Quite a few people seem to have been raping their English exams, though, and still more have boasted of beating their Env. Sys. exams with sticks. Now is apparently not a time to be virtuous and pacifistic...

And guess who got writer’s block on the IB English exam? Ooh! Ooh! Me! Six and a half pages of absolute idiocy. I think it might have ultimately had something to do with Ros, Guil, and Hally, but I can’t be sure. Maybe I did Anouilh. Or Wilde. Better off forgotten, that one.

On a lighter note, the History one was rather nice, the documents were easy as anything, the essays were lovely, and my IA proved to be more useful than I ever imagined. Kerensky couldn’t have done anything better than getting himself booted out by Lenin.

However, such things do not happen on their own. After the English exam, one of my History notebooks disappeared and most of the senior IB population, a few profs, and the IB coordinator were treated to the sight of a tense, agitated Ivy scurrying around inquiring as to the whereabouts of a small, green spiral minus its back cover. Said Ivy asked this question to quite a few people, with the exception of Helga. As a result, when Helga popped out of nowhere brandishing the notebook, Ivy snapped a bit.

So she held up the recalcitrant notebook and, after some involuntary oh-heavensing, I decided that sometimes it isn’t enough to merely invoke the heavens, but that, in extreme circumstances, it can be deemed necessary to place something in the heavens and proceed to invoke that. I’m quite sure I sounded like an acid-tripping evangelist; fortunately, it was a crowded room and only the dozen or so people nearest me bore witness to the uncharacteristically public display of melodrama (no, actually, I’m not normally melodramatic in public; why would you ever think that?). But really, I was worrying about my green notebook... Heaven knows where Helga was when I was interrogating everyone else.

And I did skip Trig. According to Shih, there was a sub, as there always tends to be when a test is scheduled; at any rate, I was gallivanting around the school hunting for my notebook at the time. Upon returning to the congregation room once again, I encountered the TOK prof and several students toting a few dozen large red boxes. After a second or two, it occurred to me that the boxes contained pizza and that they were being taken into the group room in order to aid any Ibers who saw fit to drop in for a study session. As it was, so many people turned up that no one cared what class I was supposed to be in. Trig or pizza ... ’twasn’t a difficult decision, and rather interesting besides. I even studies a bit, until she-who-shares-my-first name started telling Fleur and she-who-shares-my-surname (I do need a slightly more original name) about her particularly peculiar relatives, such as the self-proclaimed warlock and the feuding inbreeds, and the uncle who was hit by an ice-cream truck. Studying became entirely obsolete when Fleur burst into even more uncontrollable laughs than usual and accidentally sprayed Cherry Mountain Dew on she-who-shares-my-first-name’s Ho Chi Minh notes.

********

Sorry, had to run for a second. The phone rang and when I got up to answer it, I heard the littlest Gorgon yelling for the Curmudgeon to come look at something. The Curmudgeon had already picked up the downstairs phone, so I headed down the hall to hear what the brat was yodeling about and lo and behold, outside his window, stretching from what seemed like a nearby cul-de-sac to the backyard of a house across the street was an enormous rainbow. We tugged open his window and looked at it for a bit, located all the colors except blue, established that the trees were indeed very green, discussed how the clouds would make a good location for a Star Wars scene, and snapped a Polaroid just before the clouds moved over the right side of the arch. The left had started to fade as well when I noticed another, fainter rainbow alongside it. So we had to stare out the window for another minute or two and snap a picture of the double faded. Neither or the pictures came out very well, but he didn’t mind and said he’d remember them anyway. He put them on his desk and commented on how cool it was to have two sightseeing moments in less than ten minutes. Then the Curmudgeon hung up and called up the stairs, asking what the littlest Gorgon had been yelling about; he ran down the stairs to explain. By then, both rainbows were gone. For my part, I headed back to Robin, thinking, among other things, that one doesn’t always need to take pictures in order to remember. Maybe someday the truth of that will sink in.

But anyway, after a mildly productive, delightfully chaotic cram session, the History exam happened, it was decided that virtue and pacifism were indeed overrated, and all was well until the thing ended at three-thirty.

One more IB exam to go.

Adieu.