6 liters of cider later...

Yesterday, 6 long, studious, painful weeks ended.

Of course, being the member of a Gang of Losers that I am, there was still an exam to pass before I could finally breathe again, and what do you know, I'm part of the half of my class that got screwed and had the B exam.

In this case, B obviously stood for Brutally Hard.

Or Bummer.

Oh well.

The bitter taste I had in my mouth once I heard the questions those lucky bastards with the A exam had had soon disappeared though.

Being the classy broad that I am, the first thing I did once I got out of the exam room was to grab my friends and schlepp to the nearest supermarket to buy as many cider as we could carry.

Let's just say we could carry a lot and it wasn't long before I was pretty intoxicated.

Hell, after those six atrocious weeks, I could have gotten drunk on Fanta I think.

Except that well, one of my poisons of choice is cider and so here I was, tumbling on the school lawn and calling people by their name+first name+ birthdate.

It was a truly memorable morning-afternoon-evening-night and if I may say so, in no small part thanks to my erratic behavior and drunk hyena laughter.

Mr K. did tell me that he loves the fact that I am a funny drunk though.

I'll toast to that !

x, K.

With A Little Help From My Friends.

I spent the last two days crying.
It seemed that everything I tried failed.

Exercises that had once seemed easy were now impossible and I couldn't seem to study anything.
I was burning our meals, bumping in everything and hurting myself seemingly every second.
I was spiralling downwards and as time was passing by, it kept on getting worse, every minute bringing me closer to my exam.
Just as it felt like I had reached a point of no return where failure was the only option, it dawned on me that there really was only one thing to do : call E.

I've known E. a long time now, and despite (or maybe thanks to ?) the fact that we're both very headstrong, she's always been like a sister to me.
While our highschool science teacher made us realize that we actually are real sisters (aaaah the wonders of genetics...) I seem to be the wussy one of the two and I always lean on her for moral support.
She doesn't take shit from anyone and I knew that she was the person I had to see in this state : no way she was gonna let me waste time crying with our exam fast approaching.

That's how, on a warm and sunny day, we locked ourselves in the library, doing exercise after exercise until we felt we understood them.
I will admit, a part of me is still trying to get me to jump off my terrace, asking over and over again whether I'm sure that I'll remember what we did today, and whether I really understood it or if I just thought so.
That same part of me is still pretty convinced that there's no way on earth that I will manage to succeed at that exam.

But, it's only a part of me.
Thanks to E., another part now believes that there might be a chance that I won't fail.
Also, I didn't waste another day crying, and for that, I will owe her eternally.

Thanks man.
You have no idea of how much you helped me today.

x, K.

Post Traumatic Stress.

Two days ago I had a particularly stressful exam.

My teacher wrote each of the 500 pages of his book himself and, believe it or not, he actually wants us to quote them word for word at the exam.

- It's ok if you think that I'm shitting you, I would have never believed it if I hadn't been a victim of his particularly stupid and narcissistic way of interrogating students.

I had already passed two of his classes and I didn't see any reason why this year's one would be different.

Sure, it hurts a bit to try and cram 500 fucking pages of keywords in your head, but then so do a lot of other things that we do every day.

Actually, I was even pretty chill when it came to that exam.

Been there, done that, it would just take a lot of willpower and empty memory space.

Or so I thought.

For reasons unknown, those damned words didn't want to travel from their page to my head.

I gave up two days in a row until it was really a matter of sink or swim and I had to forceps them into my memory.

It's never pleasant.

The night before the exam, I was a hot mess.

For the life of me, I couldn't remember one word of what I had studied. -see previous post

It goes without saying that come bedtime, there were lots of tears and very little sleep.

On the morning of, my sweet Mr K. took precious time out of his own studying to help me go over every damned detail of it.

Picture me sitting on my bed, repeating my lesson with tears in my eyes like a child who didn't do his homework.

Not one of my finest moments.

When I arrived to the exam room, I could barely stop myself from fainting.

All my hard work was gonna be destroyed by one stupid exam which was supposed to be piece of cake.

It's a miracle that I didn't run after Mr K. and ask him to take me far, far way from uni.

Once I saw the questions, things seemed to look up a bit though.

Except from two questions (out of 10) where I went into full freestyle mode, I actually remembered my shit when it came down to answering.

Before giving back my exam, I painstakingly calculated that even if he was very strict in his notation, I should manage to pass.

Getting out, I talked with some friends who miraculously seemed to have answered roughly the same as me.

It seemed that once again, I had worked myself into hysteria for nothing.

Reassured, I left uni to get back to my ball and chain : my piles of study material.

From then on, things took a turn for the worse.

During the ten minutes that it took me to walk home, I went over and over all my answers again, dissecting them mercilessly in my head.

With every step, I became less sure that I had actually done good at the exam.

When I got home and started rereading my notes, every little key word that I had forgotten was one more nail into my coffin.

By the time I called my parents to tell them my impressions, I was sure that I had miserably failed.

I was so distraught that it took me a second to realize that my dad was mocking me when he wondered whether or not I'd actually have a negative grade.Ah ah.

Two days on and I'm not only certain that I failed that one, I'm also convinced that I'm gonna fail all the others which will then result in my failing Uni and failing my life.

I've actually gotta run : I have to see if any of the sleazy bars next to the train station are hiring.

God knows that I won't find work anywhere else.

x, K.

Where Is My Mind ?

My head collapsed and there was nothing in it so I ask myself:

Where is my mind?

I know that it happens every time.
I know that as long as I have exams, it will keep on happening.
Still, it doesn't make it less scary.
At all.

See, I seem to suffer from stress induced post study amnesia.
One second, here I am, reciting -chanting even- what I just learned to Mr K.

I do my best parrot impersonation and make sure that I say word what is written on my sheet.

Sheet of paper after sheet of paper, I go through what I have to study for my upcoming exam and I get more pumped with each one that I recite correctly.

Then comes the night before my exam.

All of a sudden, I couldn't say what I studied for the life of me and I then proceed to impersonate a fish instead of a parrot.

Blub blub blub.

The -veeeery tiny- rational part of my brain knows that all my working has paid off and that it is actually stored somewhere in the back of my head but that rational part doesn't talk quite as loud as the other part.

That's when my fish impersonation turns into a headless chicken one.

Not a good look.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I will get out of that exam room and admit to Mr K. that yes, again, he was right and I remembered my shit.

Hell, so far I haven't gotten out of an exam in tears, wailing that I had indeed forgotten everything.

Still.

The mere thought of it happening, the mere vision of me giving black a blank copy will probably always ensure that I work myself into a frenzy the night before any exam.

Oh well.

As long as the only thing that I OD on to calm my nerves is pasta, I should be fine.

x, K.

Placebo * Where Is My Mind

(btw, I'm not an idiot.I know that the original song is from The Pixies which I also happen to love but the 13 year old inside me will always love any song sung by Brian Molko better )

Hello.

My name is K., I'm 22 and I am a CoSTA.

Yeah, you read that right, I'm a Compulsive Stresser Anonymous.

I can still trace back precisely when I had my first stress.

I must have been all of 7 years all and I was a pretty confident kid until the "cool girl" in our class told us that the key to succeeding at a test was to think that you failed it.

I guess that the point that she was trying to make was that you'll always be pleasantly surprised with your results if you think that you bombed an exam.

To my naive, influenceable brain though, what she was saying is that seeing yourself as a failure was the key to success.

Sadly, I'm afraid that thought has never really left me even though, over the years, it has morphed into something else :

a deep belief that I'm bound to fail.

Take last year.

I got pretty good grades at all my exams, yet, if you had asked me after each one of them, I would have told you that I didn't know how good it had been but that hopefully I had managed to safe face.

Do not even get me started on my mental state before my exams.

I have been known to cry myself to sleep (figure of speech, I actually manage to sleep very little) and to pop medicine like it's candy to soothe my terrible cramps.

Can you say wreck ?

I stress before and after an exam, until I get my grades.

If my grades are too close from 12/20, I stress that I won't have my average.

Hell, I even stress when I'm not stressing because if I'm so chilled, it obviously means that I'm not preparing myself good enough and that I'm gonna fail.

Ugh.

This year though, I'm gonna have to change my years because all my usual patient listeners will be M.I.A.

My parents think that I'm a bit crazy after I had a particularly nasty meltdown in January, convinced that I was going to fail my year then of course, my life.

Mind you, I hadn't had any exams then and my closest ones were 6 months away.

N. has started Med school and will have slightly more important things to do come finals than to listen to me wail on the phone.

Still, the biggest change this year is gonna come from Mr K.

For the past 4 years, come exam session he becomes my caregiver / psychiatrist / cheerleader and all around mama bear.

Sadly those days have come to an end.

Mr K. is now also studying for a Master's degree and he will be in his very own pile of shit.

There will be no crying my eyes out come bedtime because Mr K. will need his rest, no endless complaining because he will need to study...At 22, I'm finally going to have to be a big, independent, responsible girl and this might be what stresses me the most about this exam session.

I can't say that I remember how I felt when I started to ride my bike without training wheels, but I'm pretty sure that I'm feeling the same right now.

x, K.

All Alright.

For the best part of this year, I've been busy with a ginormous school project.
We first had to write a newspaper than come up with a communication strategy about AIDS in Southern countries.

I fought to have this subject.
While I don't have the science abilities or resistance to blood necessary to attend med school (props to you Dad and baby brother!)that doesn't stop me from being fascinated with medicine related stuff.
I grew up listening to my dad's (who is a GP) stories at the dinner table and was always rather interested.
And no, by that, I don't only mean that I'm obsessed with Grey's Anatomy.
I mean that I actually grew up sneaking around with my dad's books and that one of my favorite reads as a kid was "100 extremely weird medical cases".

As you imagine, I was pretty pumped when I knew I was going to be looking for info about AIDS for 8 months.
Here I was with my subject of choice, on my way to academical success.
Right.
As soon as I met the members of my group, I knew it wasn't going to be the walk in the park I thought it would.

See, I like to see myself as a very driven person.
I know what I want and while I h-a-t-e sitting at my table for hours on end, cramming theory inside my head, I know what I have to do to get it and maybe I'm not a study bunny, but I do love to write.
I love searching for sources, illustrating my papers, interviewing fascinating people...and I don't count my time while doing so.

I quickly discovered that not everyone was like me.
Stuck with a ditzy boy always playing with his hair and two non native speakers among others (we were 7) I came to the bitter realization that I was pretty much on my own.

Except that i wasn't and that's maybe the worst.
See, the problem wasn't really the work amount it was the fact that I never knew what to expect from those jackasses.
I'm not going to launch myself into a bitter catty tirade but let's just say that I had my fair share of knotted stomachs, never knowing if they would respect their deadlines and if not, if I would have enough time to do their work for them.

Thank God though, instead of having the sucky ending that I was expecting until today, this story ends good.
They studied the text I wrote them and our presentation went pretty smoothly.
Our grades will probably not be mind blowing but hey, at least, they didn't manage to sink my boat.

Now to be perfectly honest, I don't really know how to end this post.
I didn't learn anything new from that experiment, except maybe that really, you can only count on yourself.
There's not really a morale, or if there's one, it is that if you're a bunch of slackers stuck with 3 hardworking girls (I wasn't really the only one working, that would have been the death of me), fear not because they will single-handedly make sure that you get good grades.
Blah.

What I did learn though was a very valuable lesson : when all else fails and you have to work for 6, there's always Diet Coke and pretzels.

x, K.


Thanks to my awesome cheerleaders, I managed not to go all Lizzie Borden on my teammates. Pfiew.

The Joy of Giving Up.

The calendar of a University student in Europe is a very weird one.
Every winter, you find yourself dreading Christmas because that means that your exams are right at the door.
You absentmindedly pick at the feast that your mom spent hours cooking as your mind is racing, not letting you forget that really, you should be studying.

Easter is another holiday that falls victim to exams.
While I haven't chased chocolate eggs in the garden for quite a while now (bummer), I used to always love spring break for the two peaceful weeks of (usually) clement weather that it offered.
Now ? not so much...
There are books to read, lessons to learn, exercises to do, ... and all the while you know that it's just prep work and that the real work hasn't started yet, that one whole month of studying and exams still awaits you.
It's kind of like getting a root canal but knowing that you'll have to come back soon to have your wisdom teeth taken out.
Joy.

The fact that me and Mr K. both are at uni certainly helps, I mean, who doesn't like knowing that they're not in it alone?
Those past days, we woke up and went on with our day with the painful precision of well trained robots : breakfast-study-lunch-study-dinner-sleep-start again.

But not today.
Today, we opened our eyes and saw a grey sky out the window.
Today, the little place between his shoulder and his neck where I like to hide when I sleep seemed that much more warm and comfortable.
Today, we said screw it, and as I was drinking a cup of fresh orange juice nestled in my pillows, I realized that working hard might make you feel good about yourself, but boy, does giving up every once in a while feel heavenly...

x, K.

Mr K., happily giving up on the world last summer.