Watch out, the world's behind you

It probably wasn't the best idea to start this while in the depths of Exam Hell, since for a while (20 days and counting) all I'll have to say is stuff like, "Got up, wrote an essay, revised Latin, ate lunch, panicked, procrastinated, continued procrastinating, ate dinner, revised Latin, tried to write a poem, was too tired, went to bed". This is the kind of cycle my days are starting to take, and I doubt it makes a great read.

Nevertheless, I feel I should keep writing in here, if only because I'm in the middle of the Post-Lunch Procrastinating Period (PLPP) and don't feel like writing another Fart of Darkness essay just yet. This is what my Saturdays have turned into. I'm trying not to get miserable about it, since misery, as Thursday afternoon showed, just leads to chocolate marshmallow bingeing and yelling at younger brothers. And if I were to divide everything into nice, sensible lists, I'll see everything is in fact more fine than not fine:

THINGS THAT ARE FINE
1. I'm not dead.
2. There are just twenty tiny little days until Exam Hell is over, and all that's required of me is just to get through them one at a time.
3. I have an outfit for pruuuuuuuuuhm (aka the sixth form ball) next Friday, which I finally pieced together today.
4. I won a poetry competition yesterday. And OK, it may have been with a poem I LOATHE TO THE UTMOST DEPTHS OF MY SOUL THAT MAKES ME WANT TO RIP ALL MY HAIR AND ALL MY TEETH OUT AND CLAW MY EYES OUT OF MY BRAIN WITH MY BARE HANDS WHENEVER I SEE IT but it's still nice to win something.
5. There was an old lady in the street today who dropped three twenty-pound notes and they went flying off in the wind, and it was me who ran down the street and actually jumped in the air to catch them, and she was very very grateful and it made me glow inside.
6. I think it needs reiterating: I'm not dead.

Therefore all that I need to do is forget all the rubbish stuff (examsexamsexamsmyleghurtsIfeelsickJesusChristIcan'tfindmyCicerobooksIcan'topenmypursebecausethere'safivepoundnotecaughtinthezipexamsexamsexams) and just breathe.

And I think (because everyone else does it) I'll end on some poems today. OK, they're poems I wrote essays about this morning, but they're still good poems (and the essays were OK too).

SONNET 65
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

SONNET 147
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,
Desire his death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

By Shakespeare. Obviously.