Exams. Nuff Said.

It's that time of year again, you know, the one where any sane teenager is driven insane and all the insane ones are perfectly fine.
Here, at least, I'm proven sane, as insanity has surely set upon me, especially this morning.

"I don't care about the laws of physics, I'm late for an English exam!"

Yes, I really did say that this morning. There were a few ill-judged moments on the way to school, and I'll let you peruse them at your leisure:

• [Upon seeing two people taking up the pavement with umbrellas]: I can make that.
• Bugger it's raining. Should I swap my VELVET school bag for something more waterproof? Nah...
• Those earphones will untangle.
• On average it takes me two songs to get to school. If I play Intro by the Gorillaz and Prelude 12/21 by AFI I'll get there quicker.
• That guy's made of smoke. I can walk through him.
• If I turn up the volume, the road workers won't be making such a noise. They'll disappear and I can walk my usual way.
• Cutting across a bumpy field and a wider corner will get me up the hill quicker instead of a tight paved curve.
  
• I see Shane. I can't be late. (N/B: Never trust Shane's punctuality)
• If I refuse to meet Miss Ram's eye, she won't try and talk to me. ('Don't you have an exam this morning?' Yes, and if you'd let me carry on I might make it there before everyone's FINISHED WOMAN!)
  
• [Contemplating school-run-filled main road]: I can make that.
• My locker will shut if I just stuff everything in quickly.
• That girl's made of smoke. I can walk through her.
• Kids smaller than me will get out of the way.
  

So after all that fun I finally make it to the Hall and sit talking to friends. Our Head of Keystage is sending in people row by row. Apparently I'm in row E. It's a little odd, I've never been earlier than J in the alphabet seating arrangement, being an S n'all.
I realised I was right to doubt as I walked into the Hall along with K. Ebanks, A. Effendi and C. Elsey (coincidentally all on a row the same as their last name).
I approached one of the stern old ladies we only see at that special time of year when it's seen appropriate for teenagers to sit in the same seat for more than an hour.
"Uh, I don't think I'm meant to be here."
"Who are you?"
"My name's Rachel Seller."
"No, I mean what's your exam number?" I'm sorry, when did this become the Armed Forces? As if I have name, rank and serial number etched on my mind. So I do the logical thing and stare at her like she's grown an extra head, to which I get the response I wanted.
"What's your surname?"
"I'm an S."
"Oh, you're in a classroom. Go out there and wait til you're told to go."
"Right. Ta." I wander out of the Hall, painfully aware of my boots on wooden floor in total silence, and go back to my seat in the first Hall, remembering with panic the conversation with my friends I'd just had:

Me: I'd hate to sit this in a classroom.
Her: I don't know, it's smaller, less pressure.
Me: Nah. Put me in an exam Hall I put my head down and work. In a classroom there's noises and doors and windows with CLOUDS on the other side of the glass...

Fun fun fun. Exams with distractions. At least I can do English. So I sat and contemplated the impending struggle I was facing in keeping my eyes on the paper (which I lost on a couple of occasions I'll have to admit) when Head of Keystage says, in a casual passing statement meant for nobody in particular "Anyone in classrooms should not still be here."
"WHAT?!"
"Where are you meant to be?"
"I DON'T KNOW, THAT'S WHY I'M STILL HERE." (Forced calm there, I'll have you know.)

I ended up at the back of a tiny maths classroom with a wall to slouch against (wall seats are always the best). Unbeknownst to me, however, I was at the 'wheelchair table'. We don't actually have any wheelchair-using students in the school, but just in case, every pod (collective noun for set of classrooms grouped by subject) has one. And I'd been sat at this pod's one for my exam. Probably obviously, people in wheelchairs don't need to stretch their legs. So upon trying to stretch my legs in the middle of the exam instead of passing easily through air my shins came in to very painful contact with a screen of metal. I don't know why there's a screen of metal across the front the the 'wheelchair table', nor do I know why this changes it's performance to make it more suitable for wheelchair-users than ordinary tables. All I know is they hurt. And they make a very loud noise when kicked.
So when the woman supervising our room looked over at the massive BANG she probably saw the girl who had rushed in late to a gabbled sosorrydidn'tknowwhereiwasreallysorrywherethehelldoisit? biting her knuckles with her eyes screwed shut hissing 'bastard, bastard BASTARD' to herself. Fabulous.

Later on I was sitting with the friends mentioned before discussing what we wrote about in the fiction prompt section. I agreed with a friend that the best prompt had been 'Write A Story Beginning With The Line: 'Some Days Just Have To Get Better'.
But while I had written the poetic mind-wanderings of a girl fleeing her life down a rainy street until she gets herself deliberately lost, she had written about a girl believing she was pregnant, then discovering she wasn't, but had an STD.

Me: I think that's probably worse...
Her: Piling on the misery gets you marks!
Me: If you write for Eastenders
Her: Yeah, well, I thought I'd stick an STD in there.
Me: That's what he said.

OH YES!

Mah rappin' SKILLZ!!1!



















Well seriously.



You try it.

Shoes For Thought

Currently Loving: An art project that threw me back twelve years to the films I watched as a small child. I now have the soundtrack of the Swan Princess and Thumbelina to accompany Anastasia and The Silver Brumby on my MP3 Player.

Another insomnia-filled night. I suppose I'm lucky I got four hours sleep. I don't need this now, but I guess it's better than having it in exam time.
Unfortunately I doubt it's one or the other.



Backpacking. To Marks and Spencer. On a Sunday afternoon. In the snow...
With a basset hound.
Nice.
Apparently, however, this kind of behaviour is not as exclusive to the Seller family as was first thought. While I sat outside M&S in increasing YouthOfToday fashion (twisted around a trolley barricade refusing to move for anyone) tugging a embarrassingly nosey hound out of the way of cars crawling along at about two miles an hour, I saw numerous brave souls in varying degrees of personifying the phrase Death Warmed Up trudging towards the collective beacon that was the tiny shop.
Then everyone seemed to freeze. More than we already were (British Spring? Are you kidding?)
A woman in a black skirt and suit jacket was walking across the car park. Her hair was immaculate, as was her makeup and posture. What set her apart however was that, while everybody in the vicinity (including the floor staff and management) was wearing either walking boots and hiking socks or wellies protruding over layered legs, this woman was wearing golden pumps with black lace stitched around the top. There was a single intake of breath from every backpacker and weatherbraver as they stared at this lunatic prancing past with snow on her feet and no a care in the world.
Again, this says so much for our community spirit. We do not meet other eyes. We certainly don't speak to one another. But if there is a break in the norm or a particularly outspoken rebellion and were there with our hisses and our stares.
English nature at its best.

Coming Of A Certain Number Before "Age"

Currently Loving: 20th Century Fox's "Anastasia". Just got the DVD for my birthday and I know every word after nine years since the video got thrown out.


I was sitting in History colouring in the Iron Curtain with a thick black marker when I realised I was probably obliterating cities at a time considering the scale of the countries I was bordering. The "shadow falling on the scenes" was, in effect, quite literal for those who lived right on the edge of that paper.

~~~

I woke up yesterday, and I was no different from the day before. At least I didn't feel different. Nobody ever does on their birthday.

But something obviously does change every time someone turns sixteen, as that's when the government decides they can trust you with - ahem - certain things. I don't really get it. Okay, so every government needs a point where they can say yes, you can do this now, but has anything really changed in that person as they shift from one age to another?

"Age is just a number." ~ Joan Collins

Exactly. People don't change over night. You can't suddenly be ready for these kinds of tings. Some people do it early, others wait for ages. This age is a number, just a number for the government to say they are exercising a certain amount of control on the few people who actually listen to them. You take a risk. You pay your part and see if it works out. Many people are left utterly disappointed, but hey, if everyone won, there'd be no risk, right?

Yeah, lottery tickets are bitches.

Amongst The Tree Wrestling (A True Story)

Last Saturday I helped out at my Grandmother's Christmas Fair.
Know what you're thinking.
Waaaaow, Rassy! How exciting!

Aaah, simple townie. You underestimate these women's cutthroat approach to Church Fundraising.

So I set foot into the small, bright FREEZING Church Hall and I'm immediately bombarded with 'hasn't she grown?'s and 'your the spit of your mother's. All's normal so far. I shouldn't and don't expect anything different from the once or twice a year I go to my mother's home town.
My Auntie and I are on a stall, and when I heard about it I thought it sounded great. Her idea was to have a Christmas Tree with numbered baubles on it. You choose a bauble, get the present with the same number on it. Simple, no? Not with these old ladies. It appears any idea that is not a) Thought up by a certain clique of old ladies or b) traditional to a Christmas Fair (tombola, bric-a-brac, bookstall) is instantly sabotaged from the inside. By my own grandmother no less. No worries, she'll never read this, I don't think she knows the Internet exists. So, instead of numbering the presents, my Grandma WRITES ON EACH ONE WHAT IT IS!!
Nyaaaaaarrgh!!
Why, Grandma?!
WHY??

So basically we got a lot of people asking what the point of it was. We had to explain unfortunately we had no idea. So that was Cloak and Dagger slightly. These old women commit Fair Attraction murder but get away with it because they pretend to be oblivious. Conniving beasts. What's annoying is they're really good actresses.

My brother was on the Name the Bear stall while my mother was helping out at toys. My brother needed a couple of fifties for change and my mum passed them over. Half an hour later she let slip she committed such a travesty, got a severe telling off from the old crone next to her and was sent to get it back. Territorial much? The cash is all going to the same place and in the end there's NO record of who got the most or suchwhat. These women just want any excuse to show off to their chums at the next Ladies Guild they single-handedly paid for the church roof.

Oh yeah, another thing. Bitchyness never dies out. It grows old with you. An argument broke out about who was on which stall. "I'll do it, Peggy!" "But where's Phillipa?" "I don't know but I'm doing it!!"
Peggy walks away and both woman's faces were mirrors. Nose crinkled up, gums showing, teeth bared. Scary scary. Remind me to keep Peggy sweet.

You also might have noticed I didn't do a currently loving up there. That's cause it's down here. There's two. First off, I was kicking myself I didn't have a camera that day, as I saw the one scene that would probably sum up Christmas Fairs all over the country. Santa, boots, beard and all, hanging round the corner out of sight of any kiddies listening intently to the announcements, raffle tickets clutched in gloved hand. Also, I'm currently ecstatic about the fact a woman my Grandma talks to on the bus has caught herself a toyboy with a boat in the Bahamas. Future me, here's to hoping.

The M Word

Currently Loving: My maths teacher's total obliviousness to the youth of today's language. Today we had to explain what LOL, ROFL and LMAO meant. He thought the latter was LAMO, as in, what a lame joke. He seemed to get that alot.



Maybe it's just cause I'm growing up. Maybe everyone thinks the world is ageing with them, that the prospect of something once so well loved is now looked upon as babyish or immature. It causes some to panic - and why shouldn't it? The idea you can never get back to when life was simple, when you took it day by day and never worried about the future. Never worried about war, politics, the environment, illness, death, the terrible things humans can do to each other.
Never worried.
These people have good reason to panic.
I don't know how I've lasted this long.
Perhaps I haven't, and I'm mad already.

Magic - pure, simple wand waving - is never used anymore. JK Rowling got it right in most aspects, and I think the reason she's so popular is that the initial idea of a school for kids with wands, broomsticks, cats and potions, is that is so darn simple nobody thought they'd get away with it. But she did. And how.
But now it's all shady, diluted magic, even those books and programmes about magic itself. Tithe and Ironside, gritty, 18-rated Faerie books, show magic as hazy and uncontrollable, best left alone.
Merlin, of all things, uses long Latin phrases the boy wizard hardly ever gets right first time.
Betwixt, by Tara Bray Smith, doesn't even bother describing the odd, instinctive magic it's characters use. A guy turns into a human Moth. What? How, why?!
Hell if I know.

Then there's the fact most things are entirely disowning magic altogether, and replacing it with it's greatest foe. Science.
Heroes is about a group of people who have certain strands of DNA that generated unique abilities.
Gone, by Michael Grant, features an unanswerable Lost-like conundrum that we know is linked to nuclear fallout.
Even one of the shows I'm the most faithful to, the fantastic Doctor Who, dismisses magic as nonexistent.

Martha: Is it real, though? I mean, witches, black magic, and all that? It’s real?
The Doctor: Course it isn’t!

Dudes. What's wrong with a couple of choruses of Abracadabra?

By The Power Of Three Let Them See

Currently Loving: Why Should I Worry? from Oliver and Company (it's Billy Joel!! SQUEE!!)

Megan Fox, Keira Knightley, Emma Watson, Beyonce Knowles... the list goes on and on. All these girls are considered the height of everything. They're successful, they're rich and they're beautiful.
Or, as some may say, these girls are glamorous.

glam⋅our  /ˈglæmər/ [glam-er] –noun
1. the quality of fascinating, alluring, or attracting, esp. by a combination of charm and good looks.
2. excitement, adventure, and unusual activity: the glamour of being an explorer.
3. magic or enchantment; spell; witchery.

Yeah, see that last one? A glamour is one of the primal forms of magic, dating back to the beginning of mythology. Essentially, it changes your appearance to anyone looking at you, although some can cast glamours on things around them. It's not particularly offencive in magical battle (what some I know would call "flashy stuff" (I know no Wiccans, unforunately)) but looks a lot of fun if it exists.
Thing is.
Glamour.
Glamourous.
Fake?

Something to show you what some glamours are like, although you'll have to skip to the end, I couldn't cut it, sorry: