Dreams can be very odd things. Particularly the waking up bit.
On Saturday night I dreamt that I was back at high school. My entire class was there, it was the beginning of a new school year and we were all sitting at long tables in the quadrangle, waiting for the previous year’s results to be handed out*. After a bit of preliminary faffing about the staff got their act together, and started walking up and down the tables handing out report cards. Eventually they got to mine.
I checked it over, and everything was fine, pretty much exactly the marks I expected. Until I got to the bottom of the list and saw my grade for English Lit. 8%!!
It was at this point that I remembered (with a sense of crashing doom) that 90% of our English Lit mark was assignment based. On the first day of term they’d handed us out two major essay assignments to be handed in at the 6 and 8 month mark, and I (in my usual sloppy fashion) had put them aside to look at “later”, and completely forgotten about them. The fact that the staff hadn’t mentioned them since didn’t help.
Looking around at my fellow English Lit students I could see that I wasn’t the only one in this predicament. About a dozen of my fellows scattered throughout the crowd were looking seriously startled. Just to my left, Alison Ranger (on who I actually had a big crush throughout year 12 which is no doubt why she made such a prominent guest appearance 🙂 was looking particularly frantic. Just as we were all about to start noisily protesting, our Lit teacher (who was sort of a combination of Mrs Wolf and Mrs Beam, my Lit teachers from years 12 and 11 respectively) got up and started haranguing us.
First of all, she confided, she was very disappointed in us all. Fully half the class had failed to hand in our assignments, and she was tempted to fail us all. BUT, she had decided to be merciful, and was giving us all one month to get one or both of the assignments in. Which, if we valued our marks, we would.
Everyone let out a small sigh of relief. But by the same token no one was prepared to relax. The assignments were BIG. Like thesis big, and we only had one month to do them both. The sense of crushing doom was replaced with one of sickening tension, and it was clear glancing around that every single one of us was just itching to get up and tear into the library which was just across the quadrangle. But we had to wait until we were dismissed. So we just sat there, tapping our feet, grinding our teeth and sweating. Also (in my case) attempting to remember what the heck the assignments were actually about, never having seriously looked at them. I asked Alison, but before she could reply, I woke up.
Now, here’s the weird bit. I lay there in bed planning out what I was going to do. I knew that I could probably throw together a halfway decent assignment on JRR Tolkien, but before I could do that, I’d have to find out exactly what was required. I went over some possible angles, such as how his writing was affected by his time fighting in the trenches of World War One, or his dualistic and somewhat contradictory views on creativity. After a few minutes though the worry got too intense, and I woke up some more. Enough to realise (with an enormous sense of relief) that I graduated from high school nine years ago, and got an A for Lit.
So yeah, like I said, odd 🙂
Anyway, in a remarkable change from the way my life has been running lately (rent inspections, major projects due with a week to do them in, a certain so called “designer” from a certain so called “design” company) the universe has decided to be uncannily nice to me this week. Not only is episode four of The Dead Zone on this week, the one featuring Alisen Down as a guest star, but starting this Saturday, new episodes of Mysterious Ways!
Time for the Myposian Dance of Joy!!
#Happy dance! Happy dance!#
OK, they’re not actually new episodes, there being no such thing (the series being axed and all), but it seems that Channel 10 (in their usual capricious fashion) messed around with the screening order and held a bunch back last year. So, one last season! Huzzah!!
I’m quite sure the majority of the ep’s will be pretty dodgy, they usually are, but so long as they feature Miranda, I don’t care!
I’m such a loser 🙂
PS: Awesome show 😉
* Not usual procedure, I should point out, at St Francis’s or indeed any reasonable school in the known universe
