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That time June 16, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Life, School, Scraps , add a comment

Tomorrow begins my final week of exams.  My most important week of exams.  The exams that could well decided my future.  Unless the universities decide they suddenly don’t need grades they will decide my future.

Let’s just say I could definitely be more prepared.

Of course, times like this make me all looky at my life time.  And listen to music at a higher than normal volume, that too.

There is really no point worrying, I know this, it doesn’t really seem to stop me doing…whatever it is I’m doing.  At least once this is over I really have very little to worry about and I think it’s about time I got some worry free moments.  Well, I have to find myself a job but that’s another story.

One nice thing at the moment is that I have been given the job offer by my Ski resort so that is one more hurdle down, only one big one and one small one left.  The big one is the visa process.  Gee that’s gonna be fun…

May Balling it Up May 20, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment, School , add a comment

Yes, last Friday it was indeed that time of the year again. I mentioned it last year although it didn’t get its own shiny post dedicated to it.

Unlike last year, this time round I had a bit more time to prepare myself. Back then I had 3 hours of exams the afternoon before the May Ball and barely had time to put clothes on before friends were turning up to be taken there. I had a much more relaxed time this year and we arrived not early but not late either.

Although our invites told us that we needed to be there for 6.45pm to have the photo taken at 7pm it was much closer to 7.45 when the photo actually got taken. We hung around eating sweets and throwing around innuendo in the entrance bit. Unlike last year the photo was taken inside and thus required a lot of squashing up to fit everyone in it, I assume that the photographer did get everyone in, he seemed to take quite a lot of photos so it will be pot luck whether I look ok in the one that is chosen as the “official” photo.

At this point we all sat down to eat. Being that my sixth form friendship group consists of me and 3 other people it was pretty much guaranteed that we would be sat with another group of people although till we got there we didn’t know who. I was quite pleased to find we were sat on table F (for failure, obviously) and were with a group of people similar to ourselves in terms of popularity. Perfectly nice people so that was all good. Last time around we basically had the table to ourselves as a couple of people on it didn’t show up and the ones that did just left the table and didn’t come back.

When it comes to the food I can’t help but feel I’m on my own with my opinion. The starter was a tomato soup with croûtons and bread rolls which I thought was very nice and the staff checked who was vegetarian (on our table it may have just been me, I’m not entirely sure as I was at the end). Main course I already knew was going to be lasagna and chips (strange combination…) and mine was basically a lasagna with all the meat replaced by vegetables, which works fine for me and I quite enjoyed it. From what people were saying in tutor period this morning however, it didn’t seem to go down well. Maybe the meat version was far inferior or perhaps they are just fussy. I don’t know. Pudding was a profita roll type thing with quite a lot of cream. Nice but for whatever reason I was just too full to get through it all.

Once everyone was close enough to finished they brought on the band whose name I couldn’t really hear properly so I won’t try and tell you who they were. They played last year and have band members ranging through a few years although most do not go to our school anymore.  As expected it was pretty crappy pop-rock with rather boring lead even if it was technically correct.  They also had some quite weird line up changes, with some songs the singer was just singing whilst his younger brother played bass but in others the singer played bass as well and the other guy just sat out.  The drummer also did a small bit of playing guitar and singing whilst they were setting up for their second set which was really quite bad and a very good example of why drummers should never be allowed to play guitar.

I also noticed this time round that they had really quite craptacular amps, I think one of them was a Marshall MG (the first amp I got, they are awful) and the other was some other quite small and uninteresting amp.  No one used any effects and the drum kit was a bit lacking in options, although I’m not sure if they would have been used if they were there.  I think that completes my criticisms, to be fair on them, they weren’t really that bad.  They did what they did perfectly well and although the songs they played weren’t really to my taste they were generally good choices for the audience they had, I don’t expect stuff I like to be played.

On the note of band playing though, it would be good if we could get Opium Toad on for next years May Ball, probably just for a small opening set since we would of course be bringing the metal.  I have a little more faith in the will-be-then-year-12s as I know quite a few of them and there is a bigger rock/metal presence in their year. It wouldn’t really be strange for us to be there either, since 3/5s of the band will probably be going to that sixth form and the rest of us are still about.

That’s a bit of a tangent, back onto the ball.  Once the band had disappeared it was just the DJ, a typical balding, middle aged overweight guy if I remember correctly.  Of course from this point the music was just god awful.  Filled with crappy rap and pop, some of the shit was played more than once and that particularly annoyed me because they could have used that time to play Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.  It never was played, of course, because any requests for it would be fighting against a flood of requests for rubbish.

At this point the night mostly turned into watching drunk people, such as our friend David, get drunker and drunker and do amazing things.  Sights included seeing my tutor (and IT teacher to friends) attempting to do the Macarena (something I tried last year but there wasn’t enough wine for that this time around) and my friend getting a hug and drunken future encouragements from another IT teacher.  It was gold.

The night culminated with a bit of Don’t stop me now by Queen followed by Livin’ on a prayer, which enticed our drunken David to the dance floor, where his swaggerings kept us all raving away.  Once we were shortly into Livin’ on a prayer David bolted off the dance floor without a word.  Of course, without his swaggering we had no hope of staying on the dance floor, dancing is really not our thing, particularly with my blood alcohol level, it just wasn’t going to happen.

Naturally there was confusion as to where he had gone and after a couple of minutes my friend returned from the toilet with some amazing news: Vomit.  Or more specifically: Vomit Explosion.

As it happens, he had headed to the toilet once he realized something was up but the bodily processes were already in motion and things were already well underway before he was in the door to the mini-corridor that lead to the actual men’s bathroom.  To sum up the damage, there was vomit on the carpet before the mini corridor, vomit on the floor and a bit of the wall of the mini corridor and of course all over the floor of the bathroom as well.  Presumably he got some in the toilet as well but I didn’t really want to get that close, the smell was a pretty potent spectacle to behold and as he exited the building (which he did in a great hurry) he left a great trail of smell behind him.  It was amazing.

The few great sights alone made the night worth it really.  I left out a few bits which I can’t remember in enough detail or can’t really write about in a reasonably anonymous way (eg the awards).  Of course David gets left out of the vague anonymity because of his amazing performance.

Still to come, the report from Saturday, which will hopefully be a bit shorter because this has grown to rather an epic length…

Setting the tone May 15, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Rants, School , add a comment

So I just got back from my first exam of the season, Maths Pure Core 2.  I suppose I can sum it up by saying I’ll be lucky if I even get a grade.  Yes, it was that bad.  Turns out when I said I was going to fail this exam I wasn’t actually that far off.

This exam was so bad it was almost spooky, it literally included everything in the syllabus that I don’t know, twice if it could manage it.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had an exam so tailor made to my failure.  At the moment I’m just so pleased that none of my university offers include maths, it doesn’t matter how well I do.

At this point I’m contemplating whether I should even try for the next exam.  I already know I’m not gonna get a good grade in maths and since it doesn’t matter…is it even worth trying? I’ll probably do ok in the exam with little effort because it’s Mechanics and as such is quite physics based, I tend to find maths quite hard in some areas because the use of the maths seems to be lost somewhere along the line and things I can’t put to a use I forget.

If anything this is a testament to just how hard you have to work to do well in Maths AS and A level. I did about a bit less than half the work I should have done and missed a good few lessons and I’m pretty bright but have almost failed.  I can’t imagine how hard it would be for someone who wasn’t so bright, you would just have to work so ridiculously hard.  Let this be a warning to anyone planning to do it, you’ve got to work.  If you’re reasonably intelligent you can get a C in GCSE maths without really trying (or you could two years ago, some things have changed a bit but I doubt this has).  When I did it a C was 15%. Come on.  At AS level, a C is 60% and the maths is substantially harder.  It’s a massive leap, perhaps the biggest of all the subjects I’m familiar with.

So yes Mr Maths exam, you have successfully set the tone for the entire exam period, the tone of sweet sweet agonizing failure.

Coursework Conundrums May 6, 2008

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I should be doing my psychology coursework right now. Well, I am. Trying to do it at least…

We started doing this coursework absolutely ages ago but I was always going very slowly. I got the practical and results out of the way a long time ago but writing the report for what I did seems horribly difficult. In fact, coming up with an original study (well, original compared to what everyone else did - replicate last years coursework and then use it as a guide) is a huge disadvantage.

What I did was a bit weird anyway but I have very little relevant guidelines. Unless I do what I sometimes seem to and just pull a good piece of coursework out of the bag with pure fluke this will be a terrible failure and since I’m relying on the shinyness of an A in psychology to overshadow the almost unavoidable C in physics I can’t have shoddy coursework.

Did I mention it has to be in tomorrow?

And of course, due to the fact that May is already in swing, this is one of those deadlines that the teacher has very little control over, I can’t just magic up an extension from anywhere.

One of the most horrible things is that when I’ve talked to him about it I’ve gone away feeling good, feeling like I can tackle the problems. But then when I sit down and actually try and write, nothing comes out. I mean, I’ve been thinking of things to put in this coursework for months, it’s something that interests me and actually gave results that I wasn’t necessarily expecting but now that I try to write about it I can’t seem to find any words.

The title of my blog is looking very appropriate now…

Decisions Decided April 27, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Life, School, Thoughts , add a comment

That big ol’ decision has now been made.

After speaking with the band it was made quite simple. They are serious about Opium Toad and want to try and get somewhere with it and after presenting my predicament they pretty adamantly told me to stick around, in as many words.

That was it really. Nottingham it is.

More than that, I have now gone through the accepting and declining of offers process, there is no going back now, no way to change my mind. If the band collapses tomorrow I will still have to live with the decision. If they decide they are better off without me during the five or sixth months I’m going to be away then Nottingham will still be where I’m going.

For better or for worse, so long as I get my grades, I won’t be leaving Nottingham (save for sixth months in the US of course).

That’s that then.

The biggest decision so far April 21, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Life, School , 1 comment so far

In the next two weeks I am faced with finally making the decision of what university offers to accept.  This is a decision that has an unbelievably massive bearing on my future for at least the next 5 years (gap year + 4 year masters degree).

Ultimately, it looks like this.

I have four offers out of my five applications, Cardiff: BBC, Loughborough: 300 points (BBB but could include AS levels too), Leeds: BBB, Nottingham: BBB.

At this point I have written off Loughborough because of its sport centric vibe and the fact that whilst it is moving away from home it isn’t really going anywhere particularly new as Loughborough is just a small town really not very far from where I live now.

I’m sure that I’m going to pick Cardiff for my insurance because they have given me the lowest offer. It’s a nice university in a nice place but not attractive enough to warrant giving up the other places.

Now comes the indecision.  Leeds or Nottingham.  Their differences as universities are equal and opposite almost and the major differences in other aspects also put neither in a direct lead in any sense.  In terms of the university themselves I think I would have a great time which ever I go to.  The main difference comes here and is indeed where the massive difficulty comes.

If I go to Leeds I effectively give up all my friends here.  Yes, I would still see them from time to time and of course in going to university I will inadvertently meet a lot of new people and make friends there.  It would guarantee the end of my place in Opium Toad, possibly the band entirely but I doubt that.  Still, it’s something I’m really beginning to enjoy and not something that I want to let go of lightly by any means.

Of course, university is the first time that a person really has a chance to escape from where they grew up and going to Leeds would mean a whole new city to explore and get to know and everything that comes with it.

So there it is, leave friends for a new city or keep friends and stay in the old one. I mean, it’s not like Nottingham is a bad place, it has areas I don’t really want to visit but overall I feel a lot of affection for it and perhaps unlike some of my peers isn’t somewhere I necessarily want to just run away from.  Of course, if I choose Nottingham to stay with my friends and then the band splits up and everyone goes their separate ways then I may be left feeling like I made a bad decision.

I know that, whichever I choose, I’m going to feel bad about it in a sense.  There is always going to be a regret, all I can do is to try and minimize it.

I’m going to a Leed’s accommodation open day this Saturday but I really doubt that anything there will change the decision I have to make.

It all comes down to a few questions; do I think Opium Toad can achieve any reasonable level of success? if so, could I be a true part of such a success? How would issues such as our Bassist’s lack of commitment and effort effect the future or possible success of the band? Will I find people at university that I feel more comfortable around, people more special than the ones I have here?

I’m not sure these questions will ever have answers and knowing that I’m making a decision that may well decide the way the rest of my life goes (a basically unchangeable decision) and there really is no obvious choice.

I suppose I will just have to take comfort in the fact that, in some parallel universe, a version of me will take the other choice, so that in some ways, I will know both paths.