yesterday's post:

today i clinched a new record- the 2/24 SPA F*ck-up Record. as the name suggests, it is only for those who bomb through 2 science practical assesments (which incidentally, count for my A levels, too!) within 24 hours. i am proud to belong to this elite club.

now that i have established what a loser i am, we have got to the part where somebody (preferably a tutor but that doesn't mean i don't value -your- opinion just as much) pipes in and says 'hey, it isn't so bad! stop exaggerating!' except that this time, it -is- so bad and i am not exaggerating. but go ahead, don't take my word for it:

let's start with chem. we had to do this gas collection thing for SPA, which involved decomposing hydrogen peroxide in a conical flask and delivering the oxygen gas into an inverted burette, so that water in the burette will be displaced downwards allowing you to calculate the amount of gas evolved. anyway. that part went smoothly. in fact, i was actually really pleased with myself because i mixed all the reactants very neatly and stoppered the flask almost immediately after that. the last few times i kept forgetting to insert the rubber tubing into the burette before the reaction, and ended up frantically squeezing the tubing in attempts to stop the gases from escaping. so, when no such incidences happened, i thought that everything had to be going well this time, right? wrong. like after the paper, when i was still buoyant from the successful gas collection, a quick poll proved that everybody got results that were directly opposite to mine. like me, they got 2 curves, but unlike me, their 1st curve was significantly higher than the 2nd. and there i was happily plotting the stupid graph, all the time marvelling at how gorgeously the points fell on the curve. really. my graph was so perfect! it's just sick that that it had to be wrong!

and then, there's the physics exam, which really merits a blog of its own, but since i can't be bothered, i'll just relate it here:

for physics this time, our level had the obvious disadvantage of taking the paper all at once, meaning that there weren't classes which got to take it later on in the space of the week, and, you know, be better prepared for what killed the earlier classes. anyway. apparently i underestimated the power of my classmates to get inside information, and when they were all desperately mugging the set-up of this weird test-tube experiment mintues before the paper, i dismissed it as baseless speculation and decided not to worry myself with it. as luck would have it, that EXACT thing came out for the paper, so when i saw the question you can bet a major swearfest went off in my brain. of course that wouldn't have been so bad if i had thought through the question logically and got down to planning what really should have been an easy peasy experiment. but no. somehow, five minutes into the paper i just felt my braincells shut off, and i had a major case of mental block. this led me to decide that in order to investigate the oscillation of a test-tube bobbing up and down in a liquid, i would have to vary the force applied to the top of the test-tube. like any sane asshole would have thought to vary the mass of the test-tube or the mass of the weight inside the test-tube, but not me. oh no, not me. instead, i come up with this super elaborate set-up which involves a pulley system releasing a brick onto a horizontal plank of wood, which (get this!) is balancing in equilibrium on top of a (get this!) test-tube. like what the hell was wrong with me??? how can a brick balance on a test-tube, and how can a pulley system remove the weight once the initial force is applied? i didn't realise the former during the paper, but i did realise the latter, though that hardly made a difference. because my brilliant solution to that problem was to have the person conducting the experiment MANUALLY and "rapidly, taking care not to disturb the oscillation" REMOVE the brick from the plank of wood. and where does the plank of wood go? it is retracted by the retort stand. yup, that's what i wrote in my A level script!

like i said, i deserve an award for that. and 100 marks for novelty. maybe they will send me back to primary school after reading the script, as i'm assuming any primary school kid would be able to tell you that you can't balance a brick on top of a test-tube.

anyway, that explains why i was in a completely shittified mood after school on friday. but my day improved exponentially when my mom picked me up, because she identified that i was too stressed and "needed a break". and so, she brought me shopping in orchard! specifically, shoe shopping, which is like the best brainless activity any girl can do when she's depressed. plus, i had a fantastic brownie-and-chocolate-chip cheesecake with vanilla ice-cream from NYDC, which i had been craving the entire week. so that successfully replaced my depression with fats and sugar instead. after that, we went home and i slept for three hours to let the fats congeal, then woke up feeling slightly sick, had dinner, and did an hour of yoga.

any girl who is depressed should do just that- go shoe shopping, eat cheesecake and ice cream, sleep, eat again, and then do yoga. it makes the whole world better, i swear!