The Gloves Are Off

just don't shake me

Kad has not brought the internet back yet.

Kad went to cat-sit at his brother's internetless house a few weeks ago and now he tells me he is going to stay there forever, crushed by the unrelenting grind of sharing space at Chateau Weasel with Weird Guy and the new guy in the room opposite mine who doesn't speak to anyone except Weird Guy and who plays music that sounds like Satan vomiting up chainsaws at ear-splitting volume each night and on Sunday afternoons.

I cannot understand why Kad has left.

But Kad says that when his brother sorts out some internet of his own I can have his, so I am very excited. I have never had an internet of my own before.

School started in earnest today, after the tutors ordered us to have a cruisy one last week. Maybe because I am still a bit shellshocked from my work experience experience, maybe because the sun was shining and there was a hint of spring in the air and for the first time in ages I didn't need to wear gloves while walking to school, I breezed through Term Three's baptism of fire without a care in the world.

Two assignments had been promised for today, on maths and statistics. Two hour deadlines for each. That's all we'd been told. All weekend I tried to worry about it, but couldn't muster the energy.

And so the day came. Assignment one: at 10am precisely we were presented with the 2009 annual report of a bank, and given two hours to interpret the figures and write a 300 word story on our findings. Deadline midday - hand the story in a second later and you fail.

Assignment two: at 1pm precisely we were handed a very fascinating release from Statistics New Zealand, and given two hours to interpret the figures and write a 300 word localised story on our findings. Deadline 3pm - hand the story in a second later and, well, not only do you fail but you are likely to get your fingers slammed in the top drawer of the tutor's desk for your trouble.

If you'd have told me in February I was going to have to do this I would've run screaming from the building. But I not only completed today's tests with sanguine disregard for deadline pressure and my innate mathematical subnormality, I even managed to get a pun about sausages into the first line of the second assignment.

Education is a wonderful thing because something from the mess that was the past five months has clearly seeped into my tiny weaselly Etch-A-Sketch brain.

Like I keep saying to my Fabulous Classmates, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.