'Tis the way of it

Remember back when you were a student and you had a major test looming and you just didn't organize your study time well enough to do a good job on it?

Happened to me all the time. I remember wishing the school would mysteriously get flooded by a monster typhoon or hoping that the trains would go on strike without notice and oh, darn it, the test would be rescheduled for next week (I commuted to school on trains... Asia). I would then have the time to actually study like I should have been doing all along.

It never happened. My wishes and hopes for the destruction of my school never came true and I always found myself test in hand, sun shinning outside (no typhoon anywhere!), trains running along like normal, sitting down at my desk with a sense of doom growing in my stomach. If only I could have studied more... if only ancient teachers at the beginning of time had never come up with this grim torture device called "tests"....

I'm back in school now, a whole 15 years since high school, and I had this exact same thought last Tuesday. My major mid-term exam was on Wednesday and I hadn't done a good job of managing all my responsibilities to give myself time to read the text book, do two quizzes, finish 100 pages of workbook AND study for this ridiculous exam that half the class fails and as a result gets kicked out of the program (so I've been told by many reliable sources).

But then a miracle happened. REALLY. It happened. The heavens opened and a voice spoke to my teacher and told him delay the test five days (okay... the heavens didn't actually open but the rest is true). For some reason he decided at 5 pm on Tuesday that he would asks us if we wanted our exam to be on Monday instead of the next day. Um... yes please? Is that even a question you ask students? Isn't the answer obvious?

So here I am. I have a WHOLE EXTRA FIVE DAYS to study for my exam!!!.... but what do I do? Dink around the house. Do some studying. Talk to my friends on the phone. Open my workbook. Check facebook. Write a few answers. Scheme up a blog entry. Eat dinner. Think about studying. Write the blog entry. And then I get a headache so I definitely can't study now.

*Sigh* There's just nothing like the impending doom of an imminent exam that I don't have time to study for to really get me moving. When I have all the time in the world nothing gets done.

'Tis the way of it.... unfortunately.

Oh and I updated my blog template (you may have noticed). It's still pretty generically "blogger" but it looks cleaner to me, and easier to read too. I also finally discovered how to make my enormously long list of archives to be secretly hidden in a non-obvious spot. Hooray!