Happy Haloweeeen!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY! The time when the living meets the dead! The day of the Witch! The day of EVIL! The night of Shadow! The carving of the pumpkin (we tried but lets face it, pumpkin carving isn't as easy as its made out to be, and our pumpkin had sort of collapsed into itself the moment after we carved it)! The day of the Dead! 

....And the day when we all dress up in the silliest costumes and parade around the place demanding goodies. Trick or Treat? Surely by definition that basically says: "Give us sweets, or you'll REGRET it!" 
Halloween, despite originating from the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holiday All Saints' Day, it has recently been turned by the Americans into a massive festive occasion that exists soley to get your pocket full of the Halloween goodies and merchandise that your poor Grandparents had to fork out for. It undeniably gets bigger and bigger every year, heck the amount of scary makeup and Halloween costumes rolling of the shelves nearly rivals Christmas in sales now. Although its a big money maker nowadays, its also the COOLEST Holiday out there, mainly because it makes you pee your pants! Come on, who dosen't go to Bed on the 31st without atleast a pang of fear? Getting scared is fun! Get in the crap-your-pants mood by watching cool movies like The Exorcist, Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday The Thirteenth and, of course, Halloween! Visit Haunted Houses, play pranks on people and tell really scaaary ghost stories! ITS HALLOWEEN, YAY!  


P.S I found this really scary mokumentary on YouTube, a banned 'fake' Episode of Ghostwatch that although is extremely slow until part 7-ish really gets your blood pumping by the end! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPTDHEeLI0A&feature=related Pipes is coming for you....
The weird thing is that the people watching this at the time thought this was real! 
 

Last Week In School

This Holiday is going juuust swell.
Monday, was THE get-up and go-day of the Week as I had two (potentially three just in case I a surprise History interrogation)  Tests to revise for! To be fair, they were in Art and Science, which were the only subjects that had NOT yet given me Tests after Tests after Tests to revise previously. The Science and Art Teachers prefer to give you one big Test at the end of the month rather than lots of little Tests every Week. I personally prefer this type of Test-ing, but there is a negative side to it: you only have two chances per Trimestre to get a great Result, but you F*UCK up on one of them and your score goes down the drain. Luckily, I was prepared (the result of almost FOUR straight hours of revising the previous night, which was a record for me) and I exelled in the Science Test (my first 20/20?) and the Art one went well also. The Science Test was massive, packing in just about every question on what we saw in Class, whereas Art was more relaxed but still had a boatload of pure you-either-know-it-or-you-don't-type questions that preyed on anyone that hadn't revised for it. I don't have the Results back yet but all should be revealed when I go back in early November. After two Ginormous Tests back-to-back my hands were sore, I can tell you!
Then we went into Maths...
SURPRISE MATHS TEST! OH. MY. GOD. I'M. SO. DEAD! 

Literary, I could not have been any less prepared! Just when you think you've got the Test thing sorted, in comes along Maths with a buzz-baton to your back! Don't they understand that I revised for FOUR Hours last night? FOUR HOURS! Well, the Teacher probably didn't know about the other Tests but she could have not have picked a worse time for a surprise Maths Test! I hadn't looked at my Maths book since Friday! Poor, poor Maths. I got 3,5/10 in that Test, and with the exception of one good Test (a 4,5/5) pretty much encased Maths in dog poop for the rest of the Trimestre. I'm truly am gutted about Maths, a subject that I normally have difficulty with anyway but these sudden surprise Tests DO NOT HELP (especially on a big Test day)! 
I was relieved that Monday was over (I can go on for Hours about the Monday fiasco but its already becoming a heavy Blog post), and the School rewarded me with only ONE big Test to revise for the following day. It was in French and compared to my last dictation evaluation should be a real step up (still haven't got the result yet).
Which wouldn't actually be as hard as you think because I scored 0/10 in the last one (in the poem one from last Week I scored a reasonable, but a barely rewardable 8,5/15)!
Wednesday was fine, I had a Sports Test on Baseball (which went surprisingly well, I suppose I don't suck as much when under pressure!).
I'll now discuss my School trip to Rennes on Friday:   

I had to get up at 6.30am to catch the Bus to Rennes at 8.20am. I reasoned that if I went to bed one hour early to get up one hour early all should be fine (how wrong I was). I got onto the Bus half-awake, and it was packed full of exited kids. They didn't shut  up at all until we had arrived there! We was on a day trip to Rennes, (the biggest city near to us) to spend a morning in the Science Labs and to take a visit to the apparently infamous Rennes "Parliment" (although the English wouldn't call it a Parliment, more of a swank looking Courthouse). It was all fine until Lunch Time, we sat down in the Planetarium, saw all the galaxies that made up the Universe ect... Explored the different periods of Earths History and had a brief visit to the "Natural Disasters" area (the seismic activity section was quite boring). Then came Lunchtime...and the headache. Lunch consisting of a Cheese Burger with fries from a nearby mcdonalds knockoff called "Quick". To be quite frank any memories of the rest of the day are shrouded in the pain of that dreadful Headache, I can only remember looking at some exuisite tapestries and ornamental ceilings from the 15th Century in the  Parliment! God the moment I got off that Bus at 6 o'clock I ran straight home and into my Bed, my head was sooo bloody throbbing! After taking one of Grandma's painkillers (which effectively put me to sleep for several Hours).

Well that was the start of the School October Holidays, and out of the frying pan and into the fire couldn't have been a more apt method to describe this last Week!  
Now if you exuse me, I must now get up from my new habitat (aka B.E.D) to experience some modern sensation called "Exercise". Hmmm, never heard of it. Still, I must get up and do it or Dad is threatening to take the Internet away from me if I don't! Hmmm, Dad, now dont get me started on him:

  

"Smarmy arse git!" (as quoted by dear Grandpa)

This Week In School: My Poor, Poor Legs...

Well, I ran (or very slowly jogged) for almost THREE Hours this Week, and as you can tell by the title of this Post, my legs aren't feeling very well at ALL. In fact, there's a tendon on the back of my right leg right now that is just begging to snap (its already been stretched to bits, poor thing). You know I wouldn't be surprised if my leg had actually broken off during that cross country race on Friday: SNAP! Commentator: "looks like Tim's leg has just finally had enough...." I think I might just pull a sicky next Year (or maybe not), because that was bloody soul-testing. Our College and the one from Mauron always join together every Year for the traditional "Cross" race. A stupid tradition if you ask me, and one of the most pointless things in the entire UNIVERSE that exists only to torture both your soul and your poor, poor body (if I ever feel anything below my knee again it will be a bloody miracle). You can check out my in-depth rant about Endurance running in one of my previous Blog posts here: http://thelazyteenagerinfrance.blogspot.com/2010/09/do-you-know-what-really-grinds-my-gears.html. As if the cross country race wasn't enough, I was also swamped with a TON of Tests: two in French, two in German, two in Art, one in Technology and one in Sport (kinda, he'll be evaluating our performance over a period of weeks). If you think thats bad, wait til' you see the Tests next week...  
The German Test was easy, you just had to write down a string of numbers you heard and then recite another string of numbers to your class while making sure that you p-r-o-n-o-u-n-c-i-a-t-e-d every word correctly (may I also point out that these were SURPRISE Tests, the type I particularly hate because its just an exuse to pray on the kids who don't learn there lessons reguarly), anyway I got 20/20 but everyone in my class got at least 18/20 so no big feat. In the Technology Test I got a measly 8,5/10, which is just quite frankly an insult (SO WHAT I FORGOT TO PUT THE "S" ON THE END OF THE WORD! WHY CAN'T NOBODY EVER GET 20/20 IN THIS LESSON GOD DAMMIT??????), the guy clearly doesn't have the guts anymore to give me a 10/10 rating! I may also comment on my teachers name: Mr Bastide! Anyway after the insult of Technology, I should fare better in Art, in which I had to represent 1 second of motion in 25 Images (fairly easy, akin to the famous stop motion techniques of the 50s Sci-Fi B-movies. Not hard per-say you just need to be a good drawer: ex: a man putting his foot down is about one second, so you'll just have to illustrate that mouvement in 25 different boxes). French was a bit of a disaster as you had to study an old poem, which was clearly wrote by homeless drunk man sat on the side of the street somwhere as it didn't make a lick of sense (one minute the poete was walking down the street describing the "shiny" stars, and then it jumped to him riding a polar bear out in the artic desert! MIND F*CK ALERT! And the dictation were you had to write down a text said to you with as little spelling and grammatical errors as possible, and seen as the French language has so many god-damn words that sound the EXACTLY the same (the sound E has multiple spellings for a start, the word could finish by ee, es, ais, ait, aient, e, i ect...), so basically I'm (pardon the profanity) f*cked. Music was really easy, you just had to read a Biography about Jean-Babtiste-Lully to the Class (imagine my surprise when I found out that "Lully" was a man!), and I also recieved a very welcome 17/20 in the Test we did last week....So all in all, a mixed bag, just PLEASE DONT MAKE ME RUN 6 KILOMETRES AGAIN!!!!!!!!
Now exuse me while I rant at my bedroom wall for fithteen minutes: "ONLY GAVE ME A 8,5/10 DID YOU? WHY YOU LITTLE...$%£@*!"  

NOTE: I didn't actually rant at the wall like a madman for fifthteen minutes, it was just me being "funny."

The Sarah Jane Adventures

SJA! Yes, it's a kids show, but its the best kids show out there! For four years now (a considerably long run-time for a kids T.V show shown at 5pm) the Adventures of Sarah Jane Smith has entertained children and Doctor Who fans alike. A bit of a waste really, as this show really deserves a prime time slot just like Torchwood and Doctor Who. Torchwood is for grown-ups, Doctor Who is the  family show and SJA is for kiddies, or so we like to think. Unfortunatly, it feels as if kids T.V is trapping this show in its toned down, light hearted chains. Admittedly, if the show had nothing whatsoever to do with the Who-Universe I probably wouldn't watch it as regularly as I do, but seen as every Episode in the Series has at least something who-related this happily isn't the case 
(possibly due to budget reasons, the shows creators realised that they could save money if they re-used old monster costumes from the main Series, which is why the Slitheen, Sontarans, Bane and Judoon feature heavily in the Series. Heck, the Slitheen are used so often now they can almost be dubbed as the "Daleks" of SJA). The story involves past Doctor Who compagnion Sarah Jane Smith and her "Team" of Teenage friends battling countless Monsters and (of course) saving the world every single Episode (Okay, this is the point where I draw the line, does every single alien threat have to provoke the utter destuction and annihilation of the human race every single time? Why can't the aliens be nice for once?). 


The Series is split into twelve short twenty-five minute Episodes,

comprising of six stories split into two parts. So all in all, the Series is the length of about six Doctor Who episodes, which may not seem alot but for a kids T.V show is your standard Series run-time. As with DW, you get your Monster of the Week, which can sometimes vary from your generic Doctor Who bad guy or a new villain created for the Series. The Episodes can be a bit of a hit or miss sometimes, but it's a kids show so I can mostly forgive it. Though there are instances where this show truly becomes pure gold. The Series one Episode  "Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane Smith?" is considered by many who watched the show as a truly "cult classic" that acheives to actually be better than some Doctor Who episodes (I agree). Its a What If? type story where a villainous rogue called "The Trickster" wipes Sarah Jane out of existence (any memory of her is wiped, like being swallowed up by the crack) and replaces her with another woman so that she can't prevent an upcoming disaster and then "feed" off the chaos this disaster creates. Check out this awesome scene from the Ep here by clicking on the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfjFsIWv3K0&feature=related. The Trickster is a great villain, but is a little holded back because of the fairly "light" tone of the Series, but if he was in Doctor Who I think they can truely do something great with him. In fact, he's already met the Doctor in the SJA-DW crossover:     

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnqSsw_WgGQ&feature=related (Which by the way, was the last time that David Tennant played the Doctor, you can see it on his face in this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8WpzLLWtvw&feature=related.) New Doctor Who Matt Smith will star with another previous DW compagnion Jo Grant in a special Episode of the show coming in a few Weeks, which will not only be written by previous DW showrunner Russell-T-Davies but is also titled "Death Of A Doctor." If that isn't enough to get me shaking with exitement then I don't know what will! Clearly this show has the possibility to become really good telly, but its confined to your average CBBC slot that it quite simply does not deserve.  

The previous Episodes that aired last Monday to Tuesday titled "The Nightmare Man Part 1 &2" saw Julian Bleach play a deliciously evil Freddy Kreuger/Joker rip-off that planned to make everybody in the world sleep forever while experiencing horrible Nightmares. Sounds pretty cool doesn't it? Except because its a kids show the Nightmares are nothing more than "unconfortable" and all he does is mainly hop around manically shooting out laser bolts without actually slaying anyone in their dreams. Still a great Episode, though you do have to accept that they couldn't really do alot to make him as menacing as he was supposed to be, alot of it seemed toned down (people rarely die in this show, and the ones that do are either the bad guys or the people that sacrifice themselves "for the greater good"). Which is a bit of a shame, as the guy does this laugh that could make even the Joker pee his pants then jump out of a three story high window (he does the laugh shortly after this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hKGjUMfoks, and you can see the last nine minutes of the Episode I found on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjX0HW1Xtos&feature=related! In short, The Sarah Jane adventures is a enjoyable show for a kids T.V programme, and one that could benefit from a larger budget and respectable timeslot (although it's still the highest rated Childrens show on Television right now and is attracting some really high ratings). I will continue to watch the show until either the Series finally fades away or Sarah Jane really has become so old that she can't do anything but move along on her crutches! 
 

This Week In School: The Germans have invaded!

 

THE GERMANS HAVE INVADED! Well…maybe not like that, but they sure as hell walked in like they owned the place.  This Week the German correspondents arrived,  much to the anticipation of my Classmates (more like nerve racking tension I‘d say). Apparently this is the first time my School has done this sort of thing, because the moment they arrived out of their posh looking bus the French just sort of huddled up in the corner like scared Babies. Which I don’t blame them for doing, as they were (with little exaggeration) F*CKING HUGE! A lot of people say that I’m tall though next to a German I might as well be the size of an ant! They have to physically duck to get through a doorway. And to make matters confusing, you couldn’t tell if half of them was a Boy or a Girl! There’re so thin and gangly and have loooong hair (the Boys had bloody ponytails!).  Much akin to the sorting hat in Hogwarts, they then proceeded to pair the German-ists (the people studying German) with the correspondents based on there likes, dislikes and general personalities. Luckily I had declined the offer to have a German correspondent before the Summer Holidays because we don’t have the space for someone else (although he could have had the blow-up double bed), and some of my Family might have had a few issues with the Germans infamous track-record. The idea of a German staying in my House for a week didn’t really please me either at the time (not to mention the fact that you knew nothing about them before-hand, heck its probably just luck if you get one of the nice kids) so I just sort of accepted it. It was all very reminiscent of the famous evacuations in the 1940s actually. For the rest of this week the Germans were touring Brittany, taking a peek at Josselin ect…. To be honest it just seemed like an excuse for half the School to have some fantastic days out with there newfound German ‘friends’ (arguably). Except they probably weren’t ‘great’ days out because of all the blistering weather. Its been raining over here for four days non-stop (EDIT: just started to brighten up a bit)! I didn’t really have anything to do with them til’ Thursday when they spent the entire day with our Class. For people that know little to no French they were surprisingly good at Maths (or at least better than me). The lessons were of course dumbed-down because they were there, so Thursday was one of those days when you could lie your brain to rest (for once). They completely annihilated everyone in Sport, and of course the French then began to blame anyone in their Team for whatever reason. For losing them the game (back-stabbers the lot of ’em) Once the Germans had settled in mid-day the French got surprisingly nasty towards them. They would make fun of their language, laugh at them, and in one case actually verbally insulted one of them. No doubt due to Sport… All in all despite being the size of a mountain they turned out to be quite normal. We’re supposed to be going over to Germany next Year, we’ll see whether I actually pluck up in the courage to go. In the meantime, I really have to get my head down this week, due to the Germans being here we now have to catch up with the missed lessons (which is generally an excuse to put out more Tests). And this headache I’ve suddenly developed isn’t helping things at all…

Do you know what really Grinds my Gears Part 2: Tests

Welcome back to what really Grinds my Gears: Part 2! This week, I look at my Arch-Enemy, Tests! Quite simply put, Tests are a pain in the butt. They exist to stress you out, taunting you with the prospect of a bad result (shudders), and threatening you with a dark stain on your report. I'm only a month into 4eme right now and I can't even count how many Tests I've had already (I think I've done something like five Maths Tests in one month!). Tests are a living hell, but can be rewarding in the long term, which is part of the reason why I keep crawling back into its Dark, evil clutches...

                                                        THEY STRESS YOU OUT!


Tests are a emotional Roller-Coaster, with three primary stages:
1. Revision, the dreaded period where you have to Review everything you've done in the past week/month of  any subject (not accounting Sport, where Tests are a matter of endurance and physical skill), which for me, normally accounts to 2-3 Hours per Test (no joke, it takes FOREVER for me to even remember one sentence). I spend an entire day pushing back the so-called "Revision time" just because its B-O-R-I-N-G. I mean, could you recite a page of French Text for two Hours without getting bored? I can't. The Revision stage is nessecary if you even want to hope about getting a good Result. I learnt the time-consuming way that if you manage to recite your lessons off by heart you're practically guaranteed to get 5/5, 10/10, 20/20 ect... Only problem is that after two hours of reciting the words over and over again those words become just that: WORDS. It has no meaning to me any more. In Tests, I'm just reciting words by memory onto a piece of paper without any thought behind it. Like Blogger.com tasked with remembering the words that I've typed  when I hit the 'SAVE' button right now. I'm not invested into the subject at all, I'm invested into getting a good Test result. Ask me a Week after any Test whether I remember anything about that Test and I'll say (apart from what Result I got) NO. So that kinda defeats the whole purpose of a Test doesn't it?

2. The Test, the moment when you're the most stressed out: the high stress level points being right before the Test, when your frantically checking your Memory to see whether or not you've remembered anything, and the point where you stumble upon a Question where you have no idea what the answer is (which really Grinds my Gears I can tell you, because for me, thats one point or more less, which then means a lower score, which then means that my Report for the Trimestre has gone down as well, which then means...IT CAN NEVER BE PERFECT!...And I have less a chance of beating my previous score). These moments are the make-or-break of a Test. The really annoying thing about all this stress is that it can  sometimes put a cloud over your Memory, which means blocking certain facts or just effecting the overall Score in any way it can. If stress was a person, I'd shoot it, along with that over Bastard, the guy that invented Education: "GET ON THE FLOOR AND BEG FOR YOUR LIFE!" BANG! Anyway, lets wrap things up, as this paragraph is already becoming far too long...
3. The Result, the part of the process that requires the least effort, but contains one of the most tense filled moments of the entire process. So you've spent the next agonising days wondering about what the outcome will be, whether a 20/20 awaits you or a most evil 10/20 (10 is a insult, 0 is excrutiatingly painful), ready to eat you whole. I've had my fair share of both Results, and this is the only time that I can say that the wait is truly KILLING me. The moment when the Teacher hands you back your Test, the moment when you first set your eyes over the dark red ink at the top of the page, showcasing the two encircled numbers, is THE most tense filled, gut wrenching, suspensful and heart tearing moment that only the greatest of Alfred Hitchcock films can truly match up to. Then, at that precise moment, your fate is revealed...

It can end two ways: one where your left immediately overwelmed, happy, and proud....or the other where you feel bottomless, bullet-hole ridden and deserted, hating your very existance and even going as far as saying you hate your Life. It may shock you how someone can get so emotionally overwelmed over the History Test you had last Friday, but for me, thats what Tests are like. But why get so worked up about it? Its only a Test right? Surely its no big deal? This may seem like a cop out answer to these questions, but I have no reason why, it just affects me that way...

Having said that though, I have only recently become the perfectionist that I am, and I now find myself at the unfortunate point where a 18/20 in a History Test that I spent nearly three Hours on Sunday night revising for it is simply not enough. I have somehow developped this greed to become perfect in everything, and even though I can never acheive 20/20 in everything, god damn do I try. I suppose that's a good thing, put please God, take away all the stress and the hard work, I'm trying to be lazy, I really am! Funnily enough, two years ago I was getting really bad results, not to mention having quite a tough time at School and even a few Family issues. I can't say things have turned out the completely opposite way, but damn if it hasn't improved alot. So perhaps these feelings only occur to perfectionists such as myself? I don't know...
Anyway, I have already done far too much typing (my hands are VERY sore), and I've got quite a bit of Revising to do for an upcoming Test....OH NO, NOT ANOTHER ONE!    

                                                 ARGHHHHHHHHHHH!