(f5 f5 f5 f5)

It is That Time of Year once again – the time of year that all students dread and yet look forward to in equal amounts: Results Day. Or it should be today, anyway – while we have been told by a trusted source (or two) that it should be today. But it’s half six and I’m losing hope – do I really have to have another night of not being able to sleep much, of tossing and turning and waking up at 9 in the morning, the first thought on my mind being ‘ARE THEY UP YET?!”
Must I?!
Panicking comes easily for me. It doesn’t take much until I turn into a gibbering, hackering, jellified mess. How’s this for nerves: it took me well into the second semester before I stopped getting nervous about class. (Don’t ask why, I have no idea.) So this wait for my results is absolutely killing me, not to mention my forefinger – hitting the f5 button is probably gonna end up wearing the muscle out. How many times is it possible to check the same page in a minute?
‘LOTS’ is the answer.
Last year at this time, I was reasonably confident of passing. I had loved the course and while I may not have enjoyed all the modules, I felt I had learned something from them all. This year, in contrast, has been a hard slog of dried up inspiration, classes that weren’t motivating at all, and considering quitting the course several times.

Short Stories is the only module I am even slightly confident about: ‘Great Plans for the Future’, a story about an abused wife telling her child-hating husband that she is pregnant, is one of my favourite pieces of writing that I have done. It ushered in a new love of reading short stories, not to mention the genre shift – sci-fi and fantasy, my old favourite, seems to have given way into more ‘real life’ stories. Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, and Raymond Carver have suddenly taken their places as some of my favourite authors (alongside old fantasy favourites), mainly due to the module and what I learned.
It’s the rest of the modules I’m dreading. All three of them. I know a couple of guys who are third years who are awaiting the results of their dissertations, and from them I know that 50% of the students taking one of the modules (research for writers – a module designed to make you think about your dissertation) usually fail. I will be one of those 50%. I had a decent idea, I think – to look at ghost writers – but the proposal lacked a focus and that, I think, will cause me to fail.
I had a decent idea for Narratives, too – to look at urban legends and to follow them back through time, thinking about what could have inspired them as well as their part in the history and the evolution of the folktale. A big subject, I know. So, to make it easier, I chose two urban legends (‘Bloody Mary’ and jewellery found in the stomach of an animal) and concentrated on them. It was a very interesting subject, actually – I really enjoyed researching them. That, however, doesn’t come through in the essay I wrote: after rereading it earlier (obviously in a fit of madness due to still being gradeless!), I have come to the conclusion that it was appallingly written and I could have done (and should have done) much better.

The module I failed badly is Creative Practice 2. I hated the module, and although I tried with the coursework, I know that the writing in it was sub-par. I can’t even bring myself to think about that module: even writing this, there’s an odd, queasy and wobbly feeling in my stomach.
Can the grades just get here, already?!