HSC = Horrible Stupid Crap
The bulk of the HSC draws to a close with the last of my major works due by the end of this week. My visual arts major work is due this Friday by 5.00pm. I seriously do not know what I’ll do with myself once they’re all submitted. For over the last three years, I’ve grown accustomed to the numerous muscle knots in my back and shoulders that remind me that I have work to do. Now with almost nothing to do, I am lost! Perhaps now for the first time in my life I’ll be able to sleep a full night, eat four square meals a day and organise my bedroom in such a way that allows me to walk in without stepping on something on the floor.
I may as well inform the Census that I am a resident of the Price household, because that has been my home for the last 4 days. I haven’t been home to see my parents in ages. I’m starting to forget what they look like! Maybe not anything that drastic, but I do miss them a lot.
I promised Tom that I’d help him with his majors, due to the fact that he spent the majority of this year baked off his brain. Like so many with this laid-back lifestyle, eventually he got that slap of reality and the realisation that he had practically a few days to complete a year’s worth of work.
So being the helpful cuss I am, I have been slaving away sketching up bogus designs for his Design & Technology major work, and making them look like he drew them.
Then I organised and neatly typed up his 49 page Design & Technology porfolio. It’s been a great learning experience, on account of I’ve learned that the subject is repetitive and ensures that it sucks the fun out of everything. It overuses the same words. So with that, I’ve recognised four words that I never want to have to use again:
- Innovatively
- Functionality
- Aesthetics
- Durability
I also had to clean up a lot of Tom’s language. I may be wrong, but porfolio markers generally don’t appreciate expressions such as “DIE HSC!”, “Go to hell!” and “Tom is tired”, like I found throughout Tom’s notes.
To make it up to me for all the effort I put in for Tom’s project, he agreed to film and edit a short interview piece with my puppet that I’ll use with my visual arts major work. But in true HSC tradition, everything must go wrong. We finally managed to get some of the archive footage I wanted to use working, after days of frustration. Then of course we were about to film my interview, but the camera’s batteries exhausted. After it had some time to charge, the interview got filmed. When we wanted to upload the interview footage to the computer, we couldn’t find the cable that connected the camera to the editing to the computer.
So we got his sister’s laptop, that we could transfer the footage from. If this wasn’t difficult and time consuming enough, the computer (which has a whole fucking pony club of trojan horses with Hendra viruses) turned into still-life pixel art. Trying to remain calm, we rebooted the computer… to be greeted with a friendly message that the entire computer operating system had shut down. By this point, we had forgotten how not to panic. That computer had all of his sister Emily’s University work on it and Tom’s Design & Technology work on it. We were convinced that the shit would hit the fan if she found out, and we would most certainly get blamed for it. Notifying Tom’s mother of our dilemma, we left the dirty work up to her to tell Emily that we killed her computer. After deciding against leaving the country (we didn’t have enough petrol to drive to the airport), we ran outside and hid from Emily, in fear of our lives. As we dreaded, we saw Emily moving towards us like a steam roller approaching a pair of cripples stuck in dry cement. We were fucked.
What’s incredibly weird, is the smile on her face. I was not fooled. Monkeys smile before they attack too. She was strangely calm about the whole thing. And she reassured us and ended the conversation with a hug for both of us. We were NOT expecting that reaction - that’s for sure!
I had at least one thing that I knew couldn’t possibly go wrong. My visual arts prints that I submitted at graphic design place last week were supposed to be ready to be collected today. So I got up nice and early to go and pick them up this morning. The space cadet with pencilled-in eyebrows behind the counter told me in her ‘I’d rather be somewhere else’ tone that they “weren’t ready yet”. How much fucking time do they want? I put them in a week ago! It’s not like they’re busy or anything. In fact, any more relaxed and they’d be asleep! I’m now expected to wait until 4.00pm to pick them up. I don’t have that kind of time! Today’s supposed to be my day off, too. I could be at home colouring in Muppet Colouring Books!
Golly, gee, fellas!
Aside from that, the only reason I am at school today is because Tom’s HSC drama group performance had to be performed today. His experience with this drama group mirrors my own frustrations with drama students. Their performance piece was such a mess that their narrator actually ran away from the school half-way through their trial performance last week! Saving the day, Tom has been boasting of a director that came in to help their group get their play to a point that didn’t resemble the steamy brown matter that my dogs leave on the lawn. I got to meet the director the other day. I could not believe who it was - MS. PARIS from Ku-Ring-Gai! Ms. Paris was my teacher for drama and history in year 7 & 8, and no doubt one of my favourites. It’s strange, because I always wondered what became of her, as she seemed to just disappear off the face of the planet! Now it turns out that she’s a Bradfield teacher. I hope I get her for drama next year.
I’m going to need all the luck I can get if I want to get my documentary and mounted prints ready by 5.00pm on Friday… *sighs*