Clutter

Exams fuck my system up.

I mean, really, every time there's a major exam round the corner I tend to get cramps in my belly and pornographic thoughts in my head. I do the things I’d normally not do during normal periods in my life, and I resort to extremities that keep people away during the course of my preparation prior to the examinations.

When I'm not self absorbed between the mountain of books and lecture notes in front of my face, I'm in bed fast asleep catching a quick 'nap' that ranges from 5 minutes to seventeen hours. At times, I wake up in the middle of those 'naps' and find myself flat faced on my books, wondering how I got there and why the clock seems to show the time six hours in advance from when I last saw it.

And now that spring is around the corner and daylight savings is in effect, the alternation of day/night further fucks me up. It's still bright at 8pm, and the sun rises at 5am. My biological clock struggles to make sense of all the daylight, at times depriving myself of the sleep to keep up with the number of hours awake in the light against the number of hours asleep in the dark like I am normally used to.

Since high school I've reverted to pleasure foods to soothe my aching forehead, often choosing the sweetest foods available to man. The only explanation for this is that at full capacity my brain gorges on whatever supplies of glucose I supply it with because I neither gain nor lose a pound after the exams are over. When I was 14 the trend was to drink lots of extremely thick cordial and eat a ton of marshmallows. Now I tend to stick more to chocolate.

And when I say chocolate, I don't mean the small puny 65g Mars Bars you can get off the shelves at 7-Eleven.

I ingest an average of 750g of chocolate per day everyday for about a week leading up to the exam, with consumption peaking during exam periods and then tapering off to 0g right after my last paper.

And FYI a standard Cadbury 'brick' of chocolate is 250g.

I tend to focus more on the chocolates that have nuts in them because I like the texture of crushed nuts against the soft sweet chocolate, although solid dairy milk is fine too.

If you do the math, and assuming an average of 34.3g of fat per 100g chocolate, I consume around 17MJ (Mega joules, or 17x10^6 joules) of energy during every exam period JUST FROM CHOCOLATE. This does not include the other fatty foods I pig out on, such as oily noodles from the local Chinese take-away or ice cream that I eat by the tubs or even the occasional slice of cake with extra whipped cream after six hours of studying math. An average male uses around 10kJ of energy per day (factoring in light exercise and normal daily activities, such as toilet poops)

Cadbury pays its employees well because of ardent supporters like me.

As of today, in seven days leading up to the exam I've bought 6.5kg of Cadbury and consumed 5kg of it. That's 20 standard bricks of Cadbury, and almost 1/10th my body weight in kilos.

There's this old belief that chocolate increases sex drive. I may not know the true details of the research that led to that conclusion but I got to admit, I become quite wild during the exam period. When it doesn't involve seven DIY sessions on a DAILY basis, I'd be scanning through the realms of cyberspace hunting down every speck of good porn that's available for free. I've amassed my greatest porn collections during exam periods, something to the tune of 75GB of full length DVD quality videos over the past three years. And that doesn't even include the 10,000 or so nude pictures of men that I have and a further three hundred or so 'sample clips' from free websites. Collectively, the porn I obtain during an exam period sustains me for the next six months although this has been known to vary to a great degree depending on the year's 'harvest' and the quality of the movies.

Right now I'm in the midst of collecting porn of film stars, although most idiotic sites make it difficult by requesting for your credit card number in return.

If there's a better time to borrow off from my collection, it is one week before any major exam when I start putting the old collection into 'archives'.

Don't blame me. Blame my balls.

When the telly is not blazing away or the music blaring in my ear from my headphones, I'm most probably doing anything but studying. There seems to be a correlation between my need for noise and my ability to study. I couldn't study in a public library; I'd get too distracted by the silence.

My room bears the brunt of my frequent whining and mood swings. Often there's a spare chocolate wrapper hidden away between the pillows, or some crumbs on the floor, or a thousand A4 sized printouts scattered in organised chaos, all cluttered around my room.

Looking around me I can easily make out bits of nuts under the table, stacks of books everywhere all opened to random pages and showing grave signs of highlighting abuse, incomprehensible scribbles of working and answers to pass exam papers scattered over the floor, bits of chewing gum wrapper rolled into tiny balls sitting amongst the huge clutter on my desk that has old newspaper, gay magazines, bits of dried up marigold flowers I picked from the side of the road three days earlier and shells from an excursion scattered across the table top, smears of moisturiser across the bottom of my desk when I was too lazy to grab a paper towel to wipe off the excess from my fingers, some flakes of tissue paper from goodness knows where strewn over the carpet, a crumpled pile of laundry from last week's wash that I've not bothered to fold, dust bunnies in every direction because I've not bothered to vacuum for two weeks and last but not least, scribbles of 'I Love You' on a chemistry journal that I was reading with hundreds of tiny hearts scattered around the pages in various colours ranging from red to green to blue.

In true exam tradition, I work best at night, usually burning on until the wee hours of the morning before calling it a day. Daylight has adverse effects on my ability to absorb information, notwithstanding the urge finish reading the stacks and stacks of material that I’m required to read. I am extremely prone to distraction when it comes to studying, even if it means running up and down the staircase to open and close the fridge door repeatedly, hoping I'd find some treasure inside every time I take a peek.

I find that of all the techniques I use to study, the most effective involves regurgitation of material that I've learned. I'd suck up a ton of information a few days prior to the exam and vomit it all out onto the exam paper. Directly after the exam has concluded, I spend half the day unloading all the facts from my head to make space for the facts required on the next paper. Usually this works best when there is a day or two between exams because it gives me time to unload, recover, then regurgitate again, although I don't have this privilege this semester because all my fucking exams are back to back.

Continuous study has NEVER worked for me. The teachers in high school lied. Studying throughout the year DOESN'T help you pass the exam. Cramming at the very last minute does.

After the completion of any paper, it is my duty to inform the world of the mistakes that they've made and brag about my achievements during the exam, using words such as 'fucking easy' and 'bloody closed one eye' to further enhance my vocabulary. I occasionally toss in a sarcastic laugh during the exam to freak out the people around me, even though I know that I'm staring at a nightmare paper. I have been known to crush people with the 'right answers' to the difficult questions, and whine about how silly I was for forgetting to put a comma or a full-stop. Usually my most simple mistakes like misspelling the word 'dictyostelids' are exaggerated to a factor of 1000% to make the people around me freak out, and my gravest mistakes are cast away from the conversation because I have confidence that everyone else must have made the same mistake as me and therefore the moderation of marks in calculating the average score will still be in my favour.

Don't blame me for being an airhead. I put a lot of chocolate and porn into getting where I am, so piss off.

The most glorious event of all is when the exam comes to an end, when I finally unload all the information I've stored for the sake of passing. System returns to normal capacity and my room gradually tidies itself up, in anticipation for the next round of exams that will repeat the cycle.

And of course, this year there will be a much needed break together with the boyfriend.

God, I love exams.