The theme for this year's Beyond the Borders for me has been Feeling Like Shit. Physically, mentally, emotionally. But let's just talk about physically. Since about Thursday I've had a raging itch on my scalp. It is bumpy and my corresponding glands are swollen. It is sore to the touch and I also have this pain radiating down my head. Of course, this all happens on a holiday weekend. So I go to the overrun Urgent Care Facility, which is overflowing with illin' folks. I like this Urgent Care because they have a separate pediatric area, which is a glassed-in quarantined pen for the sick squeeblers. The grown folks are allowed to languish in their own boring grown-up pen with minimal saliva contact. Anyway, as my latest folly is to apply for MFA programs, programs that require a mastery of 8th grade mathematics to study creative writing, I took along my Princeton Review GRE practice book for study during the long wait (actually, a not-bad 1.75 hours). I figured a germ-infested medical waiting room was as good a place as any to relearn Pythagorean theorem.
NOTE TO DUDES: If you want to pick up chicks in a waiting room, just bring a standardized test study guide with you. It was a chick magnet, and I'm not even a dude or hot or anything. Every person who sat next to me was riveted with my big book of triangles and analogies. I had no fewer than three ladies reading over my shoulder asking me what I was doing. "Uh, I don't do standardized test prep for fun," I explained. Imagine how manly and hot you could make such an interaction! Entrance exams, at least to nerds like me, are rife with unspoken information about one's intellect, goals, ambitions, and conformity to questionable college entrance standards. Or stodginess, desperation, desire to avoid real work, and potential for pretentious words and deeds over coffee or in the vestibules of art museums.
I personally dig nerdy shit, so if I were to see some glasses-wearing nutsack box-of-hangers test-prepping or reading Nabokov, my dials would probably hit 10 or 11. Indeed, I must admit that in the windows of that men's clothing shop at the corner of 6th and Congress (the one that sells suit jackets with UT or A&M-themed linings) there is a window dummy wearing a sweater vest and a bow tie and I have to admit, even though it's a headless mannequin, I always get a little brain-chemical lift when I walk by that window.
If someone were to make the adult film Standardized Test Fuck 4, I'd buy it.
Posted by Zerd at September 3, 2007 02:25 PM