Skip to main content

The effect of exam stress on my book buying habits

It is approximately 8:30pm on Monday 7 May 2012. I'm doing my German oral exam tomorrow and I'm extremely nervous and it's not fair. It has occurred to me at several random points in the past week or so where I've been handing over tender to pay for books or clicking "proceed to checkout", in an almost zombie-like state, on Amazon that exam stress does nothing good for my book buying habits.

Usually I will buy one, two or three books a month. This past week or so: 10+. It's crazy. And mad. And the like. I think I'm just craving stuff to read that doesn't involve anything "school"y, so to speak. Saying that, I've bought a weird mix of books: anything from the most classic of classics to the the most contemporary of contemporary. It's good because it means I'll have a lot to read over study leave and after, but it's not good because I don't exactly have all the money in the world.

On the plus side, my Mum bought me a lovely hand painted heart-shaped rock to wish me good luck in my exams and it fits exactly perfectly into my hand and it's quite relaxing just to chuck from hand to hand. This thing is going to be glued to me over the next few weeks.

I thought I better document these horrendous spending habits of mine to remind myself not to do it again when I see how much I've spent in total....

Keep (trying to) smile and never forget that you are awesome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Teens don't read"

Earlier today Maureen Johnson pointed out that the view of "teens don't read" in the UK is deeply entrenched (which is a word that I now love  and had never heard before). As a teenager in the UK, the stigma around reading seems to be - to me - it's "uncool", it's "geeky", there "aren't any good books out there". I think the fact that a lot of teenagers in British schools are exposed to older literature or, perhaps, not that popular literature in lessons and forced into over-analysing and spending countless hours on 'what the author meant'. A point that was raised in this twitter discussion was that people didn't want to be seen reading, or didn't want to be seen reading certain books. It's made me realise that I never   ever ever  see people reading in the older years in my school ( ever ). Perhaps the odd year 7 (12 year old) or year 8 (13 year old) will read, but - from experience - they will probably be ...
4 comments
Read more

Expectations

I haven't even attempted to write this blog post until now because I haven't really fully contemplated the goings on of this past week. To say they have been crazy, mad, bonkers... dumbfounding even would be a slight understatement. After spending the last three days recuperating and avidly watching season 2 of Gilmore Girls I have finally realised that I, Claire Margerison, have just left school. I have four exams and a results and that's it. Kaput. Done. Bam. Gone. Poof. Weird. My last day and leavers' ball (prom, whatever you may call it) were sublime - and I genuinely mean that. Other than the nearly fainting and having to leave and getting laughed at in the leavers' assembly, it was utterly perfect. I spent a majority of my prom catching up with teachers and just talking to them about the future, about the past, about my ex-boyfriend in particular (hah, sorry Michael - suffice to say I think you enjoyed the conversations too!). It was amusing and fun and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Unexpected Art

As I was walking in Lincoln today down this random footpath that I've always wanted to go down but never have I came across a myriad of things. The canal ran along side the path; said canal was littered with ducks, geese, debris and - unfortunately - litter. Every so often I came across a 'Fish here with licence' type sign which more often than not had been graffitied on with a penmanship or a heart whose ink dripped down quite morbidly. Hugging the canal was a spread of jigsaw houses. You could almost see the development of house after house, developer after developer. Every now and then a person would pass me, sometimes child in hand, others bag. To my right was an industrial sprawl and here lay the most unexpected part of my journey. After venturing past factory after factory, some more decrepit than others, I arrived at this old, rusting, green-rusty-orange-brown-old factory. It was quite pungent around the area and the wall facing me as I approached had a sprawling...
2 comments
Read more