Insomnia

It is currently 12:56am in the morning, and my HSC exam is tomorrow. I cannot sleep. I haven't experienced insomnia in ages actually (usually I am so tired from lack of sleep I can't get enough of it). I am definitely not the type that gets insomnia from stress. The only time I could remember being semi-insomniac was the night before my piano diploma exam. That was it. At first I couldn't figure out why I can't sleep today but I realised, I had like a vanilla coke (a little bottle) at like 9pm ish. That's why. I couldn't figure out why a sugar high would give me insomnia, but then I realised coke has caffeine. That, paired with the 27mg concerta in my system equals wide awake, super concentration. But not sure if I'll be so brain-clear tomorrow. I shouldn't take the 27mg today again, but goddammit I need it to memorise. That paired with my baroque music works wonders. Hope it doesn't give me more insomnia (I never usually get insomnia from these meds. Apparently if you never get insomnia from taking concerta, it means that you actually legitimately have ADHD).

I will be taking a gap year. 95% sure. The other 5% is based on my mum and my HSC results. I have not broken the pleasant surprise to my mum yet, and she would be pretty furious. I reckon I may just ring her up from Paris one day and be like, 'hey mum I'm not coming back home for awhile'. Nothing she can do about it when I turn 18. So might do it in Paris, she doesn't need to know I changed my plane ticket. My ticket was $1800 for Sydney to Shanghai to Paris back to Sydney, which is not a bad price at all. I emailed STA today to see if I could change my ticket just for the one way without the return to Sydney. The maximum refund the guy would give me was $177 which is ridiculous, that return ticket back to Sydney from Paris should be worth at least $700, and if they have surcharges for cancellations I should get at least $400 back. He wouldn't tell me the latest date I could claim the refund, either. I want to go to STA in person and ask for the cancellation to see if different salespeople offer different refund amounts. But I can't bothered to do that until after the HSC (more like I don't have the time). And by the time 31 Oct rolls around, even the measly $177 refund might be no longer available.

Fuck, a giant spider just waltzed across my desk INCHES away from my arm and crawled across this very keyboard. Sprayed the hell out of it with bug spray (keeping it handy in the study where bugs show up on average once a week in the hot weather). I hope that spider is dead by now. I was spraying behind my other computer like crazy, so now my other laptop is covered in disgusting bug spray. That spider BETTER be dead, and I'm not about to check on it either. Dead spiders freak me out just as much as live ones. It annoys me to no end that I find on average 1 or 2 ants per day in the study, just casually crawling around. But there aren't giant hoardes of ants or anything so that confuses me, where is their nest?? Eurgh now I have probably poisoned my brain with the bug spray or something, I sprayed so much of it. Especially when this room already stinks of bug spray half the time. Where were those candles from bath and body works. Now I have the creepy crawlies and every 30 seconds I feel like there may be a bug on me somewhere.

Moved to my bedroom now (bug spray in hand, just in case). Arghhhh.

I am in a better mood now because of the sugar high. Even attempting to make a last minute fail study plan. Trying to make myself feel better. After all, as one of the English teachers said, the HSC is designed to be attainable for students my age.

-14 October I will get home at around 3 ish at the latest. MAKE NOTES FOR PAPER 2.
Fay/Jane should not be too hard because that was the one essay I nailed for trials, and I could use the notes from that as the arguments I made could sort of fit most questions I think. Julius Caesar, I have quite a few band 6/state ranking essays for that. So take notes from those essays and bullshit my way through the additionals. Harwood I am most worried about. They better not specify the poem. I don't think The violets or At mornington will get asked, because they have been done in previous years. That leaves 5 more poems. Out of those, I will be ruling out (possibly) Triste Triste because it is really sexual so there is the chance they probably won't specify that...Harwood was the one module I completely, utterly zoned out on which was not a good idea because it's so bloody difficult. I will just have to resort to memorising quotes and making up bullshit ideas that don't make sense. Oh God and there's the stupid textual integrity and critics too. So safe to say Harwood will not go well. It is really based on luck when it comes to cramming for advanced. You can flunk some things last minute but you can also fluke things last minute too. In the trials I legitimately remember get ranked like 40-something in one essay and then 3rd in another. The inconsistency is totally ridiculous.

-15-21 October: study one modern topic per day, alternate this with General. Modern surprisingly I have managed to convince myself that it won't be too bad. I have state ranking notes and essays and custom-compiled historiography quotes too, so really I should just read through all the bazillion study notes I have downloaded from boredofstudies, and by the time I read through all of them the info would have stuck in my mind. Then I'd just have to memorise the history quotes, easy. Plus you can make up historians anyway if you forget, it's not like the marker would know. Kollontai I am quite chilled about, because it is more focused on evaluation and using brain during exam and historical debate rather than knowing lots of content. WWI will be chillaxed, source based crap. Indochina, I actually worked my ass off for that last Indochina assessment and finally topped K and G, my main competitors, so I'm semi not too worried. Russia, I am quite concerned about. I reckon I will just do Stalinism and nothing else if I run out of time, because there is guaranteed to be a question on that as they haven't asked it in awhile. But Russia is the topic I zoned out most on and it's the most confusing one too. Overall modern is not too bad because my entire class is really good (I think the whole class is at least mid band 5 standard except for like 4 people out of a class of 15). Only one person in the modern class, C, does standard english so we should be able to do good essays as a class on the whole. Especially as K, the class genius, has probably gotten less than full marks only like 3 times max since the beginning of year 11, so I am predicting state ranking for her.
General, of course, I am not worried about. In fact I could even say that doing maths relaxes me. There is something methodical and calming about general because you don't learn much new content, it's all the stuff you did in junior years and easier. So I think my general and modern internal rankings are the only 2 subjects I didn't stuff up, which would help me big time.

-22-28 October: This is the nightmare week I will not look forward to. Who schedules a music 2 exam at 3:25pm???? WHAT THE HECK WERE THEY THINKING? I can imagine myself straining my ears trying to listen to the exam CD in the damn music building when school ends at 3:20 and the exam starts 5 minutes later. Eurghh. And it ends at 5pm. FIVE PM. When I live so far away from school and then the next morning I have extension english at 9:25am. So I could not do last minute cram for English. My plan for the week beginning 22 Oct is to tackle the musicology scores, memorise music quotes, memorise all the concepts of music, do a tonne of interval training and melodic/rhythmic dictation, go through past papers like mad. Then on the side I will somehow try and manage to pull off an ext creative, memorise parts of it (the ones that would suit any question). The ext essay I am not worried about, for some reason I always seem to go okay on extension essays even when they are done last minute. I always get shocked at my extension essay marks because I expect them to be way worse than what I get, and I get shocked at my advanced essay marks because I expect them to be higher than what I really get.

So eng adv paper 2, extension creative and music will be the death of me for sure.

Overall I am happy with my exam timetable though. THANK YOU BOS FOR NOT BEING SADISTIC FOR ONCE. I have the 2 english exams, then a five day break before Modern with General the day after (but it's general...so I don't care). Then I have another 6 day break before Music with Ext eng the day after (this is the only sucky thing on my timetable). Then a one day break before SOR (which I reckon one day is enough to study for especially as both SOR I classes are really, really good, in that the average is usually an A, so the class would pull me up if I did badly).

One more thing: I did find my gap year family. So after I au pair in Paris and after I finish my Europe tour, starting from 1 March I will au pair for a family with SIX children. 5 girls and 1 boy. (10, 8, 7, 3, 2, and 7 months old). Insane I know. But sounds interesting. All will be at school (3 year old at preschool). 2 year old and 7 months old are all I need to worry about, from 9am to 6pm. I work from 9-6 three or four days a week (So I get at least 3 days off), and I get paid 400 pounds a month which is a lot compared to other au pair jobs. In Paris I only get paid 266 pounds per month, and it's harder work there too because I'd actually have to teach. I can't imagine London being a whole lot more expensive to live in than Paris anyway, I think both cities are quite expensive. So really the amount I am getting paid in Paris is not much at all. And wait for it. The mum wants a 7th baby, she will be pregnant by the time she returns to work next March. I was totally honest with her, told her that I had next to no experience with babies, and she said that before she returned to work she'd show me the ropes. You might wonder how I even got the job (jobs in countries like England are much harder to get than say in Spain or Italy where an au pair wage could be a measly 200 euros per month). Well, I'm a good bullshitter and I'm good at shamelessly promoting myself. Apparently she had a 'good warm feeling towards me' so I was hired. Which was kind of surprising considering she had like 400 interested applicants since first hiring au pairs in 2009. Actually it's not that much bullshitting, it's not like I lied. I asked Host mum what she disliked about previous au pairs, and she said she has had people steal from her, use her toiletries and stolen clothes and used her credit cards, as well as an au pair that pretended she didn't smoke but actually did. I think with host families they want to focus more on personal qualities (well by that I mean as long as I'm normal, not a thief or a smoker). Which I am perfectly okay with, I'm pretty polite anyway with strangers and I take hints pretty well if they are important. I can see where the host mum is coming from, I mean if I were a mother I would care much more about whether the au pair is a thief than whether they could change a nappy or not. I did tell her I was more than willing to learn the basics of infant care. Gotta start somewhere, right? Although I do admit I mainly chose this family because of the money (and well it is a different country too, plus it was convenient as my tour ended in London). I do prefer non-English speaking countries, I really wanted to go to Germany. But au pairs there legitimately get less than half of what I'd earn in the UK. So I'm fine with England, it's just not a country I would have imagined being interested to live in. It sounds a bit boring and Australia-like, but London sounds cool so I guess I could just take the 6 months to explore every nook and cranny of London.

They have like 1000 photos on Facebook and they seem nice enough, they don't seem like the crazy poor family type that has this many kids for welfare benefits. Parents have been married 11 years and they have a 5 bedroom house and they both work in the local hospital as radiologists or something. I get my own apparently completely purple bedroom but no ensuite so boo. Though apparently the kids all use their bathroom, so there wouldn't really be anyone else using my bathroom except for kids' teeth cleaning and when the younger ones need baths.They are agreeing to hire me a piano (I offer to pay for this because I don't mind, it's only 190 pounds for 6 month hire plus the 75 pound delivery cost). I will au pair near London (30 minute train ride away) for 6 months until mid-August 2014, because I can only stay for up to 6 months without a visa and I can't apply for one because I won't be in Australia to go to the embassy here.

The thing I am a bit concerned about is bank accounts. Obviously I can't open one overseas because technically, without a visa I am a tourist and not allowed to make money. The only thing I can think of is to hoard the cash from Paris, and also hoard the cash from London, then ask host mum at end of my stay if I can go with her to her bank so she can transfer the money to my Australian account for me. Either that, or just try my best to keep the money safely until I go to my next country in August (I think Norway, Netherlands or Germany as they are the only non-English speaking countries that allow you to apply for an au pair visa AFTER you have already arrived in the country, not before). Then I would be allowed, with an au pair visa, to open a bank account in that country and deposit my earnings from France and England too. Bit risky though, as it is a lot of money to be hoarding without a bank account especially when travelling.