Bodily functions

Three exams have occurred so far, and all three times I’ve needed to pee so desperately in my life that it’s untrue. I do not have a small bladder.

I will place it down to the can of Red Bull I chug before openning the exam paper, letting all those E numbers soar through me and straight down to the other end. But it’s so badly timed. I have thirty to forty minutes of academic clarity where my essay writing is spot on and fluid and everything, but then it fades in time for the second section of the exam to start. I don’t mind this usually, as I’ve done so well on the first exam that the second one is just there for picking up a few extra marks here and there. But, right when I’m polishing off the last of the analysing of the second essay, my bladder twitches. It’s full apparently. Very full. And I think it’s getting fuller because the need is more pressing. I feel fit to burst, so I squirm, I become uncomfortable and I become distracted.

But the thing is, I’m so close to the end of my exam. So damn close. If I can finish this conclusion then I get to leave twenty minutes early and laugh at how well or badly I’ve done. If I go to the toilet, come back, then finish it then I’ll finish on fifteen minutes left and they lock the doors and I’m stuck there for fifteen minutes with something I cannot possibly write any more on. So the dilemma is there. Do I pee and be bored for fifteen whole minutes or do I hold it in and rush my conclusion?

Of course, without question, I rush it. After wasting so much time studying recently I have no inclination to waste any more of it doing nothing. So I rush it, hand it in, stroll casually out of the exam hall, and drain my bowels in the nearest toilet. I have few regrets on this approach. The conclusion is worth at maximum ten marks and I’ve banged out five just by scribbling a mediocre, but accurate, paragraph. But, what I do regret, is being unable to leave my signature final line of a joke.

Sometimes I feel sorry for lecturers and how bored they are. You just wanna give them a hug.

Also, on an unrelated note, I’m no doctor but I don’t think it’s normal to have mucus that’s actually green.

Things I regret

I just finished watching the tail end of Passenger 57 and I tell you, that is one hour of my life that I’m never getting back.

I hate those moments. Sneaky little realisations that hey Jonathan, you just completely wasted your day and you’ll never get that back for as long as you live. It was sunny out there, brilliantly sunny. There was a wind that playfully ruffled your hair and kept you cool, and you had a packet full of cigarettes and a full battery in your mp3 player. Hell, you had plenty of weed stashed away somewhere. You could’ve gone for a walk somewhere. Sat somewhere, in a tree maybe. And you could’ve gotten high in a tree and gone for a walk and sat in the sun. But you didn’t. You wasted your day. Your day was wasted. Not even the good kind of wasted. The bad wasted. Gone.

Damn exams.

What are…

emotions?

And so (3)…

I have finally received marks and comments for the the paper I wrote about in this post, and in reference to the blind woman being able to understand why her partner is doing better, my marker replied with;

Those are, sadly, not the best examples.

To the idea of increasing the sea of psychological knowledge drop by drop, she said nothing.

And I still passed.

There is (4)…

something in my head something in my head something in my mother fucking head get it out get it out get it the fuck OUT.

You left me apologies to all your regrets

I had a dream about you last night. Is that weird? I think that’s weird.

We all yelled at you not to jump, that it wasn’t worth it. But you did it anyway, you leaped from the sandy ridge and slid down the edge into the river, throwing the ball back up to us using your unfathomable momentum. You died apparently. You cut your leg on some greasy shard of metal and got septicemia, or you swallowed some of the toxic water and got cancer, I don’t know. But I know that there was a will written in crayons and my name smudged in red with sad little lovehearts dancing round it. You walked up beside me and took my hand in yours. We walked along the ridge where you fell and I had to force myself not to look at your dead, saturated body. I couldn’t stop talking in Spanish and you couldn’t understand me, so you held a finger to your lips and I fell silent. In front of us was the ball you went to receive, covered in slimy blood. When I turned you were gone but I could still feel your hand in mine, and I kicked the ball as hard as I could, covering myself in splatters of the shining black blood.

I don’t know what to think when I wake up. I wonder if I should feel happy or sad that you’re dead before I remember it was only a dream. I had a dream about you. Is that weird? I think that’s weird.

Preemptive retaliation (2)

“I don’t know how you do it,” he says, swinging on the plastic kitchen counter and swirling water in his cheek, “I’m only thirty miles away and I can barely hack that.”

“Yeah, it sucks,” I reply. In the background I can hear giggling and “the terrorists are in the basement oh no” as a drunken girl stumbles about the in the other room. I want to go out for another cigarette but I’ve smoked twenty that night already and I don’t need another one. “But it’s good though. Really.”

He doesn’t believe me, he just fingers the scar under his eye from where an opponent pushed a key through his fingers before he hit him. He downs the water and sighs.

“Nah. I wouldn’t be able to hack it. All that distance, being so far away from each other. How can you not feel the distance?”

I stepped outside and lit a cigarette. He didn’t understand.

Hear no evil

You wouldn’t think it would you? No, no, not in a million years. I didn’t, and I was wrong. All the other people didn’t, and they were very wrong. Maybe their mother knew, but I’m damned if she told me.

I had just sat back down on the coach after a brief stop in Carlisle, munching away at a bag of horrendously overpriced Doritos and enjoying my music when I sensed something. There’s nothing supernatural about this sense, it’s just feeling that everyone gets when there is someone just a bit too close to them. I turn round, and there he is. The middle member of this little trio is there, staring at me with his head in his hands and a monkey smile on his lips. I’m taken aback at first, but the thought that occurred to me was that kids can smell fear, so I smiled back and nodded. He grinned wider and disappeared. It was odd, I’ll admit, but I shrugged and settled into the window to grab some sleep before arriving home.

Halfway through my nap, I get that feeling again. Someone is very close to me, so I turn round and sure enough there he is again, this time chugging from a bottle of orange juice. I nod to him again and he grins back. I felt bizarre and awkward, as if I were the main character in some bad art house film. I offered him a Dorito and he took it unquestionably.

“I’m Johnathan,” I say, and offer him my hand. He shakes it, but doesn’t answer. “And you are?” He grins. “Right, so you’re not going to say a thing?” He laughs. “Fine then,” I say, and give him an earbud to my music player. He looks at it with wide-eyed shock before bouncing his head along to The Mars Volta and trying to hum to the erratic tune. I turn the music off abruptly and his eyes fly open and he’s begging me to turn the music back on.

At least, that’s what i think he’s doing. He doesn’t speak a word of English.

It’s not until later that I figure out that he and his family were Serbian, but the information at that point would not have been a great help to me. Soon after I turned off the music his two brothers came and joined him, and an interesting game of inter-lingual pictionary began where they would draw something and I would learn how to say it. They laughed at me plenty of times, repeating my failed attempts at saying “roller skates” in their language and they covered most of my notebook with scrawled, itchy pictures of busses, cars and clowns. They grew bored of my pens eventually though, so I taught them the nuances of high-fives and thumbs up and I beat them so many times at rock paper scissors that they started throwing wild-card weapons like dynamite and gun.

Now, looking at that picture up there and the other one down there, you wouldn’t think it would you? You wouldn’t think that three angelically smiling children could be the incarnations of something more sinister, something evil? Of course, I didn’t. I’m one of those annoying guys in a horror film that has a sword shoved through their skull right after they’ve lulled the viewer into a false sense of safety.

The kids, they get too much. They clamour for my attention, rifle through my bag, and try to steal my saved slice of lemon drizzle cake. I push them off harmlessly, managing to gently nudge away their hands every time they get close. But then they get bad. The laughing and hair pulling and nose tugging begins and face myself cornered in an onslaught of tiny hands with fingers like claws. I call out in vain for other people on the bus to help, but no one helps. I hear a snigger* or two from seats beside me and I manage to shoot the perpetrators a look before becoming engulfed my grabbing hands and screaming milk teeth.

Somehow I manage to pull myself out of the chair and onto my feet, with the littlest of the group hanging (literally hanging) off my hair. The mother notices and shoos them away from me with a barely apologetic smile. I retreat to my seat, lie back, and just as I’m about to drift off the oldest of the little bastards appears again with a devilish look in his eyes. As he prepares to lunge for me again I hold out my hand and manage to say “Prestana”, which I gathered over their attacks as “stop”. He cocked his head to one side and I gave him a high five again, then his brothers came over and I managed to snap one last picture before they disappeared forever.

God, I hate kids.

–
*Oh my god, the language correcter on my browser is trying to suggest that I change “snigger”** into “nigger”! Firefox you racist bastard!

**It’s doing it again!

There is (3)…

an exam paper held in a lecturers hand, waiting to be opened and a sentence ready to be read.

Question: How do we store information in our long-term memory?

Answer: Ironically enough… I’ve forgotten.

There is a plausible explanation for this.

You see, some time during second essay, I developed a need. Yes, a need. I ignored it for a while and continued chewing on the end of my cigarette as I wrote (a handy exam technique I picked up, unnerve the people around you with a cigarette in your mouth and they get so distracted that your scores are bound to look better), but this need persisted. It grew, as a matter of fact. It grew from a need to a really need. I had a really need. So much in fact that I couldn’t concentrate on my third and final essay, and when I can’t concentrate on essays, I write jokes in them.

There’s your plausible explanation.

So, with forty minutes of the exam left to go, I handed in my work pad and walked desperately out the side door where my really need turned into a long satisfying ‘ahhhhhh’ sound. It was very long. So long, in fact, that an examiner came in to check that I wasn’t cheating despite me finishing the exam about seven minutes previous. He stayed behind me for so long, and he was staring so hard that I actually stopped mid-stream. So my need that turned to my really need that turned to my ‘ahhhhhh’ had now turned into pain. God awful pain. But he wouldn’t stop staring. So I had to stop myself, wash up, waddle my way back into the exam room, out onto the street and waddle-sprint a good long distance until I reached a safe bathroom with no prying eyes and bulging shirts.

And I can only pray that every exam will not be like this one.

Preemptive retaliation

Nothing I say ever comes out right, does it?*

—
*not even that.