The Katy Diaries – Entry #2

 

In the grand tradition of starting my dairy entries with a quote, I’m going to open with my new favourite from Rent:

The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.

I’ve never thought about this before, but it just makes so much sense. If war is tearing things apart, then of course the opposite is making them again. And I have missed creating things so, so much. I miss writing, building worlds from the ground up. I miss cooking, creating something bigger than what I was given at the beginning. I even had to miss dancing on Monday, thanks to a rather frustratingly timed cold. So with new found determination, I picked up the camera and started taking photos. I only got a couple of good shots, but it’s quicker than finishing a recipe and easier than smashing out a chunk of a story.

However, the midst of exam week is not really the time to be having a sudden desire to act upon my creative urges (which, psychology fact, come primarily from the right side of the brain), so I tried really, really hard to settle down and study.

I was mostly successful in studying the soundtrack of Rent very intensely. Hence the opening quote.

It’s really hard to motivate myself to do something I’m not particularly interested in. I love learning, but I detest the way the school decides to measure the way we learn and determine our intelligence based on who can cram the most information in their heads. Standardized testing achieves very little, apart from placing insane amounts of stress on students. As someone who places a fair amount of stress on herself anyway, it’s enough to make a person go insane.

I have found, eventually, that studying with someone is much more effective, so I spent the rest of the afternoon watching Friends on and off and quizzing psychology content back and forth with a friend.

I am still frustrated. I’m still not even remotely looking forward to doing these exams, and I’m already dreading getting the results; not because I don’t think I’ve tried hard enough, but because it has gotten to the point where there are subjects I am forced to take that I just don’t understand. It doesn’t matter how much I try, I am not ever going to understand mitosis and meiosis, or sex linked cells, or velocity vs time graphs.

Okay, so my issue is mainly with science, but it’s also with the fact that in the end, whether or not I get into my first choice university will be based on exams just like these. It won’t matter that I know a lot of things that can’t be tested, or that I might have had a really bad cold on the day of the exam (just like this week). The only thing that will matter is whether or not I can use information that I’ll have crammed tightly into my head, that I’ll also promptly forget when I walk out of the exam room.

So really, I wish I had more time to dedicate to creation. I wish I had more time to take a thousand bad photos to get the perfect one, or write a thousand useless sentences until I have the wording just right, but I don’t. Because I’m too busy trying to remember logarithmic laws (something I’m sure I’ll use all the time when I leave school).

It’s war trying to drag myself through these exams, and I can’t wait to get to the opposite.