My final three exams, Chemistry, German and Music were thankfully straightforward and uneventful. Chemistry was a delicious paper and luckily for me the areas I didn’t study either didn’t come up or only came up as a tiny part of an optional question. Trés bon! Unfortunately I did make a silly mistake when I drew a graph plotting atomic number against mass number instead of first ionization energy, but luckily I realised my mistake and had time to redraw the graph and do an extra question just in case.

German was sehr gut aber nicht fantastisch. Keeping with the trend of past Ger,an Leaving Cert papers very odd written pieces came up, like writing about wild animals in the city. I sincerely hope “because of the economic crisis, people cannot afford food and may kill and eat wild animals” counts as “a dangerous situation which could arise from wild animals in the city”.

Music was as good as music was always going to be, by which I mean I didn’t do a wonderful exam, but neither did I fail epically, although the last phrase of my melody was a cross between Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca and We Wish You A Merry Christmas. I also modulated without using any sevenths, so I hope to god it sounds like an obvious modulation.

The night before the HPAT results I had a dream about the results in which I got 460 points and was delighted with myself. Of course upon waking I realised that that’s an impossible score but went to check my email still with my happy buzz from that nice dream. It only took a few minutes for that happy buzz to be replaced by bitter disappointment and then despair, followed gradually by acceptance. I did not get a good HPAT score. Oh sure, I did better than the majority of people, but that’s not enough. Even if I got six A1s, which I know I haven’t, I could get a maximum of 720 and I just don’t think that’s going to cut it. After moping around my house on my own for a bit, I decided that Human Health and Disease, if I get it, does sound like a pretty cool course. I’m thinking that I’ll do a year of that but also spend that year doing logic and spacial awareness problems, and hopefully I can improve on my HPAT score next February. Even though I’ve accepted my useless HPAT score, I still get a sinking feeling of inadequacy every time I think of it, which is part of the reason I avoided blogging about it for so long. Fortunately being in another country with a different language and culture where I can practice French, the love of my life, is a welcome distraction, and in between sunning myself and ogling tanned French boys at the beach, I’ve come to accept that come September, I will not be a med student.

(on an entirely different note, I saw this on my balcony the other night…)