Something really sad happened today, which has me stuck in a perpetual mood of melancholia. My mum’s friend’s daughter passed away after battling cancer for eighteen months. I’m not naming any names just in case, but she was only twenty four and I think she was engaged and it must be terrible for her family right now. The cancer started in her knee, so she had her leg amputated up to her thigh, but it still wasn’t gone so they amputated up to her hip, and then she had rigorous chemotherapy and radiotherapy and it was making her really sick and it didn’t work anyway. The doctors told her they couldn’t do anything else, so she went home for a while, but had to be rushed to hospital with pneumonia a few days later, and then she was moved to a hospice and she passed away this morning at something past seven.
And it just made me really, really sad. I only met her once, at IKEA, but she was really nice and her mum’s really nice (we went to Spain with her once and my mum works with her) and it just really saddened me. Reminds you of the futility of existence, doesn’t it? How everything’s just pointless, no point getting caught up in the little things when we’re all going to be just as dead in the end. And it makes me feel pretty guilty, because I’ve still complained about stuff and still let stuff annoy me, even though I know there are way bigger things to stress about. It’s just difficult to put into context with your own life, isn’t it? When it isn’t happening to you?
This week has been very stressful, if you completely disregard the subject of death for a few minutes. My French exam was on Wednesday, which meant gruelling revision since Sunday, for the exam to go ‘okay’. I had my Carmel interview yesterday – a lot of time sitting in a waiting room talking to Kirsten and her mum, and then a few minutes spent talking to one of the government and politics teachers who didn’t really seem that interested in my explanation of my predicted grades, and then another fifteen minutes in a queue for a data input station where they took our details and gave me an acceptance letter. So I’m in, as long as I get the grades in August. We were waved over to fill in a questionnaire with another woman and then we went home. It was much more boring and much less stressful than I’d anticipated, to be honest. I didn’t go into school yesterday because I was just… tired, I guess. I wasn’t feeling very motivated, anyway, and my throat hurt, so I stayed home with Mum and practiced for my Spanish oral exam. I finished (finally!) reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – remember me buying it in Waterstones ages ago, when the man told me it was a really good little book? I loved that man. He was awesome. That WAS a good day, aside from the wet socks. Anyway, I wouldn’t say REALLY good, but it was funny and I kinda liked it. I also read Bad Girls Don’t Die (I’m not sure who it’s by) yesterday, too, which kind of sucked. Meh, it was alright.
I had the Spanish exam this morning. It was good. The only thing I berated myself for afterwards was the fact that I forgot to include ‘tanto’ or ‘tan’, but apart from that I think it was fine. I mostly improvised the answers because everything just seemed to go out of my head that I’d learned, but thankfully I can bluff things for Spanish, whereas in French I would have completely blown it if I hadn’t learned it off by heart, because I’m so completely sucky at French.
We also had that Physics trip to Liverpool University today. We got called over the tannoy system to go to the atrium steps at the beginning of period four (Maths) but it turned out they’d made a mistake and we were only supposed to go at lunch, so we missed a whole lesson just to sit around chatting. Which was good, especially since they were doing yet another mock exam paper in class. As if we don’t have enough already for homework. I’m sure the Maths teachers are convinced we don’t have any other subjects to revise for. Honestly – it’s pathetic. Anyway, we got on the coach (finally) and I listened to music the whole way with Rachel and Hannah, which was fun. The teachers there didn’t really care about what we were doing and stuff, and I don’t think anyone actually knew what we were going to be doing when we arrived, but we basically sat in a theatre with really slippy seats to hear a talk about space. I’d expected it to be about choosing Physics at A Level, but it wasn’t really anything to do with that. There was a really terrifying demonstration with balloons, which scare me anyway because of their popping tendencies, and a lot of audience participation involved. Thankfully I wasn’t made to ‘volunteer’. We didn’t even get told off for whispering to each other. We had to fill out a questionnaire at the end and it asked about our least favourite part – I said the balloon part, and Hannah said ‘the part where people got up, jumped, and sat back down again’, because the first row from every school had to do it to demonstrate the effects of gravity, as if we didn’t already know what it was. Anyway, the rest of the talk was pretty interesting, though. I’d quite enjoy being an astronaut, I think, but I think you have to be pretty good at Physics… which I am not.
Diane and Geoff came round tonight for hot pot. That was fun. Funny stories were exchanged, laughs were had and drinks were drank by all except me. All in all, a pretty okay day.
I did finally update my FanFic, though! After two whole months! I got three nice reviews, too, which is nice 
I love FanFiction.
Hope everything’s nice and shiny in your lives 
Love, Alex xXx
