Yeah! I have the whole of tomorrow free (except for the homework) to do as I please. One of the most prominent advantages of attending an international school is that we celebrate (ie. have a day off) more holidays, which is why I have Monday off. Because it's a traditional Chinese festival and all...very convenient, I must say, since that gives me about an extra three days to complete my Mandarin poster.

But aside from the holiday thing...recently I have been feeling very down and don't seem to care much about anything anymore. Which is so not true, by the way, as I know deep down that I am very very lucky and have literally nothing to complain about. But I feel...empty.

I don't know, maybe it's the after-effects of receiving my English exam score (which was a complete blow, seeing as I even got the English achievments award last year) which was just about the lowest scores I've ever received in, like, ever. Really. I mean, English is one of my best subjects, and I just expected more of me even though the teacher is, like, completely off his rocker. I just wasn't mentally prepared for the exam...like you know, when you're in a writing exam you just aim to write as much as you can and don't care about making the details perfect? I wasn't prepared for the exam and didn't have that one golden rule in mind, and wasted the whole 25 minutes we had trying to work out if the simile fitted the noun and whether I should add something there, a bit more detail here... So.

It feels much better now that I've let all of it out, but it was terrible when he gave out the test papers. I knew, just knew, that I had gotten a bad score because I only wrote, like, one paragraph, but I almost fainted when he exclaimed that he was going to read out our "break-down" of our scores in front of the whole class. What we got for each (reading and writing papers) seperately. I mean, we already had our papers in front of us, we could read! But oooh no, he has to publicly announce it as well, which would have been fine had I gotten the top marks, as usual. But seriously...this is too too low. I've never gotten a worse score ever, never.

It's just the fact that I've let down myself so badly rather than the thought of my mum which makes me squirm. My mum knows I can handle myself perfectly well, and trusts me. She probably won't even notice because she doesn't know the average of our class...if it's written in levels on the report, not in percentages. Hopefully.

I tried to shrug it off, and I must say that I succeeded in that aspect without question. I wasn't going to break, never, and even flipped over my papers to show I had nothing to hide when I saw that nothing I said was going to stop the stupid teacher from reading out the results. I even stuck out my chin and looked straight at the teacher. However my desk-mate, who was the only to see my actual results, made me feel worse by saying,"Are you alright? It's ok, you know." When clearly that only made me, well, choke back tears. But all through that lesson I didn't let on how I really felt, and sometimes it works, because then you think you really feel how you're trying to make yourself feel, and slowly the pain goes. Or so I thought. After the lesson, I told no one about my scores except Teresa, who is such a great friend I don't know how I'll ever manage without her. She didn't bring up the subject again and I could tell she was making a lot of effort to cheer me up.

But I still felt lousy.

Even though I didn't throw off the indifferent attitude until, well, now. I guess sometimes we just have to let it all out, not bury it deep down inside and leaving it to rot. After typing up this long post, I think I finally have done just that. Thank god for Thoughts.