The Adventures, Mishaps and Musings of Me

My last entry could be called "Counting my opera tickets before they're sold." Painfully, my friends got to see the opera because they were all on time at 5:30 to collect their tickets (or rather the slip of paper that would later be turned into a ticket). I, the person who got everyone together in order to make the trip in the first place, was late coming back at 5:30, and thus could not. My friends tried to collect my ticket for me, but they are strict on only giving out cheap ticket slips to people who can represent themselves in person. Thus, in my fifteen minutes of lateness, the ticket slip that had my name on it was sold (with German efficency) to the cancellation line. Little to say, very black disappointment followed.

There were three reasons for my lateness when it came to returning to the opera at 5:30. Firstly, my shirt. I knew passing the dress code could be problematic so I took special care in selecting the one out of my three shirts to wear that was most suitable. Not my electric blue shirt, not my stripy silver shirt, but my plain black shirt. Sensible, one could say. However, last week I had (very comedically) spilt hot chocolate down my black shirt while trying to run for an elevator, thus I had to spend 2 hours putting the black shirt though the wash and tumble dryer to have it ready. This time spent meant I was cutting it fine to travel from my dorm to the centre of Milano, but providing there were no setbacks all should have been fine.

Which brings us to the second reason: Trams. The word "tram" should explain lateness in itself. Also, to put salt in the wound, I realised at this point that because of the coat put over the top of my jacket and shirt, when I entered, no-one would have been judging the style of my shirt in "how well I was adhering to the dress code" anyway. Thankyou logic for occuring to me too late.

( Self Pity Continued Under Here... )

It's pretty obvious that if something is "sugar free", then to make up the sweet taste a load of other chemical crap has to be put in it instead. Of course, as long as you don't drink/eat the thing in excess, then you'll get no short term bad effects from it - with all the regulations on such things manufacturers couldn't sell it if it did. However, if you do have an excess of a sugar free substance i.e. if you become reliant on chewing caffinated and sugar-free gum (specifically "Burn" gum) for a couple of weeks, then...

Well, put simply, I've developed sores on the inside of my mouth. A little bit of research tells me that it's one of the chemicals that replaces the sugar that's caused it.

So, yes, treat sugar-free stuff (I use "stuff" and not "food") with care. Now, I'd rather have the sugar, and just clean my teeth with a little extra vigour afterwards. Something being "sugar free" is certainly a selling point I no longer value.

In other news, this is my final weekend in Milano before going home for Christmas: BRING IT MILAN!! (mouth sores or not)

Why is it always the most used verbs that are the most irregular?  For instance, "to have" and "to be" decide not to follow any logical congregation in pretty much any language (feel free to point out exceptions), and yet those are likely the two most used verbs... so why must they be obscure? 

Honestly languages, why can you not be a bit more orthodox and actually follow the grammar rules?  I would get far better marks if you did.

It is so c-c-cold in my d-d-dormitory.  N-n-no central h-heating for another m-m-month.  I'm wearing my entire w-w-wardrobe and its n-n-not helping.  I didn't s-s-sign up for the st-st-student cryogenic freezing experiment.

T-t-think warm thoughts... Think warm thoughts... Think warm thoughts...
...

About now is when I rethink going to Russia on the exchange next year.

EDIT:  Nooooo Evil Cleaning Lady!!  Don't leave my window open letting all the freezing cold air into my room!!

One of my "New Academic Year Resolutions" was to religiously attend all of my Italian lectures.  However, evil forces were at work to make this resolution as hard to keep as possible.  Evil forces here meaning the Time Tabling department.  My two Italian lectures are scheduled, one as the fourth and last lecture on Tuesday at 6pm, the other at 8:45am on a Thursday with three lectures to follow it.  Horrorific.  Honestly, how could anyone manage the motivation to attend those?? 

End of self justfication.

( Meme )

So for my Microeconomics, when I took the first midterm, I passed but with a bollocks grade.  Nevermind, I thought, I'll just have to retake it and do the general exam.  Well, I took the general in the middle of July and got the results back today, and said result was...

The exact same shitty mark I got the first time around.  DARGH!!!  What was the flippin' point of that!?!  So much extra work and no result.  Quite frankly, I'd have been better off abandoning the first mark and just taking the second partial exam, entrusting the law of averages to bump my grade a little.

Yet I didn't... because I am an over reaching idiot who tried to eat the whole damn cake and choked on it. What's worse is that I don't have the option to retake it again.  That mark will simply sit, ferment and drag my grade point average down the tube. 

Grandoise ideas of third year exchange?  I can be waving those goodbye now.

I am milimetres away from writing an angry, and most inarticulate, hate post about living at home.  Honestly, not long ago I used to really look forward to coming home for the holidays, but now home life: The country, meal times, crappy showers, crappy internet, relatives, is just irratating me to the point of spasmodic pen crushing. 

And Mum, for the love of all things holy, please stop trying to feed me up! 

There are times and places where the tangy scent of sweat can be sexy as hell.

However, crampt on a hot, stuffy one hour bus journey from the airport is certainly not one of these occassions.  Alas, the demand for deodrant is rather low in Italia.

I woke up this morning to find a mosquito bite on my eyelid.  ON MY EYELID.

It is the most itchy, irratating, painful thing in the history of small itchy, irratating, painful things. 

Obviously, the mosquitos realised I was bitching about them on LJ and this is their revenge.  God damn them.

Due to the hot weather and humid nights in Italy, it is impssible to sleep with the window closed.  However, by having the window open I let in a load of mosquitos who seem to find my English blood an utter delicacy and thus my skin a self service, all you can eat buffet.  But, if I close the window to keep out the mosquitos... then I can't sleep.

So, I have two choices:  Be extremely tired or extremely itchy.

*Itches*

As a long time Green Day fan, I set off to the shops this morning to get my copy of 21st Century Breakdown to find the standard album cost 20 Euros.

20 GODDAMN EUROS!!

Next to the price sticker, it had a quote from some music magazine telling of Geen Day's "solid punk rock ideals".  I was not amused by the irony.

The most annoying thing is that I have such a limited knowledge of the workings of the music industry, I don't know whether I should be directing my hate towards Green Day, the record label, tax administration, Milan or Italian music retailers. 

...

I'll just comprimise by hating all of them.

Today's exam went fantastically!  So fantastic that I had to geekily get up halfway through to fetch more paper to write on from the desk - something I have never had to do in the whole of my academic career!

One more economics exam to go and then I'm flying home for a week to see my adoring family, eat alot of chocolate and complain about only having a week of Easter holiday compared to my other English friend's three weeks.  Two weeks for Christmas, one week for Easter and six weeks for summer; Bocconi has short changed me on my lengthy Uni holidays.  God damnnit. 

LOL at LJ friends who work.

So... tomorrow is the day of the maths exam.  There will be ten questions, a total of 30 marks and an 1hr and 30 minutes to complete the paper (time isn't an issue).  I think... it could go either way - I'll either scrape a pass or get a close fail.  I'm hoping desparately for the former, but I'm thinking it's more likely it'll be the latter.  If I fail the paper, I'll have to retake it in the next exam session, which will take study time away from my other courses including the next set of maths.  I'm already retaking one exam, I don't want to be retaking another.  I feel failing this math exam would be the beginning of a slippery slope down into a nasty puddle of failure.  Quite honestly, the fear of failing my degree is slowly creeping from the back of my mind to the fore front.

I'm not quite sure what's happened.  Perhaps, I've just had far too many night's out having fun and not spent enough time studying.  

...

It seems a long time ago that I was a straight A student whose biggest concern was getting a B. 

So, an update on the world of me.  I'm on "study leave" from Uni as I have three mid term exams coming up.  Math (tomorrow), Economic history and Management (next week).  And I have to say that math is-

Stop RIGHT THERE Anna Clover!  Complaining about the difficulty of your subjects of study is the most dull, self pitying, self justifying drivel to ever grace a blog post.  And everyone (myself included multiple times) is guilty of doing it, so let's add "cliche" to the list of negative adjectives.  Not to mention said drivel being boring as hell to read.  Come on people, we chose to take the subject in question, we just have to bloody well deal with it!!

....

But, woe is me!  Math at degree level is really hard!  It's not like school where you learn a method for performing specific calculations, instead you have  theoretical concepts chucked at you in a lecture hall and then have to figure out how to apply them to a set of completely random questions!

OK, I'm done now.

And I was trying to have two early nights before the math exam i.e. go to bed at 10.  One could say that I failed slightly by going to bed at 2:30 am.  Damn my Russian friends tasty pancakes and HD TV!

So... I fell off my horse. Rather spectaculaly. I was riding Fado, a noble albeit easily spooked, stallion who decided randomly that, instead of trotting over a pole that was lying on the ground, he would jump it. ZOMG!!!

I survived the first jump and then Fado galloped madly into a second (actual) jump, which on landing, sent my flying off like a catapult.

Believe me, it was a long 6 feet down to the ground.

I managed to land on my back with a lovely crunch and well... Now I can hardly move my left leg and the small of my back is a complete pain zone.

Yay! Let's give the hospital a visit!

 It's Friday night.  

I'm alone in the house.  My sister has gone to London to see Blood Brothers, my brother has gone to scouts and my mum has stolen my skinny jeans to go with her friends to "a bar".  Hopefully no strippers. 

I'm posting on LJ and working on my database coursework.

I am a very, very, very sad person.

 

So... I had my law exams a few days ago and if I was going to give you a one word of summary of each, it would be:  Brillinat, crap and craptacular.  Oh, I can't resist.  Blow by blow account of each here we come!

Paper 1:  You have 45 minutes to do 1 question (3 parts) of a choice of two.  This paper, I think I aced!  I had a great, straight up question on the advantages and disadvantages of "ADR" followed by another simple, impossible to misinterpret question on the effects of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 on the Civil Justice system.  That paper went brilliantly... and totally lulled me into a false sense of security!

Paper 2:   You have 1 hour 30 minutes to answer two questions from a choice of six.  *engaging rant mode*

Every single, damn question on that paper was either on a really, narrow a topic that was practically impossible to stretch a full 15 marks out of or was drowning in legalese so you could barely understand the question.  None of my favourite topics were on there: Bail, magistrates, statutory interpretation, Woolf reforms or the jury.  Pretty unlucky - probably makes up for paper 1.

In the end, I had to wade through a dodgey 10 mark question on equity to get to a straight forward advantages/disadvantages question on precedent.  With the dodgey 10 mark question, I just wrote reams - going for quantity over quality.  And then tackled a (comparitively) OK question on the Crown Prosecution service, but I wouldn't say it was one of my best areas... I don't think I put in enough detail.  In heinseit, I could have done the questions on EU law, but the questions were on quite narrow sections of the syllabus - not much scope for picking up a whole 15 marks.

Ugh.  But things got worse on paper 3:  45 minutes to answer 1 question - no choice.  At first glance, it's on statutory interpretation - Woo!  Actually looking at the questions:  WTF?  The questions were joined with the Human Rights Act 1998 and just worded so crazily, I think I got the complete wrong end of the stick on the first one, 5 marks down the drain already.  Which means I could only possibly get a low B if I got perfect marks on the other three questions.  

And I think it's safe to say that's not gonna happen.  My arguement had no flow, whatsoever in any of the questions on that paper.  It didn't help that I was kinda gutted over Paper 2, so I wasn't thinking particulaly clearly.  If I had to guess at what I got on the papers, it would be: A, B/A, D/E.  And that's not the only thing that's bringing me down right now.

I would go and wallow in self pity, but I did that Tuesday and, frankly, it's over rated. 

Tonight kiddies, I'm going to tell you about the Friday night from... HELL!! 

Ahem.

My mum runs a Sunday School and for a little Friday evening "end of term outing" she took the top group out to the cinema.  The top group being two 12 year olds and a 13 year old.  Because I'm doing my Gold D of E service (for a year) at this Sunday School, I came along to keep the munchkins in order and to get a couple of extra weeks knocked off my service.  We picked up the three kids, who I will now refer to as "Fatty", "Shoplifter" and "Shy Kid", after the end of term school party - A party where even the lettuce was sugar filled.

They got in the car with hyper coming out of their ears.

All through the car ride to the cinema they were shrieking, fidgeting and biting and no amount of phone confiscation, "now, kids we're going to play a quiet game" or "SHUT UP!!" would calm them down.  Finally, we got there... half an hour early for the film. So, to kill time, we went to KFC to get a drink...  

Why the hell did my mum think giving them more sugar filled drink was a good idea?!?

Simply put, it was the most embarresing trip to KFC in the history of the world.  Shy Kid was running around crazy and knocked her chocolate shake over everything (It's amazing how she can be a right pain in the butt without uttering a syllabel) and Fatty was yelling at other customers and randomly biting Shy Kid and Shoplifter.  Actually, Shoplifter was the one I got on with best - it's possible to have a conversation with her without  it ending in migrains.

Leaving KFC, which was now a muddle of straws, shop assitants and chocloate shake, we went to see the film:  "The Golden Compass".  I narrowly escaped seeing "Fred Claus" so "The Golden Compass" (although it didn't fit the Scorpicus' film requirement of hella lots of violence and sex) was definately the preferable option.  Excusing the terrible child actors and never lingering on a plot point long enough to develop it, due to the need to get through the 400 pages of book it was based on, it was quite good.  I'd tactfully seated myself inbetween my mum and Shy Kid for a quiet viewing.  Quiet, but no less interrupted by Fatty's countless toilet trips.

After the film, we went to pizza hut for late dinner, which was great (pizza is always great in my book!) and after being mildly embarresed by Fatty being obnoxious to the waitress and revolted by everything the kids could do with ice cream apart from eat it, it was time for another migrain filled journey home.

.............

I hate kids.  Yet, annoyingly, they like me. 

Yesterday, I went to the beach and got completly sun burnt to the point were I could fry an egg on my leg.  Just wearing clothes is agony!  Must resist scratching itchy (and burnt) cheek... will only make pain worse... 

*whiny post*

Never again will I think I'm too cool for sun cream...