Before I posted this I felt obliged to post a warning here because the odds are that if you are my friend, you will not have the patience or the inclination to read the sorry crap that is going to be served up to your eyes beyond this point. This is the warning. Read this and you'll regret it, and IF you read this after all AND dare comment on it, I'll come afer you with a skewer. Or a chisel.
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If this blog is about unhappy tales then here is a unhappy tale to rival all the other unhappy tales on this blog. It is about how Zhenteng would fail the Unseen paper for the first time in her damned life, because someone up there had seen fit to bestow upon Zhenteng a glorious and unmitigated bout of headache and self-loathing for three-quarters of the first Lit paper.
It didn’t start out as a headache. It started out as a sense of loss as Zhenteng looked a the poems, comprehended them, and then discovered that she had no idea where to start. Fuzziness kicked in as the particular areas of the human brain where Zhenteng would feel buzz and churn whenever active thinking was taking place slowed down and disappeared into the abyss. So Zhenteng stared at the paper, and stared at the paper some more. Then she took up her pen and wrote down some utter garbage, which she discarded. She started on a new sheet of paper, wrote down some more utter garbage, and threw that away too. Then she finished the first paragraph on another sheet of paper and stopped.
Zhenteng was now at a loss, because by then she had begun to feel intensely uncomfortable. The foldable lecture theatre tables were beginning to feel like a prison from torso-down and her thighs stuck together under the ridiculous school skirt. Then Zhenteng, horror of horrors, began to feel hot and fat and stupid. At that point Zhenteng felt a strong and pleasurable urge to tear up her exam scripts, break the table, leap out of the exam hall and then leap off the building. In the end Zhenteng decided that the scene wasn’t worth the trouble (because even if Zhenteng survives the plunge, Zhenteng will never hear the end of it) and contented herself with repeatedly trying to unstick her thighs, twisting the metal holder on her pencil as a kind of substitute for tearing up her exam scripts, and staring blankly at the equally blank foolscap, which stared back. Then the fuzziness in Zhenteng’s head evolved somewhat and matured serenely into a fully-splendoured headache. The headache was not the pounding/throbbing/stabbing kind where the pain would jump in like a lightning bolt at regular intervals, which Zhenteng had been used to for the past few months. It was a dull and steady ache that left Zhenteng staring like newly-raised undead at her paper making feeble attempts to keep her thoughts coherent and her handwriting neat. The result was a thing which could not be called an essay, a disfigured pencil holder and a very demoralised Zhenteng (who recovered somewhat during the last quarter and thereby saved her Othello essay, but could not quite kick the self-loathing).
I think Zhenteng must really get more sleep tonight. I know ‘enough sleep’ is relative for a number of people, but if ‘not’ ‘enough sleep’ means screwing up another Lit paper I say sayonara to public opinion. Sleep is important.
And Zhenteng must really start dieting this time. More sayonara to public opinion. I don’t care if you think I need it or not.
Tomorrow I shall need to study math, consolidate my opinion on the –isms (and GODS HAD I BETTER DO GOOD IN KI TO MAKE UP FOR THE FAILURE IN LIT) and attempt not to die yet. My parents were nice enough to buy me some stuff on Sunday despite me being a horrible, sleepy, sarcastic-hypersensitive basket of nerves as usual. I don’t want them to have wasted the money and effort for nothing.
I think my Lit teacher may have gotten the worst deal, because she’s the one who will have to read Zhenteng's not-essay.
Fuck!
