Could USyd be more sadistic? It’s the last week of the break and, for people in Arts at least, we’ve been waiting with bated breath for a few too many weeks for those magical numbers. If the exams were the pins being driven in underneath our nails, then this is the torturously slow removal.
I guess we’re like uni exam virgins, as my friend pointed out. We’re on that slow build up to the climax of official exam results but we’ll come out slightly confused, going ‘Sooo…was that it?’ At least with the HSC there was schoolies to keep the mind off the impending doom, and when that was over there was always a day down at Manly lying on the sand, desperately trying to dissect a watermelon using paddle pop sticks taken from a café. Even that was an anticlimax when the juicy flesh was ruined by a sudden blast of sand.
And yes when the UAI finally popped onto the screen that morning, it had to be the anticlimax to end all anticlimaxes. The UAI Factory©, i.e. school, was more keen than I was to know my score, waking me at 9am to know a four digit number that summated twelve years of education. The nerve of some people! A boy needs his beauty sleep too!
To a degree this post has been an anticlimax. I’ve forgotten the basis on which I started writing this, but like all good anticlimaxes it must’ve begun with a relatively large quantity of disillusionment.
What won’t be an anticlimax (meaning, I hope it won't) is the last Harry Potter book. Rowling’s last book in the series, the most speculated in the set, coincides not only with the end of Tony Blair’s ten year run in office and the removal of the Pasha Bulker from Nobbys Beach but also the sad end of my childhood. Yes I’ve read the Potter series since I was a lad in Year 4 and I’m proud to say (I say this warily) that I was part of the first wave of Potter converts. If the Deathly Hallows is an anticlimax, then it follows that my childhood would’ve also been merely a giant anticlimax.
Not wanting to turn this blog into a frenzy of Harry Potter fanatics with their own theories and insider gossip into the fate of the boy who lived, I’ll avoid speculation into the final outcome. As long as it’s not an anticlimax, otherwise J. K. Rowling will owe me nine years of my life. She can afford it.