heart, and lack thereof
Campus is an odd place to be during the exam period. Walking around university has become like being an unwilling audience to a single and very protracted soliloquy, whose lines are distributed amongst a hundred different mouths, each line flowing seamlessly into the next. If you consider each ellipsis as a change in speaker, a typical day on campus in June will sound like this:
"So, like, it was....such a difficult paper, and I...haven't done any work the whole year, so...I'm quite proud that I crammed a year's work into...the last two days, you know, have been just crazy...I haven't had any sleep...yeah I'm so stressed, I just...really want to get a 2:1..."
Occasionally one will overhear snatches of incomprehensible parts of some unfamiliar degree - for instance:
"glycosylated haemoglobins...the median corpuscular volume..yeah diagnostic enzymology was like, so difficult..."
but normality soon reasserts itself:
"...it was such a difficult paper and I...haven't done any work the whole year..."
Prior to 5pm on Saturday, I was the very soul of commiseration for all these heartrending disclosures. Since then, having completed my final exam, I have fluctuated consistently between elation, utter gloating, and plain annoyance at the chronic lack of non-exam conversational topics on campus. I am evil, yes, and heartless. Also, examless, and free.
Throwing silken sheets to the wide open sky: that's how exam freedom feels like. And results are the grey mutterings of thunderclouds clustered near the horizon, creeping ever closer, inexorably, to unleash the storm.
Incidentally, I would like to be able to post the heady scent of the roses that marshal the sidewalks of my town. You'd type in "www.idlethink.com" and hit 'enter'; the page would load and you would be utterly overcome by the smell of sweet summer roses blooming out of your screen, into your nostrils, and up into your brain, where, on its peregrinations round your neural pathways, it might just be translated into a small sense of my unadulterated euphoria. I <3 roses!