Get in on the John

    Guess who's bac, bac again, the John is bac, tell a friend. Yipee!! Yes, as you might have guessed, my lack of posts for around the last week was due to my total BAC state of mind. I was in the BAC  zone. I ate, drank, dreamed, and breathed nothing but BAC for more than 6 days. And I may have posted something similar to those words in my last post. My lack of originality can be excused, though, because a week of tests every day for 8 hours sucks the originality out of one's veins. In addition to just sucking. But seriously, I spent an entire week creating magical fantasies designed to fool the corrector into thinking that I really knew what I was talking about, but just made a few mistakes when I wrote it down, no, seriously, I really knew all this junk, but you just asked the questions really weird, so please give me points at least for that! Hmm. Will beg for points.

    So, let me break down how it went for y'all:

       BEGIN DAY ONE
       First, came La Philosophie. Four hours of speculative joy. Had to explain some text that some guy wrote about religion, whatever. Went OK maybe. Hopefully.
       Next came L'Anglais. BOOYAH!!!! I love taking English as a second language! All your points are belong to us!! This test should be able to take the guy that corrects it over it's knee and spank him! Unless, maybe, the corrector is a British dude who thinks cigarettes are fags, and erasers are rubbers. There is a joke in there, but I shall not dirty my blog with it.
       END DAY ONE

       I go home and study like mad. Bang head against table. Tomorrow will be the most feared of BAC days, and it's shadow looms over my puny knowledge like a teacher over someone trying to cheat, an infraction which, by the way, is punished by being held back a grade. Good thing I don't cheat, right? Right?

       DAY TWO
       Enter dreaded SVT or, in English, Biology/Geology. OH THE HORROR!! OH THE MAYHEM!!! It was horrendous! All sorts of things I didn't study! Mainly, how the phenomenon of subduction provokes magmatisation. WHAT THE HECK KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT!! Subduction makes hot. Hot makes Magma. There! I'm finished! And we were supposed to write 3 pages on the subject!! Gaa! So much BS I was forced to create! Whoever is lucky enough to correct my paper will be banging their head on the furniture!
       Speaking of head-banging, and not in a "I'm head-banging to this awesome music" kind of way, but the much more unpleasant kind, Histoire/Geographie came next. And it was with cries of disgust throughout the room that we discovered the subject of the test. East Orient. This was a subject that we had written about half a page about in class, and we were about to spend four hours writing an 8 page long paper about the subject. When you have to spread half a page of information over 8 pages, you know a lot of BS had to be made to fill in those holes. So much BS. I alone may be the cause of the hole in the ozone layer, made because of the noxious fumes given off by the high BS content of my tests.
       END DAY TWO

       I slowly limp home and lick my wounds. I'm getting tired of waking up at 6:30 AM. The only time I usually wake up before the sun rises is for the Easter Sun Rise Service at church, and that is to honor our savior Jesus-Christ. Is the BAC Jesus? No. And yet I am forced to get up before that stupid early bird and eat that frikin worm. And that is a stupid proverb, anyway. I mean: "Get up early so that you can eat worms!! Yay! Go earliness!". Grrrrrrrr. Anyway, I study much much that evening, bang head on table some more, table breaks, am forced to go bang head on toilet instead. I go to sleep with the math book open on my chest, and when I notice in the morning, I hope maybe that the page I was opened to got printed on my chest, so that when I went to the bathroom in the middle of the test I could look at the thing in the bathroom mirror. No dice. And no temporary tattoo on my chest, either. So sad. Besides, you actually have to have a teacher come with you to the bathroom.

       BEGIN DAY THREE
       Ah day three, the last day before the weekend. And a day for a measly one test. Sigh. Heaven. WRONG! This is the Math test! This test is weighted the absolute most of all of them, except for Physics! And guess what? This test decided to follow the trend of the two previous ones by being pretty darn hard. I don't even remember what was on it. I have even blocked that day from my memory, it was so traumatic. Everyone did crappy on this one. Lots of ppl only finished two of the four exercises. So very painful. This test became known among even teachers as the hardest Math BAC ever. And dude, they're old. They have seen a lot of BACs. I will be visiting a psychiatrist years from now about the repressed memories.
       END DAY THREE

       Ah, the weekend. The merciful calm within the storm that is the BAC. Do I maybe go on the Internet and do email and post on my blog during these two god-sent days? No. That would interrupt my fevered sleeping, studying, and head-banging sessions. I say fevered because I was also a little sick during the whole thing. My stomach still feels like refuse. Headache, fever, everything. Maybe this malady was stress related? I don't know. Anyway, the weekend was an occasion for great joy for other reasons as well because the Rileys flew in on Saturday! Aw yeeah! It's pretty cool because Mr. and Mrs. Riley have about five kids, two of which are youth group age. If it seems bizzare to go crazy about this to you, you have never been an MK in this country. The Rileys coming just about doubles the number of teenagers I know around here. ( Not including the French school. ) Awesome. And it about quintuples the number of people I know who like video games as well. Anyway, I take a little break from Physics-assisted suicide to celebrate their arrival, and that evening we all stay up late to watch National Treasure, which is a pretty cool movie, and I was surprised that the Rileys could stay awake during the whole thing because they had just spent around two days crossing 7 time zones, and you don't really get good sleep on those planes. I would have stayed up and watched it, but 9 out of 10 leading experts agree that I'm not sane. There is a part in that movie where where the good guy tells his friends that the bad guy can't be far behind in the clues, because the bad guy has unlimited resources and resolve. And in the scene before that the bad guy was seen telling his lackey put the clue into a yahoo search on his high-tech computer in their mobile HQ, and then they clicked on the top results and figured out where to go next. So thats what "unlimited resources" means! Yahoo! Good lord! What if he had used Google? The good guy would never had made it! Gee, it seems as if I too have unlimited resources! Cool! Go internet search engines!
Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, the BAC, may it's name forever be cursed. Right. As I mentioned before, Physics was my highest weighted grade. And so I studied. And studied. And banged my head against the toilet. And Sunday evening I skipped church so that I could sweep up the bits and pieces of information that I still didn't know about Chemistry and Physics and cram them into my massive brain. A brain which was perhaps not so massive as I thought, as Physics keeped on leaking from it, as I was calculating the viscosity of milk in my cereal, and wondering if I could use an esterification reaction between an alcool and an acid to make soap when I couldn't find any in the shower. And so I layed my head down to sleep, sure of my knowledge, and confident that tomorrow would go well.

       BEGIN OMINOUS MUSIC. AND DAY FOUR.
       Did you know that on the first day of the BAC, two people were late? Of course you didn't. This is notable because if you are not present in the testing area at the time of the opening of the test ( They're sealed ) you will not be admitted, and you will get a zero on that test. Now, when it was time to start, the teachers knowing that this was the law, looked at the clock, looked at the two empty chairs, and being not quite so evil as you might think, decided to wait another 15 minutes until opening the test packet. The missing persons jogged in and collapsed in their chairs about 20 minutes later, and we began. That was Wednesday. Today is Monday of the next week. The teachers, after two more late starts, said that the next time someone was late, they would not wait. I chose today to wake up quite very late. I quickly jumped out of bed, splashed some cereal on my face and ate a bowl of shampoo, ran out the door and jumped in the car, making sure that I had my drivers license and my convocation ( they have to verify that you're really you, and the drivers license was my official proof of identity. No I wasn't driving. ) , and then Whoosh! off we went. I told our driver Mr. Syla to not only ignore the traffic laws as is usual when driving in Guinea, but to ignore the laws of Physics as well. And so off we drove faster than the speed of light, sometimes driving through cars that were in front of us, and when we hit the speed bump, instead of falling back down we fell up, flying over the morning traffic jam and landing in front of the school. Mr. Syla is a good driver. And I rushed to the test room, and by some miracle I was actually only 15 minutes early. I would like to take this time to thank everyone who prayed for me during this test. It obviously worked.
        And so began trial by Physique/Chemie. Our Physics teacher Mr. Garcia is the one who opens the tests, and before he distributes them to us, he takes the top one off the pack and examines it. His eyes grow wide and he gives us a look that says "Wow. Just wow." That cannot be a good thing. Hmm, first exercise not so bad, Mr. Garcia must have just been amazed at how easy it was, about gravitational attraction between planets, which is cool, something I had actually studied. But long. It was worth 3pts out of 20 and it covered three pages. Ok, took me a little more time to finish that one than I would have hoped, but it went well. What's next? Oh, sweet! Nuclear reactions! I studied that too! Gee, but it takes up around four pages of questions, though. Now I'm finished, and it's starting to look bad time wise. Just an hour and a half left out of 3 hrs 30, and I had only done 6pts out of 20. Not good. Next one was worth 6pts thankfully, and wasn't quite so long. Electrolysation of water. Hmm, I seem to remember something about that... OK, only 30 minutes left on the clock, and I have one last question to answer, and it's my super hard specialite question ( I specialized in phys/chem ) and it's about dosages, where you add stuff to a solution to find out how much junk is inside. Hmm. A dosage is an experiment that you do, not a test question! And then they start out by asking you to write the reaction equation between silver nitrate and sodium chlorate, and that's cool, I'll do that, but what the heck is silver nitrate and sodium chlorate!! Do they expect us to memorize the periodic table of elements!? What the heck!!! And all the questions after that are about the reaction! And so I make like Darth Vader and go NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! ( I haven't actually seen the movie, but I heard about that part. ) And if I were Darth Vader I would have chosen this moment to grab my own throat with my mind and squeeze.
        Alright, at least thats over, but wait! There's more! Last and least of all my tests is Espagnol which isn't really worth much, and I never studied for. I forgot all my Spanish vocabulary and decided to just cut and paste the words of the text into my answers. Teachers never like that. I just realized that its kinda weird that I am taking a foreign language in a foreign language. In one of the questions I had to translate some text from Spanish into french. You won't get that in a Spanish class in the states.=)
        END DAY FOUR. END BAC. BEGIN HAPPY HAPPY MUSIC.

And there you go, that was my BAC. A most unpleasant experience indeed, one to be avoided if you can. When I got home, I stumbled off to bed and slept, and when I awoke, I could barely move because I was so physically tired. Stress can do that to you.
And then today is my sister Melanie's Birthday, the 21st of June! What a joyous occasion! I think that makes her like 13 or 16 or 12 or something. Never can remember. I think even Melanie herself had forgotten that today was to be her birthday, so I don't know how we shall party. I think she wants Chinese food. I will download something cool for her off the net, or get her a card or something.
Well, I will know if I passed June 27, and at that time, if  I did not pass, I will jump in a plane and fly to Dakar to do the catching up session after which I am sure I will pass. If I do pass, then I will jump in a car and drive up to Dalaba for the MK camp. Either way I'm jumping in something and going somewhere right after I find out if I passed, so I'll post the news at a later date. And that ends this encyclopedia-sized post. Adios, et a bientot!