When will the hurting stop?

The guard at the door made me turn my front pockets inside out. He then had me turn around and said in his coarse blase voice, "now the back pockets." I was at a loss as to how I was supposed to turn my butt pockets inside out. I settled instead for stuffing my hands into each pouch and molesting my own butt cheeks to prove the pockets were empty. I thought my performance deserved at least a 20 dollar tip, but he was no bachelorette party and I doubted a desk jockey like him would carry anything bigger than a five anyway.

After proving I was contraband free, he led me into a sound-proof room with soul-sucking fluorescent lights, and sat me down at my station. Big brother looked down at me from a series of cameras hovering over each station. They broadcast to a bank of monitors at the guard's desk, where I'm sure he looked on like the albino from Princess Bride delighting in every year extracted from my life by "the machine." Where was Andre the Giant and the jerry-curled swordsman when you needed them?....To my knowledge, the former is 6-feet under (but laid horizontally, not vertically; otherwise his head and torso would be sticking out of the plot) and the latter got typecasted and now appears as the omnipresent swashbuckler on bottles of spiced rum. But I digress...

I clicked start on the computer screen, and the game of torture known only as the GRE began. For those that don't know, GRE stands for Generating Responses of Excruciation. It's more like a psychological experiment testing my ability to endure pain for 3 hours than it is an aptitude exam. The GRE (pronounced "gree," short for "grief") comes in the form of a computer adaptive test that adapts to my every move. It's like a Darwinian bird and I'm the environment, and unfortunately, the environment always gets shitted on.

The problem is that the GRE does not function like normal evaluators in our society, utilizing positive enforcement for accomplishing goals and strong performance. It does not give gold stars for sharing my toys or smelly stickers for raising my hand before talking. Instead of high fiving me, The GRE rewards correct answers by sweeping my leg with harder questions! That's like a firefighter that saves a cat from a tree and gets rewarded by being thrown into a lion pit with a bread knife and a half can of spam. It's like winning the 100 meter dash at the olympics, and instead of gold, you get your left leg chopped off and then forced to run the New York City marathon. Abu Ghraib, eat your heart out...too soon?

I frantically clicked away as my body sunk lower into my chair with each passing question. Several times during the test I looked up at the cameras and gave the guard the finger. My brain was getting bruised worse than Kanye's ego at the hands of POTUS B-HO. Images of mushroom clouds erupted in my mind over and over and over. After nearly three hours, it was finished...or so I thought. The GRE decided to throw an extra 30 minute section of "experimental" questions at me. It was the encore to the show that no one asked for. A second helping of Aunt Tom's wild meat surprise while you're still trying to hold down the first serving. But I endured.

At the end of it all, I was slumped over the side of my chair, drenched in my own sweat and other anonymous wastes, my mouth agape and begging in dry whispers for water and/or my mother. A pair of burly men in white lab coats came and dragged me away. I think one of them stole my wallet and flicked me in my teeth. When I came to, I found myself in a barren field half naked (I'll let your imagination decide which half...left or right). I crawled to the side of a lonely road where I stuck out my thumb with a cracked nail. A weathered Chevy pickup pulled over beside me.

The driver leaned out the passenger window and asked, "Where ya headed?"

"Grad school," I replied.

"I see. That explains why you look like shit. The GRE..."

I climbed in and we drove off into the horizon.