Copyright © 2005 by Blake Charlton. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, reposting, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission of the author.
Something else, ANYTHING else, other than wait and fret.
I did my share of semi-paralyzed handwringing. But after a few weeks, I was ready to explode with worry. Most writer-types start on a second book. This is a great idea. But I decided to take the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).
Don't get me wrong, I want to write until the day I turn cold and die. But I also want to physically and immediately help those who have struggled with disabilities. So far teaching has allowed me to do this, and I hope medicine will up the ante a bit and throw in a generous dose of hard-core science, something the dork in me has been missing since college.
So anyway, back to the MCAT. If you were/are/know a premed you'll be familiar with this ordeal. It's an eight hour test for the normos, and so for a double time weirdo like me it's a sixteen hour test. Covers everything you'd never want to cover: physics, chemistry, SAT-like critical reading passages with just plain strange questions, two essays on social science stuff, biology, physiology, and organic chemistry. I started studying about four months before hand, putting in twenty hours a week, more when my schedule allowed.
At the time, my writing and teaching friends were a taken aback by my sudden foray into pre-medness. "What's it like to go back to that stuff after three year off?" was the most often asked question. And it's a wonderful question, one that calls out for a colorful similarly.
I can't resist.
It was like…I mean it was like….walking into your public library, checking out five or six books written by authors with obsessive-compulsive thoughts about electrons and/or pyruvate, opening said books on a secluded library table, and then repeatedly and violently slamming one's face into the pages of said books with enough force to crack incisors, fracture nasal bone, and separate the cornea from the rest of the eyeball.
I remember sitting down for my second class at a MCAT prep course. The teacher posed the question "What does the MCAT measure?" and then went around the room, making each student answer. I was to be last, and I could tell that the best answers would all be taken by the time my turn was up--"Problem solving" was the first offered, then "knowledge of biology", "innate intelligence", "critical reading", "problem solving", "understanding the scientific process". Then the dude points to me.
I say "masochism".
I think he was going for a "the MCAT only measures how well you take the MCAT, so it's not worth staking your entire identity on one puny test score", which is a true and noble statement. Probably I shouldn't have messed with his lesson. I hate it when students do that to me.
So I took the test at the end of the summer and then discovered that what with all the novel writing and test taking I had, once again, run out of money (surprise, surprise). So for the autumn it was on to another flurry gainful employment. Now, at the time of writing this blog (i.e. late December 05), I'm coming to the end of said responsibility binge. Now that I've saved up enough to be a financial non-disaster I'm ready to cut loose of the teaching / gutter cleaning / airport taxi gigs and write another novel.
Won't mom and dad be thrilled to hear it?