I don’t make a habit of apologising on my blog every time I disappear for weeks at a time, but I feel like I probably should, because… yeah, I disappeared for nearly a month this time, and I feel bad about that.
To be fair, I have an excuse, which is that I was mired in the hell of Cambridge exams, and have actually done more work in the last two weeks than in any other two-week period since I came to university. I keep track of the number of hours I work as a way of budgeting for fun stuff — every hour of work means I’m allowed to spend £1 on fun stuff, on the basis that I never do enough work to exceed my actual budget. Usually, I average between sixteen and twenty-two hours per week. Low for most Cambridge students, probably, but I read and write quickly and have chronic pain and fatigue, so it’s about all I can manage. Last week, though? 38 hours.
I sat my last exam on Monday, and as you can imagine my brain is MELTED. I’ve been barely functional for the last couple of days as I try to recover from the complete physical and mental exhaustion of sitting exams, and I’m trying to get my brain to chill out and stop being stressed about everything since right now there’s nothing I can do. It’s all over until I get my results at the end of next week: I just have to wait.
I’m honestly in no position to estimate how my exams went, either. For example, my last exam was Old Irish, and that was my best exam in first year. It’s also the paper I did my dissertation on, and it’s the one where I have the closest relationship with my teacher/supervisor. So I had higher standards for myself for Irish than for any of my other papers, but it’s also the hardest to judge whether or not I did well in it. Obviously, I don’t know if my translations were accurate, because if I’d known that… they would’ve been right, you know?
But anyway. It’s over.
It’s kind of weird, actually, to realise that I’m finally done with second year. It’s widely regarded as the worst and most stressful year of ASNaC, and third year has a totally different structure in terms of the papers you study and the way it’s taught. Lectures for first and second year are on a two-year cycle, so there’s quite a lot of continuity between the two. Due to taking time out, I’ve taken two years over second year, and so I’ve been taking these papers for three years. It seems difficult to believe that I’m finally moving on to do something different.
(The ‘something different’ is about 60% Medieval Welsh and I’m both excited and deeply terrified about this.)
There are a whole load of things I want to do now that I’m free of academic pressures for a little while, and mostly I haven’t had the energy to do any of them. I read Skulduggery Pleasant: Resurrection and it gave me at least four feelings. I reread This Savage Song in preparation for reading Our Dark Duet, which came out yesterday, but I haven’t actually started it yet. I went to archery, and was shooting like crap, so probably shouldn’t have bothered. I’ve slept a lot, though most of it not at night time.
There are TV shows I want to watch (American Gods, OITNB s5). Books I want to read or reread, not all of which I’ve actually acquired yet. I need to get on with reading all my review copies from NetGalley and Edelweiss and get my book blog back on track, because I haven’t reviewed anything for ages. I should probably blog some more, and make some vlogs too.
But for now, I just want to sleep.
See you in a few days.