Leave studying on 'study leave'

Wow. The dreaded exam season is back.  Now I can witness my elder sister carry on doing things she did all year, ie. binge-watch Netflix and sleep, while being tensed 24/7. Now, I can again experience everyone wanting the house to be as quiet as an empty library (or libraries in general, as they’re always empty) to facilitate my 16 year old sister to concentrate (on doodling another unrecognizable figure on the edge of her notebook).

She has added a task on her daily quota of annoying me- ranting on the phone for hours on the ‘mind-numbing’ nature of exams.

“The concept of exams is perfect. You test kids on their ability to cram up data which won’t affect their life in any way, ‘taught’ during a year-long class, in which no one paid any attention, in a few hours.  Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Like, a piece of paper can determine how great I am, right?”

I hear her saying something along these lines 5 times a day, to different friends, when they call each other to ‘study’.

Yesterday, I was watching Family Feud on youtube’ like she does for the whole existence, in our room, when she enters and shushes me out as she had to study. I pouted, but was leaving when she said:

“You should just be thankful that you are too young to be forced to sit for hours at a time, writing stuff you are unsure of on a piece of insignificant paper for no good reason.”

“Well, I would also get like 5 days of ‘study’ leave a week for 3 weeks. I wouldn’t mind that.”

“Shush! Don’t waste my time, I need to study. Mom! Look, she won’t let me study.”

“Tattle tale.”

And this was the cue for Mom to come to the scene, declare me to be guilty, escort me out of ‘my’ room and send me ‘to do something worthwhile’. Ironically, when I passed my room 5 minutes later, I could hear the noise of the same Family Feud episode coming from it. This is just one of the millions of such instances where I ‘interrupt her studies’.

Another drawback of exam season, especially my sister’s exam season which occurs during March, the perfect time for having fun, is that she is always at home. The school gives her ‘study leaves’, in which she literally ‘leaves studying’.  She can’t have her daily dose of roaming on the streets with her ‘gang’, she calls this socializing, and can't be a menace somewhere other than home. She is on top of my head at all times. ALL THE TIME.  I can’t have my friends over, I can’t play noisy games, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.

The only thing which increases during this time is, not her knowledge, nor my sanity, but her stomach. She sits on her bed all day, munching chocolates (to ‘relieve stress’, that’s her excuse for everything.) and then moans about gaining 10 pounds in a month. Mom gets all her favourite fried snacks made, and she stuffs her face with unhealthy fat. Like, you sit around for days at a time, long enough for a hen to hatch her eggs, and then expect that to make you lose your food baby?

She sleeps till 11 each morning of her study leave, and spends the afternoon watching youtube, and then stresses over the amount of syllabus left the entire evening (stresses, not studies) and then has a headache by 9 pm and snoozes off. This cycle repeats, and she goes to her exam ‘unprepared’, resolves to do ‘better next time’ and sleeps. Again.

And when results day comes, she has forgotten all about her laziness and blames all her ‘borderline decent’ (read failing) grades on her ‘incompetent teachers’ and ‘a noisy atmosphere’. She really is the master of the art of ‘not doing anything but still diverting blame’.