A little insight into a new site and life at University.
A new blog site.
Another day another dollar.
If you're like me, another day curled up in bed trying to avoid the persistent glare of sun squinting at you between the window and the curtain. Fire and Brimstone shall fall upon whoever named Queensland the "Sunshine State."
University is looming again. For me, university is a very scary thing. A fear of failure, hard driven and pushy need for success means that goals and standards (usually, one would say, unrealistically high) are usually left by the wayside to shrivel and die.
University has always been the option after school. The only way. There is NO OTHER option. Whatever happened to taking a year off to travel and see the world? To work, find your feet- you talents, passions, dreams? Twelve years of schooling comes to an end with a catastrophic bang, and suddenly there is a hoard of people under pressure to go to university, do a medicine/law/engineering degree and become a doctor/lawyer/engineer, settle down with a respectable member of the opposite sex, have three children, wait for them to grow up and look after you when you are incontinent and have to wear diapers and then wait to die. it all seems a bit, well, overbaked. the problem is, when you are sent to a high school with extraordinarily high standards, and your parents want you to meet these standards, you end up embroiled in a mass of emotional-acheiving type issues and quite commonly burn out.
The next thing you know, university is looming and "oh, I better get into such and such a degree...if that happens it will all be fine." But being conditioned to the private school way of thinking and acheiving, it doesn't just end there. university isn't all just parties, getting wasted and having to turn a paper in the next day. The invisible stressors are amazing. It started with the university- which one you "had" to get into- it's all about prestige here.
If you don't make it, you end up in a rut at a shitty university, working your arse off to get into the prestigious one. (Which, may I remind you, is only really prestigious because they built the whole fucking thing out of sandstone, and got the "University of Queensland" official title, which is, of course, only an example...of course...)
If you got into the prestigious university, either by having a lot of brains and applying them ferociously during year twelve, or by having mummy and daddy pay for your first year, there is even more pressure to succeed.
Being a lowly arts student, I can only know what sort of pressure is applied on literary, feminist, writing and music studies. The so called "bludgy" degree has unusually high standards- just try for a seven in any literary theory class, and you will know EXACTLY what I mean. That's only the tip of the iceberg- what about the kids (yes...most people are still considered children when they are embarking upon their first university experience, 17 is the median age for a first year) who are pushed into- or push themselves into the aforementioned programs like law and medicine?
the first year of liberation and "testing the waters" become a year of confusion and disappointment.
Double academic worries with Relationships, friends, family and the rest and you've got yourself one big fat cracker of an omlette to whisk.
My omlette just happened to fall out of the bowl, become overcooked, or some other disasterous kitchen-esque metaphorical disaster.
And that's why I am spending all the time that I can, avoiding the little ray of sunlight that's peeping through the curtains, laughing at me. It knows how much I hate the sunshine state.
It's really not happy enough to have earned that title.