The 100 Monkeys/100 Typewriters guide to SWOT Vac (Jeremy)

WELL, folks, it’s that time of year. Time for the lecturers to actually breathe, sleep and eat and possibly even see other people (though I personally don’t like the idea of them ever having a social life) before exam week. Time for our relatives to all put up with having unwashed, smelly first-year students at home across the real week. Above all, it’s Time To Panic! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s SWOT (which of course stands for, “Sh*t, We’re Outta Time!”) Vac. And that, of course, means planning ahead.

To help all you little JAFFY mites out there, we’ve produced the Jez Plan To SWOTvac Success*** (suggested slogan: “For when 50% plus one will do”). This plan has been road-tested by many a student. Whether they planned for it or not.

MONDAY

Wake up with throbbing hangover at ten. Unsure whether to visit toilet or go to the sink for a glass of water first so spend fifteen minutes in bed deciding which one to go to. Eventually you decide the loo is the more pressing concern. (This quite possibly qualifies as your entire study load for the subject of “Fluid Mechanics”). Stagger downstairs in your pyjama pants at ten-thirty. Feed the cat.

After checking your email, chatting on MSN, and seven rounds of Solitaire, it’s probably time for some study, which is lucky, as it’s already roughly 1.30. Go upstairs, open a textbook, and stare at it for ten minutes. This is known as intra-cerebral-intuitive-transitive learning, wherein the knowledge is all contained within the head of the textbook and it will magically flow into your head simply by you being within roughly a metre of it, without any conscious effort on your own behalf. This technique has been practiced by many a mathematics student all over the world.

It’s time for lunch, which is two-minutes noodles, chicken flavour. Eat three-quarters of the two-minute noodles, spill one-eighth on the floor, and the other eighth all over your Chinese notebook. Yell loud swear word, and embark upon a book-preservation process with involves wiping your book with a facewasher and re-inking over the characters that have become mere smudges with some inventive guesswork. Stick the book on top of the sunny window ledge in the laundry near the cat’s food bowl and pray for the best. Reheat some lasagne for dinner.

TUESDAY

Stagger downstairs at eleven to find the note that was yesterday taped to the fridge, telling you not to eat the lasagne. Feed the cat. Wipe the cat vomit OFF the book, preferably using the actual cat itself. You’re not sure, but you think that’s your Lesson Six vocab list underneath a mixture of half-chewed Whiskettes and ginger fur. Breakfast is, naturally, two-minute noodles.

You decide not to go on the computer so as to get to study straightaway. After a forty-five minute shower which involves three different Mohican hairstyles with the shampoo, two belting shower-cubicle renditions of Khe Sahn, and an extra fifteen minutes after that of sucking in your gut and admiring your two-pack (which looks more like lumpy pizza dough than a set of tennis balls), plus a half-hour telephone conversation with your mate, you’re ready to study.

Open your book to the one topic in the subject that you are actually comfortable with. Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere, right? Complete exercises 1(a), (b) and (c). Don’t bother about exercises 1(d) through to 7(u). You’ve got the general idea, right?

You remember your Programming lecturer telling you to enjoy your SWOT vac, and you decide that the best way to do this is to not study at all. You decide that your study load for this evening will be thinking about your French exam on the bus over to your mates’ party. You think and think about it, and eventually come to one conclusion. You think you’ll fail.

WEDNESDAY

Wake up at 11.00am in a spinning-room stupor. Try to retrieve some sort of semblance of last night’s events in your head until you realise that you spent most of last night studying Newton’s Fourth Law (what goes down must come back up) and Good Mate Dave’s Third Law (Straight Man Cannot Dance, but he can make a dickhead of himself). Feed the cat and grab yourself some two minute noodles. It’s only when you think your breakfast tastes a little salty that you realise that you yourself have a bowl full of Whiskettes and your cat is busy slurping up two-minute noodles. Whoops.

Sit down at your desk. Stare out the window for twenty minutes (thus preparing you well for a career in the transition department at Melbourne University) (Editor’s note: when we’re not reading the blog, of course!). Don’t forget to turn once every ten minutes to avoid pins and needles. Eventually you get out the Chinese dictionary and Cat V-spattered notebook and write a short speech about Shopping In China. Wouldn’t that be right; the central vocab that you need lies right underneath the inked-over cat spew. There you go; that’s your preparation done for the Chinese exam!

In the evening you decide that your diet has been somewhat lacking in nutritional value. You try to remember all five food groups; from memory, it’s carbohydrates, greens, animals, fat and chemicals. Thus it only makes sense to look after yourself properly at mealtimes and your inspired choice of combining the beef AND the stir-fry vegetable two minute noodles manages to accomodate all five. Congratulations!

THURSDAY

Amble downstairs, admiring your pale white physique in the mirror on the way down (a consequence of having avoided ALL direct contact with sunlight over the last four days). Notice a slightly lumpy green and brown mass in the bottom of your fridge. You think they’re fruit and vegetables, but you’re not quite sure.

Back upstairs for work and it’s time for some maths. Open your notebook to the first page. You’re trying to work out the ratio; you think it’s roughly a 20/30/50 split between things you understand, things you don’t and scrawled comments like “Hot Chick @ 3 o’clock” courtesy of your mate Johnno. Flick the page to discover a large biro picture of a takeaway cup of coffee and a set of phone numbers without owners. This is perhaps not an ideal exhibition of note-taking in Maths.

You get to the page that covers the material that you Just Don’t Understand, and discover that you didn’t really understand it at the time either. The proof of this is that this particular page is covered in various forms of the phrase “F*** f*** f***” interspersed with a few weird Greek symbols. You begin a panic a little. You open your previously-unthumbed copy of the textbook and start reading furiously at the first page. The textbook is of course written by someone with lots of letters after their name who could make addition sound like a complex and convoluted process. Bit by bit, you inch foward at snail’s pace through it.

It’s time for dinner and you decide to resort to last-ditch measures for timesaving. This time you don’t even bother trying to cook the two-minute noodles; instead you just open the dry packet into a plastic bowl, empty the flavour sachet over it and get munching. You’ve heard that rehydration is naturally important for the studying student, so you make yourself a triple-strength instant coffee and slam it down in one hit. With a slightly maniacal glint in your eye, you return back to your work, and then to bed at midnight.

FRIDAY

Wake up at eleven o’clock. Try to remember what happened last night and why you couldn’t actually get to sleep until four; perhaps it was too much coffee.

Amble into the bathroom to go to the loo. That’s when, on your way back out, you notice the cat flat on it’s back in a pool of water in the shower, foaming slightly at the mouth. Panicking a little, you grab a cardboard box, line it with newspaper and stuff the plaintively-mewing cat into it. Tucking the box under one arm, you sprint down to the vet’s.

After a sweating two hours spent worrying over Leo the Cat in the reception at the Vet’s, you are eventually handed back the cat, a large bottle of pills and an even larger bill. Food poisoning, apparently, says the vet. A nigh-on lethal cocktail of chemicals in that cat’s stomach. Only God knows what you’ve been feeding him.

Back home to read over your oral about clothes-shopping in China. You look once; twice at some of the characters in it; they’re the ones that were indecipherable under the cat vomit, and they just don’t look 100% right. You check them up in your dictionary, and sure enough, instead of saying that young people like to buy jeans you’ve ended up saying that polite people like to buy g-strings. Damn that cat.

After finding that monumental stuff-up, you really begin to sweat. Dinner is another two-minute noodle biscuit, this time sprinkled with raw instant coffee granules. After force-feeding the cat its pills with an extraordinarily long name (casualty count: two tooth marks on your finger requring a bandaid, scratches on the curtains and a torn sleeve) you get back to work. And when people ask you why you look like such a zombie when you turn up for work on Saturday, they risk life and limb for it. Ah well. Such is the life of a uni student.

Happy Cramming! I know I will be;

jez

*** not actually guaranteed to produce a pass mark