Frustrated

In the months since this post I've been fighting hard to stay celibate. Well, I say fighting - for the most part I haven't found it that hard. Except yesterday I got a bit hot under the collar and it's pissing me off. Today I cracked and said you know what I just need to get off a little, a little fantasy to set me straight and then I'll be fine. 10 seconds in I hit a brick wall and the libido just died. Tried again just now... did ok and then thought - do I really want my first orgasm after months of no touching, no fantasising, no nothing to be something that doesn't involve OtherHalf? This is a fairly futile line of thought as that means no more orgasms until we're married... if we ever are married... This time no brick wall. Me, actively, consentingly, letting go. Choosing not to. Man I wish I could just forget sex.

Gah

Oh man I'm ill again :(

With no time to get better either - I've got a big meal out tonight, and OtherHalf's parents are here tomorrow. If I'm ill they'll blatantly think I'm hungover.

Worse, I went to print off copies of extended essay / project for my supervisers and low and behond discovered a horrific typo :*(

Late night at the water hole

I tend to make a point of not getting too close to the athletes I coach. It's always good to maintain some distance: not least because it gives you a) a sense of authority and b) a much cleaner conscience when you have to bite the bullet and do what's good for the team, not good for somebody's ego, or for their work ethic.

The other thing is that it stops them thinking of you as a friend. Don't get me wrong, I've had some good friends amongst those I've coached. But.... well men tend to be ok. They tend not to want to talk about their feelings much anyway. But girls... It's a fairly common occurrence following a big drunken celebration dinner to get someone whose thought process I suspect goes along the following path:

• I am so sad and full of relationship woe
• I want advice
• FinalsBlogger has always given me good advice
• FinalsBlogger seems very authoratitive (yes dear, about sport)
• I will ask FinalsBlogger for advice

Now this makes me sound like a heartless degenerate, which isn't the case. As it happens I do think I give good advice, and I will talk somebody down from a crisis. But it does strike me as slightly bizarre occasionally that young women gravitate to me with their relationship troubles. Especially when, in some scenarios, my first instinct is to shout Dump him! Dump him! and find the guy for the purposes of making it quite clear to him how much of a piece of worthless scum he is.

If it wasn't already clear, this made up a large part of my evening last night.

I also woke up with a rare and special hangover today (rare and special because I just don't get hungover, far too sensible about toast and gallons of water before bed: not because it was a hangover with sparkles).

Can't let it go

As mentioned here I've already worked out the best and worst case scenarios for my degree. Unless there is some miracle or I've completely misunderstood a question I am getting a 2:1. (I should probably point out that they don't scale our papers. Last year the mean for one paper dropped by 10%, and they said that since it wasn't clear whether it was a hard paper, a bad year of students or bad teaching, they weren't prepared to compensate).

Yet still I am obsessing.

Some of my friends are in the habit of trying to think of e.g. 20 people who will do worse than them, as a way of "proving" their 2:1 is safe. I've been labouring under the misapprehension that only 8 2:2s were given out in my subject last year. Except I neglected to count people who'd had their name removed from the pass list: which is naturally most likely to be those who know they might do badly. Upon reading the examiners' report I discovered that in the last 3 years a total of 42 1sts and 3rds have been given out (i.e. an average of 14 a year) - not 8.

Not that I'd been playing this game - but 14% is a bit bigger than 8 no?

But then on the other hand the highest 2:2 bracket is numerously described (in the various papers) as:

• Just satisfactory
• Covering most of the major points
• A weakish argument
• Small omissions or incorrectnesses

I think that if I'd done that I'd know wouldn't I?

And equally a 1st class paper (the lowest mark for it, obviously, not the highest marks) is described as simply being good and having "adequate" extra material included not from the lectures.

I'm not even sure I trust my own judgement anymore :-S

Then it got personal...

There aren't many of my exes I still have tension with. Basically none at all in fact. I'm a firm believer that if you were together for the right reasons in the beginning, then you can be friends again at the end. Ex (my most recent) and I had possibly the messiest breakup in the world. One of those one-side-can't-believe-it's-over break ups that takes 3 months to be resolved, and one of you's moved on, but not really, there's just all these feelings but it won't work out. It was messy. It was painful. We'll never be as close as we were before. But we're still friends.

There is, in fact, only one ex that still makes my stomach turnover whenever we have an unexpected encounter. Sam was young, and pretty... too young for me let's be honest. It was a summer fling with a friend of a friend, that we convinced ourselves was more. For me, I guess it was. It started off that way, and I was surprised when people intimated how hard it would be in a long distance relationship. But it didn't take long to realise that what I was feeling wasn't just lust, or friendship. I was enjoying being around someone who'd known me for a week and could finish my sentences. Someone who understood my relationship with music. Someone who made me feel like I was really wanted.

I should have listened to the LDR people. It crashed and burned quite rapidly, as soon as there were a better selection of eligible young things to choose from.

The problem with friends of friends from uni, is that they tend to continue visiting their friends after they've trodden all over your heart. It's a long way in the past, I'm happy with OtherHalf, and I've watched in a slightly sadistic way as Sam has tried and failed to find someone long term. Yesterday was the first time where I haven't just left the room and avoided the situation. I was surprised to realise that it hasn't been just me avoiding eye contact for the 2 years since this whole thing blew over. (That's right - it took me a few months to be able to talk to Ex... A month-long fling and 2 years over it my stomach turns over. Possibly because I've never had to face it, and live with the day-by-day reality). And to realise that actually every time something made me smile, that nobody else got, the one person in the room still smiling was Sam. I'd forgotten how alike we are really.

All over...

Well that's it... all done... and now begin the 3 weeks of waiting!
So now I guess the surviving-you-final-exams blog turns into a life-after-finals, finding-job etc blog!

Predictions:
Papers 3-5 (coursework)
Best case scenarios: 67, 68, 69
Worst case scenarios: 62, 62, 64
Paper 6 (Monday's compulsory option)
BCS: 65
WCS: 50
Papers 7/8 (Option 1)
BCS: 68, 74
WCS: 63, 68
Papers 9/10 (Option 2)
BCS: 65, 74
WCS: 60, 65

And my average last year was 76.

This puts my final mark anywhere between 64.6 and 70.2. A solid 2:1 basically. So now, we wait and see...

Oddness...

You'd think that my blog would be the last thing I'd be thinking about right now.
But you see that little thing on the right hand side there? That's my visitor counter.
It counts new visitors every day.
It tells me where you've come from, what pages you've visited, and where you live.
There are 4 regular visitors from this city. Today, a new person visited.

That person, lives in my city, and found my blog by searching google for it. Now you may think that finalistsblog would be a common name for a blog - but really not. I tried to find other blogs with similar names to read and there really aren't many. So it wasn't a typo, it was someone trying to find me.

Nobody knows the name of my blog. Except, last night I left my visitor counter on the screen at OtherHalf's. Now I have it on honour that the instinctive reaction here was not to google me and read my private rantings. But unless one of the four of you from this city happened to go to a friend's and look me up (which seems unlikely since by now you visit so often I'd expect you to know the address) and then that friend read all my posts about relationships, and sex, and committment and Christianity... Then somebody has found me.

I really, really don't like that.