To Fight the Unbeatable Foe

"Never say that you have reached the very end
When leaden skies a bitter future may portend"
- from the song of the Warsaw Ghetto Martyrs

So I ordered a bunch of GRE books from Amazon and you're not done yet, because I MAY go to graduate school and so I figured I'd find out more about the test whose ass I will ultimately kick. One of the books was a Kaplan GRE "math refresher" book and I was just browsing it on the subway hoping someone would ask me what I was reading or where I was going to school and as I'm looking at the shit in there I realize there is no way I will pass this test. Um, have you SEEN the math they put on there? Everyone says that it's high school level easy math but I have news for you, high school math is easy only if you are a math JEANIUS, and the GRE math reminded me of this supposedly "gut" course at college "Knots and Ropes" that was the math class for football players that was actually impossible being that you had to calculate "vectors" and other things, and I dropped that shit ASAP. Look, the entire POINT of graduating high school is that you never have to do math again or be tormented by jerks who better regret it now or else, and I have not come this far in life to spend my time doing equations.

Here is an example of the kind of astrophysics they are putting on the GRE. There was a practice question on what would the tip be on a $18 check if you want to leave a tip of 15%. How am I supposed to answer this if a) I don't have my cell phone EZ Tip calculator with me and b) I never pay for my own meals? Are they really trying to judge how amazing I will be in graduate school based on isosceles triangles? And how I can calculate the interest on something when the interest is always zero because it's 100% boring.

This test is VERY biased because last time I checked people are supposed to get their dads to do this stuff or get their boyfriends to take care of this shit and I believe that is the entire point in having those people around. They say it tests your analytical and quantitative skills, but I am VERY good at analyzing things (see supra, this entire blog) and I know for a fact that more riches are better than less riches but somehow those are not the analytical and quantitative skills they are testing, they are just testing math. This reminds me of the time when I was like 12 when my mom was paying me allowance and had a bunch of coins on the table and she asked me to choose the one I wanted, the golden penny or the small silver dime and I obviously said the penny because it was bigger and who wouldn't want gold and my mom said "are you sure?" and I said "yes I'm sure, everyone knows gold is better than silver" and she could not argue with this airtight logic.