CAOh my God, kill me now

Granted, the title’s no “UCAStrated”, but I’m doing my best to live up to past glories.

I could dress this up, and I could attempt to make it sound a bit less teenaged, and I could stop being such a whiney whine-woman made of whine, and I could throw in an acknowledgement that there are plenty of people who would love to have my ‘problems’ instead of whatever it is they’re dealing with, but seriously, stress of life.

You know when you get so much work that you don’t even start any of it, because you know that the minute you dip your toes in the water, you’ll realise how screwed you really are? Yeah. Where’d my Christmas holidays go? Y’know, the ones that were going to be positively saturated with study, study, study. It would seem I’ve squandered them on shenanigans.

Stress of life. Stress of mocks. Stress of time running away from you faster than Nick Clegg did from his campaign promises. Oh, and stress of CAO.

I don’t really know how much thought I should be putting into it, because my dream course has nothing to do with it. On the other hand, there is every chance in the world that I’ll miss my evilly hard Oxford offer, so it only makes sense to put time into picking courses that I’d be happy doing instead. So far, so good, but I don’t really know what courses these might be. English, obviously, but pure or with a language? I was set on pure English when I applied to UCAS, but now I’m interested in Russian, and I’ve warmed to Spanish a lot lately, mostly because I’ve got that elusive ‘r’ down at long last, possibly the single most important step away from gringo-ism. Psychology looks nice, too, or Sociology. Maybe Art History. I think I actually spent a significant portion of an earlier post complaining about Art History, and my feelings haven’t changed. This is the sort of crazy we’re dealing with here.

At the moment, my CAO’s looking something like this. I haven’t decided the order yet — I just plonked in courses that looked nice until I had ten down. Consider it a first draft.

• 1. Trinity           English Literature/Russian
• 2. Trinity           English Literature/Spanish
• 3. Trinity           English Literature/French
• 4. UCD              Arts – English / French
• 5. Limerick        New Media and English
• 6. Limerick        Arts (Joint Honours)
• 7. Galway         Arts
• 8. Trinity           English Studies
• 9. Cork             Arts
• 10.UCD            English

On a scale of one to all-over-the-gaff, it’s not actually too bad, but I’m putting down all those arts courses on the assumption that there’ll be space to do English if I get in. The fact that UCD advise you to reserve a place in advance has me worrying that there mightn’t be. Also, it seems a bit Trinity-heavy, and chances are I’d miss the points for Trinity if I missed Oxford, unless I got five A1’s and a D3 or something similarly unlikely. I’m very much attracted to the idea of getting away from home, so maybe I’ll just scratch Trinity and UCD altogether.

My brain is currently a shouty soap opera where someone’s angry but they won’t say why, and a gay couple have moved in to show how hip, hop and happening the writers are regarding contemporary society, only it’ll take a while for them to get storylines that don’t revolve around them being gay, and someone’s cheating on someone and someone’s knocked up and someone’s killed someone, or maybe it was manslaughter, and it’ll all come out at the trial. Choices are confusing, and I’ve so many to make. And I need to study. That, too.

So long for now. Oh, except for one bit of advice: having been generously presented with one for Christmas by a friend who knows me too well, I can confirm that stress balls are just that: balls. Ranting is so much more satisfying.