Mood swings and roundabouts

Last night I woke up from a dream about (I shit you not) women's suffrage (unfortunately I can't remember what happened exactly, I just know Sylvia Pankhurst was involved...BIZARRE), and then proceeded to stare up at the ceiling for half an hour, sweating and having a mild panic attack about everything. I actually wondered if I was getting ill, which only made me panic even more, so that by about 3:30am I was in a complete tizz and my teeth were actually chattering. Then I tiptoed downstairs and got a glass of water, standing there in the kitchen in the dark looking up at the sky outside, and calmed down and felt much better.

Took some Bach Rescue Remedy before going back to bed, and for some reason wondered if anyone had ever written a poem that mentioned it. I don't know if there's any kind of poetry website that has a database of poems sorted by topic, so you could just type in something like "snow" or "toast" or, well, "Bach Rescue Remedy" and it would give you all the poems that EVER mentioned that thing. There probably isn't, but there should be. Anyway, it made me want to write a poem about it (especially because the ingredients sound kind of - well - "5 x dilution of flower extracts of Rock Rose, Impatiens, Clematis, Star of Bethlehem, Cherry Plum in a grape alcohol solution" - there's got to be a poem in that, surely?). But I'm completely dry on the poem front at the moment, on account of being driven insane by exams and internal emotional dramas. That poem I mentioned ages ago that was half-finished? Still half-finished. And you know when you leave a poem half-finished for too long, you sort of stop caring about it, and it takes effort to get back to it and sometimes you just have to leave it? Well, yeah.

Friday is the end of everything. Friday is going to be an epic day, really. I have to wake up at the crack of dawn and get the bus to the hospital out of town, because - FANFARE - I'm seeing the orthopedist again and this time he's (probably) going to give me the special shoe sole thingies that will fix my right foot! This is going to be AMAZING. My foot hasn't been normal since I injured it in September, and now I'll be able to, like, wear whatever shoes I want without worrying about whether I'll want to rip off my foot with a chainsaw by the end of the day.

And then after that I have to leg it home, eat lunch and leg it to school and do the last exam - Latin - of all the exams that could have come last, it had to be Latin, the most important one - and then that's it.

It'll be quite symbolic. Exams will be over, foot trouble will be over. THEN I can start thinking about Emotional Shit (i.e. the aftermath of last week, see previous entry) which has been put on the backburner for now, which I am not currently thinking about. (OK, I'm thinking about it now. Damn. Anyway.)

In the meantime - actually revised a bit today, sprawled on the sofa surrounded by Cicero notes (apparently I looked so miserable that Mum had to ask, "What's wrong?" to which I said, "Life is shit, since you ask", and she uttered the most irritating phrase on the face of the earth, EVER: "Oh, pull yourself together"). Wrote ten thousand essay plans. Now I should probably go and read some Russian book. Yesterday Dad gave me a book of short stories by some Russian writer and said they were really good and I should definitely try them, they'd be great for revision etc. So I started reading them and they were OK, quite good in a horrendously boring sort of way - the kind of stories where nothing REALLY happens, people just meet on trains and in supermarkets and have some really meaningful conversation like:

"What are you doing?"
"Nothing really. Just...surviving."
"Yes."
"The sun is really big, isn't it?"
"It is."
"Yes."

And then they stare into space for a while and you're supposed to get some sort of idea of "things left unsaid". Pretentious arsewipe basically. Only then I noticed that loads of words were spelt wrong, and that there were all these grammar rules I thought I understood which were now looking really confusing and muddled on the page. And I asked Dad about it and he was like, "Oh yeah, he writes like that, it's full of slang and bad Russian". How exactly is that good for revision then? I mean, you wouldn't recommend Trainspotting to someone learning English, would you?

So now I'm reading some of Anna Akhmatova's prose. She wrote a little bit about her and Mandelstam and some other writers, and about St. Petersburg before the Revolution, which is quite interesting (and the stuff about Mandelstam is sad, really, considering how it all ended). Also started reading Rubicon by Tom Holland because Alistair who wants to do ancient history at uni has been raving on about it all year. It's OK - a bit breathless at times, which I suppose is what all the reviewers on the jacket meant by "exciting", only sometimes I wish he'd slow down a bit. Still, if it's a lively narrative zip through the rise and fall of the Roman Republic you're after, then you probably can't beat it. And I only started reading it because I felt like I didn't know enough about that period but actually I've realised I knew more than I thought I did (funnily enough, from endless Latin unseens...).

So, now comes the painful moment of ripping-myself-away-from-the-damn-computer...