I have maintained a daily written output of one thousand one hundred words per day and emerged a poorer writer in the past month. Since Feb, that cumulative counters ticks into the high fifty thousands.
These are drills for the GRE, which looms in three weeks. And they have slashed my creative sensibilities into tatters.
The Graduate Records Examination, if you don’t already have the misfortune of knowing, is cynicism incarnate. It is a four-hour morass of middle school maths and English that ostensibly sort one’s worthiness for graduate school across a distribution of test scores, against all evidence to is unreliableness.
One’s ability to contribute meaningfully to a field, the GRE purports, can be predicted by how nimbly one answers maths questions about integer properties and inscribed angles and interpret prolix prose about recondite topics without snorting at the irony and decipher highfalutin sentences written in supercilious language that will get you punched in the face and consigned to Grammarly hell.
And the writing section. Oh, the writing section. 30 minutes to opine in 500+ words, on something like the following:
“Laws should be flexible enough to take account of various circumstances, times, and places.”
Agree or disagree. Discuss.
Oh, for the love of Montaigne, for the death of nuance, what the actual fuck.
The writing bit particularly irks me so. These are some profoundly entertaining topics to write about, free reign permitting. It’s like being offered the chance to *** the most alluring, bewitching, tantalizing guy or gal, but only for a pitiful tick of designated time, at a required rhythm, on a metallic slab, with shackled limbs… —also, no foreplay.
And so, I am to be a robot. A robot I have become.
***
Going back to school in your 30s is hard, folks. A year and a half later, and I can’t even see the door yet. If you make the mistake of advertising your intentions (because, goal setting, holding yourself accountable with the prospect of public humiliation, and all that), people will assume you must be a failure.
At least in this country. Here milestones are less of a guideline and more the loops of the hangmen’s rope on which your shame will be pilloried. A man, in his 30s, unwed, unaccomplished, unladen with bounty, unremarkable and unbecoming, who wants to go back to school instead of rectifying his failures… Oh my, what indignity you must bring to your forebears?
I don’t think my forebears care about me that much, aunties. And I’m not going to have any after-bears either. All chronological bears have been erased from my line.
This, too is a tax on dreams. But to call what I’m doing a pursuit of dreams is perhaps a little infantile. I need a reprieve from the world. I want a year to ask dumb questions about my work and answer them. For all the pennies I have saved, I would like to buy some time to indulge in a little untrammelled curiosity. Because I never had the chance to do just that – learn and be curious. You’re supposed to do that in university, but I was busy trying to shuffle off this mortal coil. The time reserved for the young to live, I squandered in dying.
On a serious note, I have reached an impasse at work. Were I to advance any further in the field of education, I must return to the fundamentals, lest I continue advancing, a stagnant fraud, like many others I’ve worked for. If it means sitting in a classroom with 21-year-olds feeling sensitive about pronouns, so be it. If I must suffer the inanity of a test to earn my ticket, so be it.
There’s still a bit of idealism left in me yet.
#00117F 