Posts Tagged ‘exams’
Examinations
It begins with the stress, the rapid firing of neurons through their synapses, the electric screams of your brain pleading with you, desperately trying to communicate that something is wrong, that something is awry, that something is amiss, that you shouldn’t walk into that cavernous dungeon with its lights dangling like poisonous tendrils and spewing out photonic spores onto the masses below, its floor harsh to the touch, every footfall registered with demonic fanfare as the room voices its echoey displeasure, reverberations telling you what you already know as you’re already aware that you shouldn’t be here, that you should flee while you still can, escape before the stone is rolled in front of the tomb, make a dramatic flight before the belly of the beast surrounds you, before you relive Jonah’s adventures on land and yet you can’t do that, can’t go with your natural instinct because you’ve put money into this, you’ve paid to be here, you went into this semester knowing that this was to come at the end, you knew that there was only one plausible series of causes and effects and that was a sequence that was fated to converge at this point and yet even knowing that you still feel in the pit of your stomach that this is not what you signed up for, not what you enrolled in at the start even though you know it was, even though you know it’s a contradiction but it’s one that your mind, in its ampered and tortured state, can reconcile and make nonsensical sense of, a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces jammed in the wrong places of a solution that you have walked into this room with, a jigsaw puzzle instead of the back-breaking textbook that should be traversing the grey matter, the elephant in your cranium, the pachyderm whose weight is drawing you inexorably towards the chair that you’re bending your behind into, the seat that was far away from you an instant before but perilously near now and now you’re placing your preciousnesses below you, your old cow of a wallet goes subdesk, your rarely used mobile phone swimming between the table leg flags, your ink-vessels floating on the wooden waves of the rickety table, your mathematical machine sailing across the ocean brown, listening for a foghorn to warn of impending disasters, a foghorn that emerges not from one of the hundred seas around you but from the overlord of this masochistic charade, the master of testing ceremonies, the scrutineer sans scruples that has just proclaimed and pronounced and told you to write, to scrawl your plagiarised opinions and pathetic ponderings neatly within the lines and any cynicism you had critiques itself out of existence as you scribble and scratch, scratchings that are surprisingly relevant and suppose that maybe, just possibly, just could-it-be, have you managed to enter the depths of hell and pogo yourself out whole, a spring-loaded visit brought to an abrupt and alarming end as the big hand passes the little hand passes the papers to the front passes the other dead tree turmoils passes the exit doors and now you’re out in the sunshine, trading one set of photonic spores for another, but these particles feel different, refreshing, invigorating, and you wonder what it was that you were worrying about so much before, what could have been so distressing as to set off this neurotic and neuronic chain of activity.
Exams, eh?
That was a 572 word sentence, in case anyone is interested. Followed by a 2 word sentence. Sometimes you just feel like not using a period. And if you’re really interested – I’m 99% certain I passed my exam today.
Marcel Proust - the long-sentence fairy
Tomorrow I go to see The Duel, at Wharf 2, if I can find it. More on that after I’ve seen it.
Epistemysics 