Studio Life, That Awful Thing Called Portfolio Exams and Other Things
Exams are over! Finally. The champagne has been popped and drunk. I've set fire to most, if not all, of my rolls of Contract Documentation work in a bid to rid myself of post-exam anxiety. Has it worked? Nope. Until I see my final marks, panic can lend my shoulder and hide its face beneath my smile. This was definitely not a good year, folks. My heart is heavy.
My year should have come to an abrupt end the moment the lecturers sauntered over to their next sweaty victim. I should have packed my bags and left but I stayed to watch the aftermath. We don't have normal exams where you sit and quietly daydream or scribble answers that you crammed into your brain 30 minutes before. We have tense orals; heated mano-a-mano power struggles between a sleep-deprived, under-prepared, hungry student who's a total G in front of the computer, and a lecturer who assumes he knows everything there is to know about anything so he keeps asking you why the heck you did what you did. I'm a G at giving my answers in the form of questions when my pin-up fails to deliver what I really meant to say but then obviously didn't bother to write down. And when all else fails, I go into 'Question everything!' mode.
Works like a charm. I think. Until they say "Great! So smart you are. Too bad it's non-existent in your work." And move on. Then you're pretty much screwed.
So as I was saying, we don't write. The only pen or pencil you will see in your exam is the big red one doodling "WTF is this?" (or the equivalent thereof) on a series of pages of work you've slaved over for what feels like years and paid quite a great deal of money to pin-up. Your heart's in your throat from the get-go. And as if your breathing wasn't already shallow enough, the room you pinning up you were portfolio in was passively ventilated. Because... sustainability. But it was badly designed. Which basically meant recycled dead air (in this part of SA). Thank you ever so much, oh insanely humid and windless capital city. Either way, there were not enough ventilation systems in the world to make the air around where you stood, while a lecturer feverishly grilled you about line thicknesses and spelling errors, cool enough.
Lecturers always make a big hullabaloo over finding what's wrong with your work rather than congratulating you on what you worked so hard to get right. One lecturer, not from our campus, called it being 'anal'. Right he was. There will ALWAYS be something wrong and your work will NEVER be finished. Ever. So for the sake of my sanity I consider what I do art. For a painting, too, is never finished. Yet it can don the compliment "what a masterpiece" imperiously. But, unfortunately, whatever you view as unadulterated genius here is simply a long piece of horse excrement in their eyes. Prepare to ball.
I should have been soaking up warm rays of vitamin D in my hometown (in the Land of The Risen Sun, Mpumalanga) but I'm stuck at my desk, getting paler by the day. Okay, I may not be pale, but my skin is an awkward shade I'm not particularly fond of. And I have the energy of an 80 year old. Don't even get me started on my hair; it is a giant mass of mangled 'you don't want to know'. During exams, I couldn't even muster the strength to stroke it back into place when I woke up from deep slumber caused by lapses of sheer boredom and eye strain. People had gotten so used to seeing me like that that my hairstyle almost looked intentional. So I kept it. Besides, I'm not the only one who's let themselves go. Studio, at the moment, kind of resembles a woody halfway house for recovering zombies. Exam time is basically hibernation... in reverse. Scruffiness is a way of life.
So anyway... studio has grown on me like a bad rash. It has become home. Everything is where I need it to be—within reach and just about everywhere, and free internet is at the click of a button. So for all the times I am imagining myself passing time on the beach or our living room floor, a small part of me wishes it could stay. Because I've grown accustomed to sleeping on hard couches and just about wherever and whenever I drop, and eating microwaved meals day in day out, I'm still here. That, and the fact that I've been here so long, my old man seems to have momentarily forgotten he has a daughter. Bleak. But I also felt like being generous with my presence. My friends who have yet to do their exams need my nuggets of wisdom. Yes, my sense of self-importance has indeed grown back. Next time, exams, I'll be bullet-proof.
