Eyes and Exam results

School has been pretty fun this past week, there have been practicals, football matches and all sort of new and interesting things. My scientific highlight of the week has undoubtedly been the dissection of an eye. (On a side note I feel obliged to clear up the correct pronunciatiation of dissection, it is a word that particularly annoys my girlfriend's dad so I do all I can to spread the truth. Contrary to popular belief it is pronounced diss-ection like in disc or disband, not die-section like dye or dine. Glad I have sorted that, he would be proud of me.) If you imagine an eye I bet you think it is soft and squishy, or maybe gloopy. They are not, they are pretty damn solid and tough. First we had to cut off the muscle around the eye, exposing it completely. Next was cutting into it, although preceeded by lots of pissing about and picture taking:

What else does a teenage boy do when presented with eyes? Back to the DISSSSection, eyes are pretty round and solid. Getting the scissors into the eye was like trying to get into a gobstopper with a fork, difficult. After nearly stabbing through my hand numerous times I developed a clever securing method involving the tweezers, I wish I could show you it. Upon piercing the Sclera (outside hard bit) I was greeted by a bitty black goop from the choroid (membrane that prevents internal reflection) and further goop that was the Vitreous Humour (goop that gives the eye shape). Our quest was for the lens (which was goopy), after finding mine and attempting to look through it I came to the conclusion the the animal that had so kindly donated its eye to me needed glasses. I did manage to read newspaper through it, inspecting a match report between Newcastle and Fulham from November (which ended 0-0), using a piece of an animal eye did not make the report any more interesting. In our school noone uses gloves for dissection, we are men.

I have some exam results tomorrow, needless to say I am quite nervous. It is quite odd being nervous about results, the part to be nervous about is surely the testing itself. Nervousness is a mechanism developed evolutionarily to help us perform better in high stress situations. To start with this hardly helps with academic thinky things as it is more about muscles and can actually be a bad thing in exams. I am hardly going to need all the extra adrenaline, strength and energy to pick up and open an envelope, unless of course they have included a detailed analysis of my mistakes, making it very heavy or have used extra thick envelopes with super strength glue. I, like many of my school comrades am facing a problem tomorrow. The results become available at 7:45am, I have a double free period meaning not arriving at school until 10:11am. Do I pick the results up as early as possible or turn up at 10 and grab them before double biology? A friend of mine will be picking his up as early as possible whereas another will be leaving it until the end of the day. It was only a few minutes ago that I realised that contrary to popular belief, the results will not change depending on when they are picked up. With this in mind I'll take the extra sleep and grab them around 10, unless of course I am too tense to sleep.

Good luck to all those collecting results (even though you needed the luck back in January and need very little luck to successfully open an envelope).