My Titanic (Part Two)

 The Race (Photo Courtesy of Real Skiers Ski Uphill)

I was a pessimist once. If you read my last post you would know that my enthusiasm levels this past week were very low. I had a to-do list long enough to fill 6 sticky notes with minuscule handwriting. There wasn't enough time in the day to do all the things I had to do. Let me say, finals week is a master at teaching prioritization. You are forced into picking out the essentials and moving up the list. A scary percent of the test material was on things that I had hardly even heard of. French superlatives, I'm 99% sure, were never mentioned in my presence, yet the seventy question test I had to take on that would prove otherwise. Welcome to high school, Victoria, where you have no free time, a perpetual headache, and a strong need to find a way to deal with the constant state of anxiety and fatigue you know live in. 

Looking into the week, I was starting to get slightly concerned. So concerned that I actually started to mentally move on. Goodbye 4.0, now how am I not going to repeat this next quarter? I actually wrote a guide for myself titled All The Things You Didn't Do This Quarter That You Should Have. Now, after having completed the last test of the week, I'm here to say: there is a beauty to being proved wrong.

Here is where the boats come in. We worked for weeks on those boats, planning, calculating, packing cardboard and duct tape into every nook and cranny. No matter how diligent you are, however, there is going to be a weakness somewhere, there is going to be a hole, a gap, in everything you do. At some point you just have to accept it. When it's all of a sudden done and the final test is standing right in your face, sometimes the only thing to do is throw yourself into it all the way, hopeful or not. 

There is going to be a little space in your understanding no matter how hard you try. Sometimes it is the little gap that sends a tidal wave of water rushing in and you find yourself drenched in humility. Other times you will spot a huge tear a few seconds too late and come out dry and utterly stunned with how everything played out. Expectation can be a wrecking ball. You just never know. The thing that makes the difference is when you put your head down and see it through until somebody drags you kicking and screaming out of the pool.

For me, this week turned out okay. I studied for as many tests as I could and I came out of it with an intact GPA. I feel like I am dry-heaving on the side of the road as I write this, but it turned out okay the end. There were gaping holes in my understanding on nearly every test I took this week. With indefatigable effort I tried to patchwork them as I flipped pages in my textbook with the ferocity I normally reserve for ski races and woodcutting. I scribbled crazily across pieces of scratch paper at in the bleary darkness of 4:30 in the morning. I felt like a movie scene where everything is intense and going double speed and then the movie director plays it at normal speed and it’s really calm and the raging battle is on such a small scale that it hardly even registers.

The boats, after all the negativity, turned out ridiculously well. My partner, Sanne, and I borrowed kick boards to paddle with and came in 3rd place out of 8, our boats faring better than some of the groups. We made it across the pool twice, and came out practically dry. Our duct tape stayed sticky, are cardboard relatively dry, our boat above water. I’d say it went very well. I was dead wrong. Never been happier to admit it. 

I guess it wasn't a titanic afterall.

Sayonara,

Victoria