I think I'll take the GRE this summer. Still probably won't apply to grad school in December, though -- with the exception of creative writing, there's not really a subject I'm interested in studying in-depth right now (in an academic setting, anyway; I do enjoy philosophy, frex, but I've grown weary of academic pretension, even though I'm fairly good at affecting it). Maybe that'll change in the coming years (assuming I'm around for them, which seems highly unlikely), but in the meantime at least a good score on the GRE would bolster my self-esteem in the company of these hot-shot academic achievers. At least then I'll have something with which to nurse my intellectual pride when those people shun me for the company of "smarter" and more well-to-do individuals!

And now, a list of books/literature I've read in the past month and a half:

No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Carrie Pilby by Caren Lissner
In the Palm of Darkness by Mayra Montero
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Marco's Millions by William Sleator
The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy
What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson

I started reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe this morning. It's not bad so far! And hopefully I'll have a review of The White Bone up on Scary-Crayon either tonight or tomorrow night. Anyway, ja!

Okay, so I don't feel like such an idiot tonight. I went back, took a few more of those practice GRE tests, and kicked major ass. My few wrong answers, with the exception of straight guesses on analogies with words I didn't know, consisted of careless shit like me not paying attention to the question's directions or in fact not seeing the question at all because I somehow scrolled past it. And since, hopefully, the latter wouldn't happen during the test due to the pencil-and-paper format (though I recall having made a similar mistakes on a past test and having had to correct for the error by erasing and shifting all of my answers down one) and I'd be a little more attentive to the former difficulty during the actual exam, I think I'd do fairly well. (more...)

You know what I've been getting a lot of lately? Money-grubbing e-mails from Yale. It fucking pisses me off -- I can't even afford to move out of my mother's house, and here the school that got $140K out of dear old dad for four years of torment and murder/rape accusations and a degree that apparently isn't worth the paper on which it's printed has the audacity to ask me for money so that other undegraduates can have "the same great experience" that I had. And then they have the nerve to write, "Boola Boola!" in the subject line! What the fuck does that mean? Seriously.

I should fucking skin Handsome Dan alive.

Get it?

Also, the page now defaults directly to the main page -- no splash. Ja.

There's a lump in the center of my chest. It throbs slightly and slides up and down; it creeps into the base of my throat and then eases itself out again, as if whatever controls its motion is trying to decide whether it wants to see me vomit my heart out or not. Yes, it could be funny, but does the joke justify the mess? And the audience may not see the humor of it.

My gut feels icky; cold and hollow, but not entirely, as if the walls of it are coated with that slime that fills the gel-packs one freezes and stuffs in lunch boxes to keep orange juice cool. Outside, a squirrel darts across the driveway. No, a rabbit. I've never seen a squirrel that moved so fast or with such purpose with such a linear course. No pauses, no deviations -- a straight jet, almost as if the thing had been skewered and yanked across the concrete on a metal rod. (more...)