If my voice could reach back through the past…

The past is a strange thing.

I was never overly fond of history in school. I don’t remember any strong feelings about it in primary school, which probably means it was just there, something to be sat through. I was really really good at it in first year, I got all As and while it wasn’t exactly exciting, I did like it. Sometime in second year we reached a topic and I suddenly went to myself “hang on a sec, this is boring!” So I stopped paying attention in history. If I remember correctly, I started listening to music during class, and participating so little my teacher repeatedly thought I was falling asleep (I was really bored), Somehow I maintained the A standard I had started in 1st year, I think it was mainly because I was really sick of the teacher calling me back after class and telling me I had to pay attention and do work and have a good attitude and all that annoying stuff.

In third year history got interesting, if not for the right reasons. For some reason I can’t remember anymore I decided almost instantly that I really disliked my new teacher, since I already really disliked the subject, this just didn’t make a good combination. 3rd year was also the year that my House addiction was born. I had a new love, and 3 35 minute long classes a week with nothing better to do. I came up with a thrilling alternative- I decorated! For the first portion of the year, it was my pencil case I had a set of pens, 4 different colours and I painstakingly wrote, in tiny tiny writing in all different directions, my favourite house quotes all over the case. I called him Greg in honour of the doctor himself, and I was so proud of myself when I had every possibly space filled with a witty remark- my teacher, on the other hand, was less than pleased.

All of a sudden, disaster struck in the form of irish weather. There I was on a Friday evening, delighted to be free from school after what as my worst day of the week that year, walking home innocently with my friends, when it started to rain. My pencil case, sitting innocently on top of my books, was a casualty of this natural disaster- yeah, the colours ran. I was heartbroken, all those classes of work, ruined (pretty much all, I think some of the blue writing survived). So Greg was dead, although a really interesting mix of colours. So while I still have him with me, and love him dearly, I couldn’t bring myself to try redo him, so now greg is merely a shell of his former glory, a fond memory or how evil life is (I’m not melodramatic I swear)… But it wasn’t even Christmas, and there were a whole load of history classes to sit through, I needed a new project.

Near the beginning of the year we had been handed a hardback copy and asked to bring in money for it, since the teacher reckoned that asking us to get our own would mean people not having one for weeks. I fought hard to get the red and back one that was thrown down on our table, landing Diarmuid with the totally inferior blue and black. The copy was meant to be for essay questions and things like tables that could be used for revision purposes (yeah right) and other important things that deserve more than an ordinary copy. I wasn’t very good at third year I didn’t really do my essays, but I decided that the hardback’s bright cover and plain pages at the front and back were perfect for what I needed- distraction.

I had a system, lyrics went at the back, quotes at the front- mainly House of course. Writing got smaller and neater as the year went on, conserving the fairly limited space. The front and back covers were attacked with biro, words gone over 7 million times until i was sure they were there for good. That was where I slipped up, in what was a really dumb move I put my new favourite quote right slap bang in the middle of the front cover “See I was right, this doesn’t interest me” Let’s just say my teacher wasn’t best impressed the next time he took up my copy, not least because the essay he was meant to be correcting was only half done. I think that’s when the war really started, up until that point he had basically ignored my inattention, given me a few homework notes but other than that he’d let me be. From that point on it was a regular occurrence for him to be speaking to the class and without even looking up from his book he would give out to me, something like “And in 1920 the black and tans, Sinéad put down the pen, opened fire at a football match…” At one point he actually took my pencil case and pen off me, or made me leave them on the guy beside me’s table…. It became a bit of a game for me, when would he get seriously annoyed?

It was also interesting because I almost never did my homework, and while at the beginning of the year he had given me notes, as time passed he just seemed to give up, to stop bothering to correct me. He still told me I could do better in tests, I’d slipped to Bs at this stage, but oddly enough he was always nice, despite the fact that I must have been seriously annoying. Then of course there was the incident in Achill when I accidentally attacked him with the oar of the kayak or canoe or whatever it was I was meant to be sailing, and the time after my mocks when I was completely shocked I hadn’t failed the test, the day of my results when I was like “I didn’t fail!” and he was complimentary about my B despite complaining about me getting them all year… Yeah, I probably could have managed the A in the junior, but if I’d done that I really don’t think I would have had half as much fun…

That wasn’t what I’d originally planned to talk about, and it doesn’t really fit in with the title either- but that’s as far as I got last night, and when now I’m trying to get back to it and it’s just not working for me. I’m fairly happy with that as it is, even if it seems a bit incomplete, and hopefully at some stage I’ll manage to write the second half and post it, seeing as that’s the bit I originally wanted to write. But as I put effort into this bit I might as well post it as it is. Enjoy

Today was a fairly good day

Reading other peoples blogs always makes me want to write one of my own, even when I haven’t got much to say.

Today was a fairly enjoyable day, I had a free french class supervised by my current favourite teacher, an irish class where I could actually hand up my essay (which I thought was actually kinda well written *shocker*) instead of mumbling some pitiful excuse, an english class where we discussed if Hamlet was guilty of murder or manslaughter when he killed Polonius, a maths class where I made a guy across the room mime his head exploding with one of my questions and to top it all off when my parents came home they gave me chocolate.

Due to 5th year trips over half term I only have three more days in school before I get over a week of freedom. It’s a very exciting prospect since in the aftermath of parent teacher meetings I have actually been concentrating and/or working in the majority of my classes, I need a break.

Thanks to my new idea of actually working, I stayed up late last night texting a friend while we both worked on the irish essay mentioned above. Through a series of odd excuses and sheer laziness, this is the first essay I have written all year (5th year not 2010) despite them being a fairly regular weekly assignment. This essay wasn’t too hard to do since we’d been given a whole bunch of vocab the day it was given. I think there’s only about 4 sentences in the whole thing that come straight from my own brain, and those are the ones with more questionable use of the language. Now, since I think it’s rather good it’ll most likely be handed back with a crap grade, since I’m just not good at predicting these things in irish, but it was done, and I actually tried, so what more does she want??? (me to actually be good at the language, yeah yeah)

Another subject with a noticeable difference is chemistry. I’ve decided to switch seats, and therefore experiment groups, since where I was I tended to finish experiments thinking “okay, what the hell did we just do, and why on earth were we doing it??”
I’ve now done two experiments with this group and I’m finding something strange- I can actually keep track of, and play an active part in, the experiment while still enjoying myself and knowing what’s going on…. what a strange phenomenon!! Okay so our results are never perfect, at least we have results.. The next test is trying to do all the homework that’s due on Tuesday- something like 51 questions. I should manage it because he’s been setting some of them before on the basis of “if you’ve done everything you should have in class this isn’t that much homework” so I’ve got around 25 of them done already. At least they’re mathsy, I do like mathsy things.

On the bad side of today- my back, which has been sore for a while now, is still sore, I’m tired thanks to that essay and I have to get up early tomorrow too.

But all in all, today was a pretty good day (or has been so far at least). That’s a good thing since I’ve had some not so good ones recently, and obviously good ones are far more fun. Let’s hope there’s more of them to come =)

Flat

It’s one of those in between times of year, when nothing’s really happening. Christmas is well and truly over, the next major holiday is so far away. Half term is fairly close but there’s nothing particularly interesting going on in my life during it, and I’m probably gonna have a bunch of homework to do.

Even the weather is in between, it’s so so super cold today- but there’s nothing like the snow of a few weeks ago.

We’re finishing up topics in most subjects, we just got to the end of Hamlet, finished our chapter in physics and maths, finished this grammar section in french, finished our geography topic. So I’ve had a good few tests in the last few days and there’s more on the way- thrilling.

The combination of this stuff leaves me feeling a bit… flat. There’s no excitement, and although school’s off for a week in less than two weeks it’s hard to be excited about what’ll probably turn out to another week of boredom.

So apologies for the lack of interesting blogposts recently, but the blog is a reflection of my life and right now it’s got the feeling spot on. So I guess I’m just really good at this…. I think.

I have a beautiful view

So basically we had an essay to write this week in English, with a number of titles to choose from. Me being me I left it until the last night and panicked when the title I picked really didn’t work out for me. Fortunately I swapped titles and did the other essay quite well (I hope). Today in geography I started playing around with the first title and ended up with a poem so here it is:

There are tears blurring my vision and I’m not the only one
It is raining, the candles that burned brightly before
Are now no more than pools of wax slowly solidifying on the ground
My feet ache from hours of standing, my heart aches with sorrow
There’s oh so familiar music playing although right now I hate to hear it
You’re standing next to me, black streaking your cheek
You smile and hug me, though you’re just as sad yourself
I’m miserable, because days ago I was so happy
This evening is one of the best and worst of my life
Although right now I would rather not see it
I know I have a beautiful view

Enjoy and all that jazz

Results

So the ridiculously long Christmas break came to an end today, it was up at 7.50 for me- something I wouldn’t have thought would be possible considering I haven’t been asleep yet by then some nights recently. But anyway I managed to get up and get ready and actually be on time, good start to the term anyway.

Now, today was obviously the first day we’ve been in school since the last of our christmas tests so we were all a bit nervous waiting for results. I hate the way teachers give a big long speech before they hand them back, going on about if they were good in general, or bad or if there were a lot of failures or As or silly mistakes, I’d much rather they’d wait until after you have it back to make the speech because then at least you know if you can be sitting looking fairly relaxed or if you need to be looking ashamed- rather than everyone looking nervous and not knowing if the bad things they talk about were things that you had done.

I’ve got all but one of my results back now and in general I’m pleased, some of the ones that I wasn’t sure about came back with nice high marks and the ones that I’d thought I’d done badly in weren’t too bad. Except irish, that was a total absolute failure and is now my lowest mark in a test ever. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m generally good at irish I would actually laugh at the utter rubbish I’ve written on the page, it was a real case of my brain leaving the building with a struggling me inside. Hopefully it was present for my geography exam which was earlier that day, but I won’t find that one out until tomorrow

Now obviously I’m in 5th year and the Leaving Cert is on everyone’s mind, especially while being handed a bunch of tests with marks, i couldn’t resist totalling up the points I would have gotten had my christmas tests been my leaving cert- although if they had I would have been wondering what the hell everyone had been complaining about for years, that wasn’t so bad. Anyway at the moment I’m looking at 510 points which is pretty good, it could go up slightly once I get geography back tomorrow but even so that’s fairly acceptable. Edit: Yup, gepgraphy pulled it up to 525, fairly happy with that. So yeah, in general christmas tests were a success. Although now that I have my results I have no reason to want to be going back to school and would really appreciate a day off tomorrow- where’s that snow when I need it?

25. tomorrow

Tomorrow
Will be much the same as today
How depressing

R.I.P. Christmas Tree

Christmas is officially over, although the weather has delayed my return to school the season is still done with. The excitement of the holiday has died, the house seems empty and boring, no matter who’s home. The Christmas tree that was such a prominent feature in the room for the last while is gone, packed into a box to sleep until December 2010. The house is no longer filled with chocolate and sweets. We’re still playing games but only because there’s little else to do.

In honour of the death of the Christmas season here’s a poem:

The Christmas tree is slowly dying
In the corner where it stands
The Christmas tree is feely empty
Presents have moved to fill demands
The Christmas tree is quietly crying
It knows its purpose is fulfilled
The Christmas tree remembers fondly
When toys and sweets from stockings spilled
The Christmas tree has left the corner
Where it stood so tall and proud
Because it’s reached the time of year
When Christmas trees are not allowed

It’s not quite right, but I started it way back in July as part of Writing for Life so at this point I don’t think I’ll ever get it quite right, so this’ll do.

Snow!

Okay I’m immature but I love snow!
I was rudely awoken yesterday morning by my sister thrusting a phone at me. She didn’t respond to my efforts to get her to leave me alone “Go away, feck off…” so I eventually picked up the phone and listened to my mother. A smile slowly spread across my face as I heard that school would be closed until Monday. I was quick to get up and start to spread the news amongst my friends, then spend the morning sitting in front of the computer staring out the window watching the snow rain down… well, watching the snow snow down I guess but doesn’t sound as good now does it?

I made plans with my friends to meet up and be immature later in the day so I went for a little hunt and found my ski jacket, fluffy socks, semi waterproof shoes, scarf, hat, gloves and all other necessary accessories for frolicking in/ throwing snow.

The actual snow was great. Powdery and soft and I was all wrapped up and cosy so wasn’t affected by the coldness of it. We were sledding on a hill which was great craic and in the evening we met up to celebrate the lack of school the following morning with a dvd. Isn’t that just magical??

I don’t have much experience with snow, I’m irish. But in the last year I’ve had two decent snows at home and a trip to Switzerland where the snow was just incredible, you’d expect that though, it was a skiing holiday.

Snow is awesome, it’s fun it’s unusual and it gets you days off school- what more could you want in the weather??
Best of all it’s an excuse to come in after a day of fun and snuggle up near a radiator with some hot chocolate, making a very happy Sinéad.

Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

Silence

It burns hot and cold
Fire and ice united
Just for an instant
Then all that’s left
Is a bitter taste in my mouth
And unbroken silence

The end of the decade

In a few short hours I’ll enter my third decade of life… Makes me feel very old. My next blog post won’t happen until 2010, that’s so strange. This year has been an interesting one. School, music, weddings, blogging, poetry, CTYI, Rostrevor… So much has happened. I’m not gonna go through a whole run through of what the year has been for me, I can only remember the important bits anyway.

As a holiday I’m not that fond of New years. I mean, considering it’s so soon after Christmas it’s a bit of a letdown. Christmas arrives with a bang, there’s presents to be opened, family are around, everyone’s in a good mood and there’s a load of new stuff to entertain me. Then new years comes, we wait for midnight, then it arrives, we cheer and then what??? It’s a new year, I spend the first week of school writing the wrong dates in my journal but other than that?? It’s no big deal really.

Still I’m going out tonight and hopefully it’ll be a good night despite the poorer holiday. Fingers crossed anyway