Blogspot, factory of human chorionic gonadotropin.

In the week leading up to SATs, I was nervous--so much so that I had spent several hours a day compulsively doing yardwork. In retrospect, working with sharp tools under duress seems a damn fool idea. In my family, the prospect of failing at a standardized test undermines one's reason for life. It would call for a ritual suicide only made messier with the gas-powered chainsaw we used to clear the wall of bramble bordering our property. What a gory suburban scene that would have been: a chestnut sapling, sprouting from freshly mown grass, splotched with an elegant arc of clotting blood--and bits of shattered bone distributed like bacon bits on a salad.

Three years later, I am once again worried about standardized testing--this time, the MCATs. They are this Saturday. It's unusual for me to wait so long to start freaking out, but I guess it's no surprise that procrastination has finally extended its spindly fingers this far.

Recently I had a nightmare where I was taking the Physics portion of the exam. Halfway through, I discovered that the problems had nothing to do with electrostatics or whatever and actually tested one's skill in cake decoration. In the end, my creation, a torte covered in pink icing topped with a single cookie seashell, garnered me a combined score of zero. When I awoke, I jumped from a desire to laugh to a desire to cry with the regularity of an AC current.

Wish me luck. If I don't return to New York, they're probably scraping my intestines off my boss's windshield after my ill-fated compulsive attempts to wash moving vehicles.