Meanwhile, Back In The Twilight Zone...

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After a full month of coffee parties at midnight, afternoons spent waking up in the Blue Garden with a square red mark on my cheek the exact same shape of my soporific chemistry study guide, and far too many hours spent just watching the word count box in the corner of my laptop screen slowly crawl forward, I can finally abandon my some-say-unhealthy-I-say-uniquestudy/procrastination habits and write something other than 'The purpose of this essay is...' However, I feel that instead of detailing just how the golden domino set that is my life has suddenly been nudged into a divinely perfect line, I should analyse what could be going on in that inverted parallel universe(that one which I seemed to escape somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean last September), where everything is going wrong :
1. All I did yesterday was sit in the computer lab and type fruitlessly away at my uni applications. There was no reason for me to be nearly arrested by the Cardiff City Police (in Welsh they're called Heddlu), absolutely not for portraying a pregnant woman too realistically at the Amnesty International Street Theater. It was just a normal day...you know, going into labour five times in the middle of Queen Street at its busiest in order to protest the wall in Palestine. Though the hospital was warned in advance of what we were doing, there were still very few passersby who even realised that I was only giving birth to a pile of scarves. All of the petitioners said they got the most signatures whenever I started screaming. If only we'd had a cute puppy, too.
2. In front of all the principals and heads of every UWC in the world, I forgot the Italian words to my Puccini aria. The high C did not echo off the vaulted 11th-century ceilings, shattering into thousands of exquisite crystal shards over the heads of everyone packing the Bradenstoke Hall (net worth: staggeringly huge. Net influence: on the scale of the Incredible Hulk). It was not the proudest moment during a performance that I have ever experienced, and naturally the head of the Italian College himself did not come up to me afterwards with tears on his face to tell me that it was the most expressively beautiful singing he had ever heard. It was a terrible, terrible ; I did not flit around campus overjoyed all night, and went to sleep at ten because I was so disappointed in myself. I most definitely did not bake myself a cake.
3. I absolutely do not have to wear leather trousers when I play Sandy in Grease, this year's AC Musical. Oh, wait. That IS real life. Darn.
4. No one is fanatically obsessed with my gossip column. It is rarely ever the first thing that people turn to in INK, and it has not become a school-wide semi-phenomenon, with high-stakes (in AC student financial terms, at least) gambling over what the names mean. I don't know a guy who cuts every single one out and keeps them in his wardrobe...actually, I really wish I didn't know that.
5. I didn't print out the final draft of my EE five minutes before the deadline, just before the ink in the computer lab printers completely ran out - a fact which inspired a chorus of frustrated screams which could be heard all the way from the student development office, as I dropped my character-defining 23-page packet on Gareth's (the vice principal's) desk. Therefore, I had to stay in the house for the entirety of long weekend, wearing black and crying despondently over the keyboard. I really wish I had gone to Edinburgh with my two best friends. It would have been really fun to have a picnic of IRN BRU (uniquely Scottish fluorescent orange soda which in my opinion tastes like carbonated cough syrup) and shortbread, lemon and coriander houmous, fresh warm bread and a Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar the size of a lost eighth continent on a bright October day in the park, in the shadow of the Edinburgh castle with the unavoidable sound of a shamelessly busking bagpiper. Unfortunately I had to eat every single meal in the cafeteria, and not once did I wake up to the smell of fresh scones and a golden lemon drizzle cake with icing melting down the sides, baked for us by Rosh's mother at 2 in the afternoon (which was slightly earlier than when Marion and Rosh usually chose to wake up that weekend, but what can you do?). Naturally, I was incredibly productive and finished every piece of coursework which my teachers have assigned me for the next six months. I refused to simply ooze around Rosh's house, with its divinely cozy smell of fireplaces and bread (instead of instant shrimp-flavour noodles and refrigerator mold, which is what I'm unfortunately used to), watching films in my zebra-print pyjama trousers over cups of sugary tea.
6. Instead of forging my way through our last CAVRA hike, wading against the gale-force winds through ankle-soaking frigid puddles and sleet while attempting to lead a group of shivering, incessantly whimpering first-years on a rapidly fluctuating compass bearing, I just took off the 15-kilo water bag I was forced to carry, lay down and died. I saw the light. That hike was a lot of fun.
7. I had a personal epiphany and switched to Higher Chemistry AND Further Maths, dropping out of my music class entirely. I decided that memorising the periodic table alone in my room on a Saturday night is a lot more entertaining than seeing The Barber of Seville, Otello, and a Stravinsky ballet celebration (not all at once. That would be a bit much) in the plush seats of the Cardiff Milennium Centre, for the equivalent of ten dollars. This also means that I've given up my addictive habit of spending my 50-minute chemistry codes making sentences out of letters from the periodic table and writing them on the desks in the back row with Consuelo's wite-out ("SmAcK RaW PRaWNS In ThAt ShInY FISHTaNK, YOU XeNOPHOBe", "WHY LiCK MoThS In ThAt SeNSUAl FAsHION? BeCaUSe TiS BeStIAl FUN In PUBLiC PLaCeS","WAsPS CrY HONeY TeArS, I ThInK", and I'm sorry to say etc.). Naturally I will get a perfect score on my naming acids and bases test tomorrow, and I will not even think about sitting next to Stephen Ashton (whose digital thirty-function watch is made to look like a computer chip) in order to feasibly achieve this.
8. I had so little to do, and so few fantastically serendipitous opportunities throwing themselves into my swerving fatal path, that I wrote a blog every single day for a month. I did not try to document what would be the equivalent of about two years in the real world in what is now 6,150 characters, half an hour before Sunday roast. Don't worry. I'm not procrastinating. I never procrastinate.

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