A Bit Reminiscent

          Just taking a little stroll down memory lane (My Documents) and found this little gem I wrote after all the stress of applying to graduate school and not knowing what the hell I wanted to do with my life.  Hopefully it resonates.

 

QUANTITATIVE REASONING: 35 MINUTES

            You have reached the quantitative reasoning section of the GRE.  Congratulations.  You may not look back at previous tests once this portion has started, so too fucking bad if you’re still stuck on the question about the contrasting arguments in the passage about the Navajo Indian remains found in New Mexico, on which you just spent 7 minutes ruminating, and too fucking bad if you missed the definition of ‘ruminating.’ In this portion of the exam, we will ask questions that involve letters, numbers, pictures, functions, formulas and charts, probably some of which you have never seen, and we will give you an absurdly limited amount of time to finish them.  We have designed quantitative reasoning to allow left-brained, logic-zealots to look like glistening thoroughbreds in the race to graduate school, grabbing the attention of Ivy League suitors who are willing to bet on the favorites.  For those of you who are right-brained and have a nauseous aversion to logic and reasoning and would rather spend hours with charcoal and easel or pen and paper or camera and film, this section will parade your weaknesses like a Pekingese in the Preakness.  And don’t get your hopes up that everything will ‘just click’ when you see the test material.  This is not Good Will Hunting.  And you are not Matt Damon.

            There are a total of 20 questions and 35 minutes for this portion of the test.  Don’t try to calculate how to pace yourself now; we know it’ll take all the energy you can muster to figure out the conundrums beyond this page.  We hope that 500-something page book you bought over the summer works to your advantage, even if you completed (and by completed, we mean skimmed) 4 out of 9 of the practice sections and retained none of the lessons that the book offered.  Surely, you remember some material from high school math classes, because despite your groans of, “I will never use this is real life,” your teachers hammered it into you how important trigonometry and pre-calculus become in your daily life, and you believed them, because who ever questions a high school math teacher?  We understand that it was your choice to slack on GRE prep, because you were so busy chasing after three children, because if you’re going to attend graduate school, you must have some way to pay for it, preferably a full-time job that involves no paper trail.  Your choices were drug cartel or summer nanny.  You chose wisely and we applaud your judgment, but we regret to inform you that you will not receive any points for that on the GRE.  Please remain seated for the duration of the test and keep fidgeting to a minimum.  Our monitors really don’t want to come out from behind the glass window and tell you to stop adjusting your ponytail and distracting the other test takers.  Relax; this is only one of the make-it or break-it factors for graduate school.

            Pressure is measured by the equation PV = nRT; pressure multiplied by volume equals amount of substance multiplied by the constant (8.3145 J/mol K) multiplied by the temperature.  Meaghan, Kathleen, and Jessica are all sisters.  Meaghan and Kathleen both completed their undergraduate study at a small, private, liberal arts college in Memphis, TN.  Both pursued law degrees at prestigious, top-25-schools-of-law in the nation.  They received the same LSAT score, which ranked them in the 98^th percentile for all LSAT takers that year.  Surely, they would have received near perfect scores on the GRE, as well.  No pressure.  Plump scholarship bundles allowed them to reduce the amount of the loans that they would inevitably pay back when both of them become partners at a firm and are making north of $250,000.  Jessica has never had the desire to be a lawyer or a doctor or anything with a practical function.  Jessica writes for enjoyment.  In the dead of night, she can’t stop the synapses that signal her right hand to pick up a pen or a keyboard or a phone and start writing, typing, recording messages of words that have fallen so deliberately and temporarily into place and beg to be remembered.  She realizes most writers shiver in the winter behind the paper-thin, smoke-stained walls of their “New! Refurbished! Great Neighborhood!” apartments and eat canned ravioli out of calcium-crusted bowls.  No pressure.  Graduate school no longer creeps up as an option, but butts in as a necessity.  If the volume of the disappointed sighs is at its loudest and if the room temperature constantly rises when the graduate school talk slips into conversation, then how many people counting on Jessica does it take for her to fold under the pressure?

Forty-one thousand, three hundred and fifty marbles are put into a bag labeled, 'GRADUATE SCHOOLS.'  As your hand shakes and your bowels clinch, you close your eyes and grab seven marbles, without replacement.  What is the probability that you will scrape by the application deadlines for all seven schools, and what are the odds that each will require a hokey, get-to-know-you essay (most likely, given your past ratio of luck to misfortune, all will have slightly variant prompts so you can't write the same thing seven times), wherein you use the canned, overwritten phrase that always comes to mind when you're asked to write about your future: "Since I can remember, I've always wanted to write"?  Because since you can remember, you’ve been filling up cheap Staples notebooks with wordy passages that flow seamlessly between pages and attempted screen plays you never had time or encouragement to finish and the occasional catharsis with raw, impulsive emotion behind all the “fuck”s and “shit”s and “what the hell am I doing?”s. Television writing became your dream before you even knew what television writing was.  When you were younger, MADtv would be dully playing in the background during dinner, and you’d catch hints of laughter every few moments and think to yourself, that will be my job.  These seven schools represent your chances to emulate what you experienced during your childhood, and perhaps make another starry-eyed six-year-old find her calling.  What fraction of those schools is looking for an acute little girl with exponential talent, but whose total sum is still unknown because she's crass and stubborn like her father, but overly sensitive like her mother, and can't find a way to balance either side of the equation?

            There are 3 points on a map: Boston University, Sacred Heart University, and Brooklyn College, labeled respectively, A, B and C.  If point A is 151.3 miles from point B, and point B is 68.1 miles from point C, when does it stop hurting that all hypothetical points revolve around a relationship that ended in a text, saying "I love you but," and you knew exactly what was coming, so instead of asking for a good 'but,' you just asked for a goodbye?   And as acceptance letters rolled in, you ached to revel in the fact that you're going to graduate school, but instead, you ached as you pictured the geometric shapes of his face, and the 90 degree angles of the walls in the apartment you'd planned to own, and the precise circumference of the coffee table in the living room that bled into the kitchen, but you’d already established that it was okay if your apartment was shitty and small, because all you'd need was one another.  Too much time playing with imaginary numbers, cubing them and squaring them and swearing at them until they would become real, piecing together the factors that would never exist except in an alternate reality.  So much emphasis on i and -i and not enough on the I that you started to become the negative I.  Focusing so much on the unknown variable that you forgot the formula.  And the structure.  And you stood at the board scratching your head wondering why your answers are always wrong.  If you are 21 years old, and put all you had into a six-year relationship, what percentage of your life did you waste living it for someone else?  Including birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s days, and Christmases, how much time and money did you put into a relationship that you and your therapist knew damn well was too one-sided to ever last?  At what point do you move on, despite the proximity of the cities? At what point will you be comfortable admitting that you are okay if your lives no longer intersect, and at what point would a hypothetical glance on the subway not make you fall to pieces?

            Two non-parallel lines with the midpoints of (NOW, -NOW) and (THEN, -THEN) on a plane intersect at a certain point.  If you know that NOW= (THEN + -THEN)(-NOW), then NOW = 0, and this is your clean slate, and the THENs cancel out because they don't matter anymore, and the -NOW multiplied by itself only leaves a positive integer, because in this realm, two negatives make a positive because you're pretty damn positive there's no room for negativity now.  Then, you couldn’t withstand the pressure.  You applied for the wrong reasons.  No one likes a conformist simply going through the motions, no matter how educated she is.  You had your dependent variables lined up as you checked off each one: 1. make something of yourself and make your parents proud; the disappointment in their eyes when you used the excuse “taking a year off” was enough to shame any daughter into racking up more student loans and a supplementary degree, because they knew (and you subconsciously knew, too) “a year off” would turn into “a few years off,” which would turn into “I’m comfortable with my bachelor’s degree.”  2. delay life; you wanted to slow things down and put off responsibility, even if you didn’t know what that responsibility would even be yet.  You were so uncertain of what you even wanted and you just knew it was too soon to pursue it without a graduate school buffer.  Now, you realize looking back that you were painfully attentive to all desires, except your own.  Appeasing the dependent variables, you were unable to establish the independent variable.  The variable that stands on its own.  The variable that is unaffected by outside forces.  The variable that says, this is what I want, and all of you can just sit on it.  You remember your first graduate school interview, and as soon as it was over, you burst into tears and called your mother, because it was at that point that you realized you were doing it for all the right reasons.  You knew who you were, and you knew what you wanted and where you were going and someone saw that in you.  You want experience, you want gain, you want day in and day out to be rooted in something you love. You will stand up and say I am passionate about me, and only me, and going off on this tangent will be a sine that you are not willing to cosine your life away with anyone else; the point at which these lines intersect can only be (FUTURE, FUTURE).