One of my absolute most precious resources (besides money and motivation) is sleep. Where as most normal people my age have the motivation to get a job to earn money, I choose to sleep. While others are toiling away at their minimum wage slave pits, I power nap for up to five hours in the afternoon. Why the need for all this seemingly extra sleep? Mostly because I'm staying up too late at night (like now, for instance). But the only reason why I stay up late at night is because I'm sleeping so much in the afternoon...which may be why I can't get to sleep at night...and then have to sleep so much in the afternoon...(thus concludes my definition of circular insanity).

So you can imagine my displeasure when I had to get up early on a Saturday morning to drive to West Hartford (because people like me lack the motivation to sign up for it on time and thus have to drive half-way across the state to get one of the last few openings) to take three SAT II subject tests. What is the SAT II? Think of it as the poorly thought-out under-budgeted sequel to the SAT's. If you're freaking out right now because you've never heard of them and wonder if you need them for college, relax - most schools are not crazy enough to require them. Of course, if you're like me and want to at least put up the pretense of trying to get into UCLA (along with 43,000 other people each year), a school which does require three SAT II subject tests, then you're screwed.

The problems started with just getting there. To me, the I-84 highway is the I-84 highway, and nothing more. So of course it didn't really matter to me that there was an I-84 East and an I-84 West...or at least it didn't until I realized that I was going seventy miles per hour in the wrong direction. Thus began the process of getting off the highway, getting back on, finding the correct exit, and then trying to find the street that Hall High School (the testing center) was on. Suffice to say that I pulled some driving menuvers that, while they might not have been necessarily illegal, they certainly weren't kosher. By some grace of Buddha, I was only five minutes late and still able to take the test.

Each SAT II subject test is sixty minutes long and is anywhere from sixty to ninety-five multiple-choice questions. I took the ones for English literature, U.S. history, and world history. There was a five minute break between tests one and two and a one minute break between tests two and three (let me reiterate that for emphasis: there was a total of six minutes of breaks for three hours of testing). English literature wasn't so bad, except for the olde English poems that I had to interpret in every way possible - and believe me, it quickly became apparent that the eight months I had spent in a piece of crap English class interpreting poems had been absolutely worthless. The U.S. history test wasn't so bad either besides a few questions that dealt with obscure events that neither of my U.S. history teachers ever deemed important enough to tell me.

And then there was the world history test. Oh sweet Buddha.

The first problem of course was that half the questions dealt with the history of Africa (Great Zimbabwe and other city-states, the Zulu, etc.) and China, and another quarter dealt with the history of India, all of which are never taught at any point in the Terryville public school system curriculum. I didn't have as much of a problem with this because after having realized how horrible the schools are here (around sixth grade) I stopped paying attention and became by-and-large self-educated. But I was a little annoyed that there wasn't anyone at any point in the time leading up to this test that bothered to mention that my crappy school system curriculum would not provide enough knowledge to do well on this thing, and that I had better know everything else on my own. Just to top things off, another quarter of the questions were about the Arabs and various Mohammad/Islam/Caliphate/Ottomon Empire type stuff, which I hadn't gone over in school since seventh grade. Also it was the last test I took, so my mind was already pretty fried by then. Oh, and you know how I mentioned that there might be up to ninety-five questions? Yeah, this was one of them. By some grace of Buddha (for the second time that day) it was the only test that I finished and answered all the questions for.

After finishing all the tests I was released, only to have trouble finding my way out of the school and then find where I parked. And it just so happened that there was a massive festival of some kind in downtown West Hartford that day, making traffic slow from a healthy thirty to forty miles per hour to a distinctly cancerous five. For a minute it made me think of New York, but then I noticed that there were people crossing the street while the light was green which would never happen in Manhattan because there'd be nothing but bodies all over the road if people actually tried that. Still, all things considered, I got home around one in the afternoon, right about the time that normal people taking the normal SAT's were getting out of testing. I noticed that I felt a certain sense of accomplishment from doing something on a Saturday as opposed to most days where I sleep excessively and don't feel anything.

And on my way home I noticed that there were clouds of dandelion seeds all over the place as I was driving through Terryville...and if you looked at them in my tired and battered state-of-mind, they almost looked like snowflakes...a kind of peaceful blizzard of summer.