the Algebra and Solid Geometry exam I’m sitting 4 days later, and I’m trying to find a reason to work and coming up with nix. The feeling of failing so drastically as opposed to being an A student all throughout your educational voyage, getting 98% the first year and the silhouette of a 60%, at best, looming on the horizon for the second, seeing your life slip away because some teacher out there was given orders to fuck up the curve so the colleges wouldn’t have to handle an influx of people who’ve worked their fingers to the bone and their parents wallets threadbare into their oh so cherished paternally caring government hands is indescribable. Fair is one thing, this is a whole other thing. This is not a difficult exam that people are whining about, this is an impossible exam that’s not designed for its appointed exam hours or the capabilities of an average student, or an A student, or a fucking student to begin with. The fact that they’d sit there all blue collar and confident claiming that its proportional to the time, work or pressure pulling on its sleeves is outrageous. The fact that they’d gamble our nerves, futures and well being like that is something I don’t even have a word for. Should I be happy that nobody got one question right? Should that be of any consolation? It’s not. This is my work. This is three fucking years worth of work, three years worth of putting everything else on hold and investing 17 hours a day into shit I, as well any other human being living in the 21st century, don’t need to know. This is three years of not having a life. It’s three years worth of anxiety and terror over a future that is hanging by a thread. This is three years of being plugged into a system over which you have no control.

I am sitting here and I am trying to find a fucking reason to keep going. I’m trying to find a reason to work when I know that nothing I do right now is ever going to matter. Hell, even Hogwarts’ sorting hat wouldn’t be able to get me out of this ditch. All is lost, I know it, everybody knows it, and we’re still asked to keep it together and keep working. The patient is dead, but hey, keep resuscitating, keep zapping him and maybe the sheer voltage going through his body will dislodge your sanity enough for our logic to take a comfortable seat.

I have failed an exam in 3rd secondary. Amnesia, lemme see you swing your bat at that.

Fuck the system.

Of Midnight Student Rants And Afro Pixies.

As usual, I’m on here till my coffee cools down then I’m back in the work ditch. Not much has been happening due to the widely acknowledged fact that during exams, you lose the concept of time and luxury of having a life. However, a small update, whoever said that once you’re in the exam cycle you won’t know what hit you till you’re out, you’re delusional. It’s psychological warfare. But hey, it totally makes sense that the centuries-old tradition of judging your humane abilities by your robotic capabilities since you were so kind as to evolve and lose your giant mass of ape hair works. Sure, it’s also perfectly logical that you have to remain fully functional knowing that your whole life and career aptitude depends on a percentage that is graded by severely under qualified pseudo-teachers at best and the former armed with no degree in the actual subject, a typo’d model answer and are aggressively biased against people who actually got an education at worst, meaning they grade you worse if you actually know your shit to bring about some sort of communist-induced jungle justice to their own government-bred kids. Praise the system, all ye faithful.

A saying goes around that pressure is the only disparity between Carbon and diamonds, but then again, I’ve never really liked bling. Due to lack of sleep and a sorely mistimed panic attack,  I managed to lose 1.5 times more marks in Physics alone than I’ve lost last year in all subjects, driving me between a rock on a hard place with only a couple of more marks to go around before I’m actually out of the realms of my designated major. I hadn’t had one of those ‘crying while saying I want my daddy’ fits since I was 6, brought about a lot of memories. What pisses me off is that once I actually got sleep, I found them out on my own, which brought about a minor adjustment to the national certificate studying strategy; being fuck work if you can get sleep instead because apparently, that ‘if you can’t walk the walk don’t talk the talk’ rule applies out of Brooklyn. Of course, there’s that little setback that is none other than the fact that I have to go on and manage not to lose it before the 4th of July, because yes, you’ll have to schedule your reactions to be part of the system, another one of em robotic parts. Meh, I’m whining, enough of that.

Pressure does a whole lot of weird things to you, like getting an afro pixie cut in my case for instance. My hair looks like it put up a good machete fight with a very pissed Hulk Hogan, leaving me with the look of a recovering Cancer patient. I’ve come to terms with it because it’ll go on my list of proofs for ‘Not everything that feels good is necessarily right’ rule. Truth be told tho, it feels so awesome that I got half a mind to go on a bald pride parade. There’s still the little con of how I went from Sphinx to Tranny on a boring day. Oh well.

'And then they lived happily ever after..having applied as human guinea pigs for unauthorized lab experiments on a new mood drug.'

There are of course other things pressure does to you that hardly need be acknowledged in any textbooks, like sending an ‘I miss you’ text to the worst possible person at 4 am, theatrically passing out in Maths class for forgetting to eat, pulling a controversial elaborate prank that has a church congregation list you on their ‘To be assassinated while making it look like an accident’ list, and, well, saluting a mosquito for putting up one hell of a fight with your shower head. The usual.

The really great thing about this whole examination trauma I’m going through is that the last exam, the day I’m finally out of this ditch and back into the real world, the day I leave high school and go to college,  is conveniently the 4th of July. Independence day has taken a whole new meaning in my book.

To wrap it up, a shoutout to humans, an air supply can't always be an oxygen mask, crying over spilled booze is hangover without the missing 24 hours, and every time you feel like beating yourself up over a bad decision, remember that at one point, the whole world firmly believed that fluorescent flare pants were a pretty cool idea. With that I leave you, take good care of yourselves, you’re all you have.

‘Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be so hard. Oh take me back to the start.’

One day, I will forget your name, and many years later, it'll sound familiar on an obituary. Life is kind that way.

All Dem Nuns Be Making Me Go Soft.

Life has been taking more of a life-y pace lately, slowing down at all the right times and speeding up when you don’t need it to linger, kind of like ballroom dancing with a sumo wrestler; in the sense that the guy is big enough to slow the earth’s revolution while showing surprising agility that works just right when you least expect it to.

The exams are going considerably well, even though I still can’t get my head around the fact that I’m graduating. School mates aren’t  hostile for a change and everything has taken more of that malleable, passive aggressive, social-friendly air that only comes in preparation for nostalgia’s crash course.

I’m pretty sure a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have been able to think of two things that I’m going to miss about that place, but to my pleasant surprise, the list is filling up pretty quickly. Granted, a lot of things were consistent about not having a snowman’s chance in hell to making it on that list, like for instance the competitive mini-Stalins running around disguised as teenage chicks. Man, I’d rather have my eyebrows plucked by a blind Asian seamstress till the apocalyptic horns sound than see them again. However, some squeezed through. Least expected was this; I’m going to miss the nuns.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Growing up, they looked like this:

They wait for us each morning in front of the scarily official, nightmare-of-a-surrogate-school-gates, being the only comforting faces in a crowd of blue collar oppressed maniacs that seem to detest us for the sole reason that we dare to breathe their rightfully-claimed, government-approved air. I don’t know about you, but moral support doesn’t come in a more fluffy package. I mean come on, loud joking nuns, it can’t get better than that. All I had to do when I was lost the first day was follow the all too familiar Lebanese accent back to shore. Is it weird that I can’t grasp the idea of going to an educational institution that doesn’t have eccentric nuns? How else is it going to feel like home? Don’t be too surprised, I can’t recognize myself either. Who would have thought I’d miss the same bubble I’ve wanted to burst for so long now?

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, I’m still two exams into the whole mess, but I guess that’s how the realizations ebb in, you know? Little by little, one creeping in every other day in indiscernible packages that sift through your conscious, like how I’ll never be sneaking into the storage room and playing that ancient piano that everybody forgot about again, or how I’ll never have to trade my Nutella sandwiches for cheese sandwiches, or how I won’t have to sit down and memorize all those Lebanese hymns for the annual Christmas recital again, even though I never really could keep it in there for longer than a couple of days, making sure to get the accent just right so the head nun (ma mère) would be happy then deciding that the rest of the corny choir will sing over me while I mumble blissfully, or how I’ll never be hearing Sister Tacla’s beginning of the year speech or make jokes about how she always manages to shove in her signature metaphor of ‘You’re the soul of this premises, without you it’d be a lifeless body and so would I.’

When did it go by so fast?

Maybe I am a little too old-fashioned after all, but hell, sue me. Look at me getting all mushy. Heh.

I’ve Got To Got To Gotta Take It Slow.

I Was Bored. Sue Me.