Exam burnout

I just don't want to do it anymore. I can't imagine that any amount of studying will improve on the mark I would get if I wrote the damn thing right now, and frankly I'm starting to wonder why I didn't just take the early exam and be damned with it all. I should have taken the early exam, then I'd have six days off to sleep and eat and get high and not worry about studying when all I want is to sleep, eat, and get high.

Which brings me to the conversation I had with Curly earlier today, as he called to bid me farewell before swooping off to Toronto for his holiday. He suggested that the entire purpose of academia is to make us feel badly about ourselves, and I am inclined to agree. We are a self-selected upper percentile of the population, and of that self-selected, university-going group, we specifically here have been selected on account of being the upper portion of that group. Every level of education merely serves to whittle the group down to smaller and smaller levels, while convincing everyone in it that they are not quite achieving the level of academic brilliance as they could. Because of course we can never be perfect, but we know that when we see a percentage, it is naturally taken out of 100. And even though we can't get 100%, we see that flimsy grade and think "wow that's low". Despite the fact that I go in knowing that everything I do is going to be marked out of 85, I can't help but feel terrible about myself.

Curly is right, we are here to have our self-esteem chipped away. Well, I refuse to base my concept of self-worth on the number I am assigned based on the amount of work I do. I also refuse to spend every waking moment worrying about that sort of thing. I will have my slack semester next year and I will love it, and you can put that in your academic pipe and smoke it.