Boo-yah!

I have officially completed finals, and GOD IT FEELS GREAT. Calc and English were on Wednesday; as always I abhor English finals simply because I hate analyzing literature under a time limit, especially because I'm already a little skeptical of the whole analyzing-literature thing anyway. I mean, I love it on a larger scale - reading a book and discussing the metaphors and connections, but on a test I feel like you can really only spend time analyzing the minutiae. "That semicolon represents the speaker's disjointed, hurried thought process..." I mean, seriously. There's only so much syntax analysis that I can endure, especially hurriedly. But nevertheless it was alright, and then Calc.... wow, if anyone's read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (which you MUST, if you have not, because it's sheer brilliance), I felt like I'd just drunk a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, which I believe he describes "is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick." After coming out of the Calculus final I was quite unable to process thoughts, images, sentences... I felt like my brain had been beaten senseless with a lemon.

The weird thing is that I rather enjoyed the Calculus final.

I think it must be that my dad was a mathematician and I've inherited the "math gene", or perhaps it's just because he taught me math so young (I could do Algebra in 3rd grade!), but I LOVE MATH! I think it's brilliantly exciting, and there's nothing vague and interpretative about it. In Calculus, I've felt like everything I've ever learned, all those boring pointless equations I've been taught for the past eight years, has all been leading up to now. Everything comes together in Calculus! And if everything has come together in Calculus, then everything really came together on the Calculus final. I'm pretty sure we've never had any problems quite that complex in class - they seemed to be compilations of everything hard we'd done so far this year, and it took pretty much all my brain power and concentration to work through them. Hence the feeling that my brain had been beaten with something powerfully citrus-y. But I solved them, I'm sure - so despite the fact that I was running into walls I had that "runner's euphoria" that you feel when you've finished a hard race and not given up. It felt great!

Going into the English final after that was kind of a joke, however. I really hope my English teacher won't judge my essays, because I'm pretty sure they made no sense.

Thursday was Latin and US History, an "easy" day - that is, more relaxed. Latin was fine, though I hadn't studied much. Honestly, I didn't study intensively for any of my first four finals. Every night leading up to Friday I dedicated to Biology. AP Bio with the brilliant Dr. Tromp, the final I feared more than anything else. And it paid off! Of course I didn't get a 90% (ha, probably way less), but she's grading it AP style, which means that 65% and up is an A. Sweet! 104 multiple choice questions and two essays, and I actually felt prepared and, what's more, knowledgeable! Knowledgeable on a hard subject such as Biology is ALWAYS good.

And then I slept. I watched Psych with Elise, the one exception to my no-television rule of 2007 (which so far is going well, and feels great! When I used to watch TV too much I always felt stupid and wished for an excuse to just get up and walk away - an excuse other than homework. But this resolution is the perfect excuse, and I've been reading more, writing more.... maybe not doing homework more, but HEY. I'm a second-semester senior, y'all, and what? Homework? Hahaha.).

So yeah. I survived Finals week much to my delight and surprise. A week ago all I felt was a pit of terror in my stomach going into finals, and that resilient and undesired thought in the back of my mind, "if I broke my leg, would I still have to take finals?" But I did not break my leg, and I went into finals reluctantly and fearfully, and I LIVED!

Have a good week, everybody!

posted by Holly @ 9:34 AM