Chapter 22 - In which the Japanese final took place (and nearly killed Naria in doing so)

*Sigh*
Okay. My Japanese final is over.
I. AM. NEVER. TAKING. A. LANGUAGE. CLASS. AGAIN!
Seriously, taking one of the McGill language classes is the equivalent of suicide! The teachers are insane! I am not saying I disliked my professor - on the contrary, I thought she was very kind-hearted. However, she was excessively unreasonable in her expectations of the class. I mean, she expected us to learn new material until the LAST day of class! This is just not right! We never even had a review! I am sorry, but I came to that exam completely unknowing as to what to expect from the exam. I wish she had AT LEAST made an outline. Instead, the only thing we knew about the exam was that it was "cumulative." Great! Like that is not too vague for anyone to know what to expect from a three hour final.

It really annoyed me, because I did not have all that much time to study: I had my first final immediately after the last day of class, then a photoshoot and the Savoy formal (which had been planned waaaay ahead!) and then I worked on an essay for last Monday over the weekend. As a result? I only got to study Monday and Tuesday for today's exam!! Not NEARLY enough time! And because I did not know what to study, it turns out I studied the entirely WRONG chapters in the book! Of course she would not ask how to ask a shop-clerk to show you something, or to tell you the price of something... why should she? This was the chapter I studied after all! She rather went ahead with the REALLY new stuff, like weird-ass verb conjugations that nobody uses, the ones for which my brain had no more attention in class because I had a million assignments due simultaneously and was not sleeping... And she asked those sneaky underhanded questions again, you know, the questions for which the answer was only briefly mentioned in passing during a class, and it happens to be crammed in a corner of the textbook, so apparently that means you're supposed to know it...

*sigh* There were things I knew I knew, but I could not remember them to save my life!! I also screwed up quite a few kanji... forgetting a line here, missing a line there... Why was the only kanji I could remember perfectly VEGETABLE of all things??? (yasai: 野菜 - yep, that I could remember with ridiculous ease... and it was not on the test...)
Anyways... I managed to fill out most of the test, to my surprise. Though, after verifying some answers, I realize that this does not mean I did well. In fact, I believe I did very poorly. I kept having to replace certain words with others (i.e. "to own" with "to have" or "to exist") because I could not remember for the life of me how to say stuff. And the newest verb conjugations... yeah, uhm, forget about those. I did not get a SINGLE one right! (Trust me, I checked now that I'm out of there.) At this point, I hope I can just scrape a pass... It would suck to fail this exam and lose 9 credits and have to potentially retake it (I sure hope not!).

Anyways, I also slept very poorly last night (in other words, not at all!). I was very upset by that this morning. Indeed, I had desperately tried to sleep and yet the hours crept by, minute by minute on my alarm clock and still no sleep came. My head was reeling with kanji and random phrases in Japanese. I tried all the tricks in the book to empty my mind, at which point I got stuck at the "stop thinking now! Stop thinking about not thinking! Quit that! SLEEP ALREADY!" bit... I hate that. It makes me very upset because I really want to sleep, but just CAN'T!
So I currently look (and feel) like death warmed up. A ghost would look cheery when compared to me. That is because this is the second night in a row that I have not slept well.
Yesterday morning, after I went to bed at 5 a.m. because I wanted to really study Japanese well (I rewrote 7 chapters of the book, made vocabulary charts and everything... and I still screwed up the final!), I thought I could sleep in because I had the day off. Nada: someone decided that it was time to renovate my apartment building's courtyard. So at 9 in the morning, the jackhammers started and they kept at it until the afternoon. When your pillow is shaking and vibrating with sporadic uncomfortable tremors and the obnoxious sound of the tools drifts in through paper-thin windows, sleeping becomes quite impossible. So, with only 4 hours of sleep, I went through my day yesterday. I went and studied with a friend, then came home and studied some more.

I did have a nice little 2 hour walk with Michael, though. After calling my dad (and him telling me to quit the books and refresh my mind and body) I decided to drag Michael outside with me and we went for a walk on Mont-Royal. We went around the mountain, reaching the Lac aux Castors and having a small lunch there (we had stopped at the grocery store before to pick up some sandwiches). We had fun in the jungle gym on that side of the mountain, and also enjoyed the pleasant weather and the nice scenery. We should take walks like that more often...
And then we came home and went back to the grindstone. I found (thanks to a wonderful classmate of mine) some websites that quizzed your Japanese and I drilled myself with them to the utmost. Unfortunately, all the vocabulary and grammar points from those tests were NOT on the exam (despite the online quizzes being based solely on the textbook we used in class... ironic that the teacher has to chose all the obscure chapters that are not as well elaborated...)
And then I went to bed, attempting to sleep. To my consternation and mounting despair, attempting to sleep was to no avail and, when I finally felt tired enough to fall asleep, it was already 7:30, 15 minutes before my alarm was going to ring. Thanks for nothing, you stupid brain of mine (why couldn't you retain what you were SUPPOSED to know!?!??!) Michael, sadly, had a terrible night of sleep as well, though he was lucky enough to fall asleep in the end. I lay still by his side with very dark thoughts floating through my mind - I hate insomnia: worst case scenarios all over the place and about every situation imaginable! And telling myself that the exam "will go well" did nothing to help the visions going through my mind...

And now the test is done. And I really, sincerely hope to God that I achieved a pass. I think I deserved it. I just screwed up, that's all (and there's my luck again: this is what, the 5th time I study the wrong thing for an exam??)

I'm currently praying that I won't fail. I'm also thinking of Michael who's doing his history final today (he should be starting soon). Best of luck to him, I'm sure he'll do well.

Now there's only one more final to go before Germany. Victorian Lit. I still have to read Bleak House, but I think it'll work out fine. At least now I can breathe again. Victorian Lit isn't out to kill me, like the Japanese final was (it tried to choke me in my sleep! I'm sure of it!)

And now, dear blog, after the long promised post about the exam, my brain feels like mush. Seriously, I am surprised it did not come streaming out of my ears and nose during the exam like some gruesome pulp. Because it does feel thoroughly mashed (picture grapes being stomped on to make wine... yeah - that's my brain). I think that if someone was to crack open my skull right now they would not be able to tell the difference between what was once called my brain and a huge bowl of apple sauce... I don't know why, but I'm just convinced that my brain now looks like apple sauce. That, or it's fried... like when I fry an egg (i.e. burnt to a black crisp that set off every smoke alarm in the house).

Okay, enough now (geez - I can't believe how much I can write even in this state of... bleh!). I am going to TRY and get some sleep...
私は寝ています、ね？がんばって、ナリア！
お休みなさい。。。

P.S. Still no news from Germany for jobs... sad face... T_T