Veritable Tantrum

Let me start this postmortem by saying I was not a smart person in high school.

I skated by on straight B-minuses, all in manic adoration of the fact that a B-minus provided the exact same GPA value as a B-plus. It was a beautifully corrupt system that weasels like myself took advantage of while all the Type-A Winstons, Chaunceys, and Olivers got pissed off and rolled their eyes.

I also never took a single AP course.

Those were really important when I was in high school. But now, if you don’t take an AP course, you’re totally fucked. Nowadays, crazy helicopter parents force their kids to take nine AP courses a year because they KNOW their kids will end up in ADX Florence if they don’t. “You can take AP U.S. History or increase your chances of becoming the next Unabomber. Your choice, son.”

But the worst, by a mile, were my SAT scores.

They were AWFUL. They were putrid and uncouth and vacuous and many other words I didn’t know on October 10, 2009. After bartering back and forth with the College Board, I found my old scores…

Standing by themselves, those scores aren’t THAT bad. In fact, they’re solidly above the statistical average. But they were far below many of my friends’ scores and my future alma mater’s standards. And since intelligence can only be appropriately measured in comparison to the people around me, I considered them dog shit. I don’t know how those got me into a school sometimes called a “public Ivy,” even though College Park is often considered the irksome wretch of the University System of Maryland.

But they did, and now I’m worse off because of it. Because those scores (1) got me into Maryland, (2) inadvertently led me toward the piddling jerkoffs who became my friends and Fantasy Leaguemates, and (3) led me to take the SAT again after losing this past season. Even after I picked first and Adrian Peterson set my team up for a calamitous season because he loves tree branches so damn much.

—

I signed up late for the March 14 test. As with most horrible things that happen to humanity behind famine and war, it was because of the College Board.

Obviously, I had no earthly idea what my account and password were from six years ago. So, I had to email them over the course of two weeks to get back into my old account, and the normal registration deadline had passed by the time they got back to me.

For the record, the College Board is one of the worst companies on the planet. It wears a façade of warmth and guidance and acts like it doesn’t want you to wash cheese sauce off nacho plates at Chevy’s Fresh Mex for the rest of your life.

In reality, the College Board wants you to fail. It wants you to keep buying $60 practice books and signing up for $50 tests in hopes you’ll never reach the rarefied atmosphere of success that college can offer.

The College Board ranks among politicians as an ingratiating merchant of smarm. I ended up paying an extra $30 on top of the original $50 needed to sign up for the SAT.

The test was on a Saturday. Everyone in my league agreed that it’d be in our best interest to go to one of our houses and get absolutely greased the night before. Me in particular.

That night went exactly like you think. I did everything an ambitious student preparing for the SAT doesn’t do the night before taking it – with one exception.

We were drinking at my friend’s house, and this friend’s little brother was also taking the SAT the next day. Naturally, we played impromptu drinking games involving his practice books. Fate couldn’t have dealt me a more preposterous hand if It tried.

We all sat around his dinner table, passing around math questions. I had the dumbest left-brain of everyone at the table, by a CONSIDERABLE margin.

My friend’s 18-year-old brother was so much smarter than me. I tried a probability problem (which, by most standards, is considered the most “common sense” branch of mathematics) and I gave up after two minutes. I’m an arithmetical moron, and my SAT results would certainly illustrate that.

—

As it eventually tends to do, morning arrived.

I creaked my eyes open around 7 a.m. Reality immediately washed over me in an acutely distressing wave. Jack Daniels sucks.

The first thought that crossed my foggy mind, when I realized I had to take a gruelingly worthless test in less than an hour because of my horrible drafting judgments half a year earlier, was…

Yep, today is the day I’m going to end it all.

That’s how horrible I felt on the morning of March 14. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I thought I was having a panic attack, but it was a REALLY LONG panic attack. Was it lasting so long because it was actually a heart attack?

I can’t really describe the biological dysfunction that was going on inside me, but I do remember thinking one thing…

I know, with total certainty, that I have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it through this entire test without making a hungover spectacle of myself.

And in front of two dozen adderall-addled infants, mind you.

I arrived at the test center late and hungover, forced to wait in line with 16-year-olds who arrived late and sober.

Half of me wanted to introduce myself to these kids and show them how SOOPER KEWL I am. I wanted to display my contempt of the education system, and of systems in general. “Schooling is an outdated concept, man. I got my degree already and I basically smeared crap all over this test when I took it. You know, BACK IN MY DAY.” I wanted to be the older guy mesmerizing all the little minions with lackadaisical wisdom despite my baby face and crippling anxiety.

The other half of me wanted to avoid eye contact with these awkward Molly-mongering teenagers, speak only when spoken to, slave through this God forsaken test with a sense of miserable self-righteousness, and generally act as reclusive as possible.

The latter half prevailed.

Surprisingly, I completed the first four sections with relative ease.

That DOES NOT include the essay, though. I couldn’t formulate a coherent argument in the state of mind I was in. Some people can’t snap their fingers, some people can’t whistle, I can’t write an essay hungover. I knew that almost immediately. The Educational Smarm Merchant would make it optional a year later anyway. I just exercised that right ahead of time.

Anyway, Sections 1 through 4 were perfectly divided into two Critical Reading and two Math sections.

I smoked the Critical Reading sections. I knew ahead of time I’d smoke the Critical Reading sections.

One of the worst aspects of college is the boundlessness of required reading material that is immaterial to life beyond the classroom. The Critical Reading sections are meant to prepare you for that aimless busy work, but that aimless busy work you prepared for doesn’t prepare you for shit afterward. It’s a linear progression of getting better at being worthlessly productive.

The two Math sections were a different story.

I wandered aimlessly through the baffling collection of number series’ and shapes. It was as if the previous night’s self-obliteration had swallowed up any remaining shred of mathematical knowledge. The practice tests seemed like a cake walk in retrospect. My left-brain aptitude felt like a speck of mud hanging in endless nothing.

Seriously though, I didn’t try at all on the Math.

Instead of directing my mental exertion toward the questions, I directed it toward filling in the bubbles as creatively as possible.

It sucks, though, because you can only make funny words with the bubbles if you use the whole Scantron sheet. You can’t write “Assblood” within the confines of one test section, because most letters require filling in multiple letters on the same row, and the machine that scores the test would nullify them for having more than one answer. The middle crossbar in the “A” in “Assblood” would require filling in “A” through “E.” It’s just another way the College Board vacuums pleasure out of the universe.

Like I said, the first four sections were half Critical Reading and half Math.

There was one five minute break after the first two sections, which is usually too short and pointless to be considered any kind of break at all. But I was still sort of drunk, so I relished it.

I especially liked it because it was a break from staring at those fucking bubbles. Scantron bubbles are daunting and horrible even when you’re not drunk. When you are, they’re 10 times worse. They make your skin crawl with panic and extreme trypophobia, so the five-minute intermission was a welcome refuge from that horror.

That first break was great. It wasn’t until afterward that I really wanted to die.

It was around 10:30 a.m. By that point, my drunkenness was becoming wholly replaced by the hangover. My head started pounding ferociously. I started having a lot of trouble concentrating.

I became overwhelmed with the same kind of sensation you get when you feel nervous diarrhea coming on: the urgent need to get the hell out of wherever you are STAT.

There was one more section until Break No. 2. That was when I would make my grand escape. Everyone would exit the room and walk right down the hallway toward the bathrooms, while a maverick went against the status quo by bursting through the exit doors and freeing himself from Scantron sheets (hopefully) forever.

That maverick was me.

“Stop, put your pencils down and close your test booklet.”

Fortunately, my seat was one and a half steps away from the door. I got up, left my test and pencils on my desk where they were, and walked out of the classroom before Ms. Monotone Robot Proctor finished the rest of her scripted instructions.

She stopped mid-sentence when I left and said “Sir!” as I opened the classroom door, like she had a chance of stopping me from escaping this redux version of a high school nightmare. I could hear the uncomfortable silence from the classroom as I walked down the hallway and exited the building through the main stairwell.

It was one of the most blatantly rude things I’ve ever done, and I’m sure those kids had no idea what the fuck was going on. Whatever, though. When you’ve had enough, you’ve had enough.

And let me tell you, I had CERTAINLY had enough.

—

After a few weeks went by, there were still no scores in the mail.

I had assumed my scores were canceled because I left the test early. I had also assumed the College Board would contact me in that case, explaining how my scores were canceled due to early withdrawal.

But then it dawned on me the College Board wouldn’t do anything helpful unless they made a profit out of it.

But I will admit I fucked up. I forgot that the Internet exists, and within such a beautiful creation exists the login info I begged the College Board to give me. I received my scores in the mail back in 2009, but mail is stupid now and hangs in museums.

Anyway, here are my scores, for what it’s worth (hint: not a lot):

Turns out I’m not that good at reading after all.

Seriously though, fuck Adrian Peterson.