Methods? Or Madness?

You know that dull, sinking feeling you get when you're on a ship that's going down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles from the nearest dry land and you suddenly realize that the sole lifeboat has sprung a leak? It's a feeling not many people would know first hand, so if you don't know it, imagine it. Then square it and then multiply it by a randomly chosen number greater then twenty. That'll give you some idea of what it felt like to sit in the exam room on Saturday afternoon and skim the QM paper. And that was before one read the instructions at the beginning and saw all the double-whammies.

And then there's the issue of selling ice cream in Moscow. The importance of marketing is all very well, but if I were selling ice cream in a city where it was an occasion if the temperature touched twenty-five on the Centigrade scale at the height of summer, and if people were actually willing to buy enough of it that I was not run out of business in the first week... I would be at least marginally less worried than I would have been had I been vending Popsicles in the Gobi Desert and still not had people out on the streets clamouring for my product.

I have endterms next week too. It's an odd sort of limbo here, where you're perpetually either convalescing from one lot of exams or just getting ready to face the next set. To cap everything, it never seems to make a difference how much you prepare. I spent most of Thursday and Friday either studying in the library or studying in my room, and I will still have to rely on a healthy combination of divine grace and a lenient evaluator to get a passing grade on the exam.

As for what's coming next Monday... all I can do is take a few deep breaths, make sure I have the cyanide capsules handy, and go to the tumbrils.