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While watching an Aussie footy game last week, I saw a commercial for The Ring Two that said in 2002, The Ring was “the one that started it all.” Started what all exactly?? People going to see The Ring? Hard to argue with that I guess…

Is there anything more frustrating that an 0-11 slump at the plate? I think not. In fact, I have twice as many stolen bases as I do runs scored this season. And my runs scored total is higher than my hits total. Ouch. At least I can still catch the ball with blinding brilliance.

And finally, now that it is May, the “Four Essays That I Don’t Give A Shit About” countdown has officially begun. Starting around May 10th and lasting until the 20th (I actually have no idea about those dates. I might want to investigate that a little more in depth), I have four essays due in four different classes. But seeing as how I don’t care about them and want to have a little fun with them, I am going to pull what my friends and I call a Psych AP. What is that, you ask?

During my senior year of high school, one of the AP courses I took was Psychology. It was one of the fairly newer AP courses offered and because of that, my high school had yet to adequately filled the teaching position. So, when my classmates and I discovered that we were being taught by someone who had recently graduated with an Interior Designing Degree, I tossed all aspects of being studious outside the proverbial window. Why study and pay attention in class when our teacher was simply reading out of the book to us? I could do that on my own time, and so I dedicated the semester to having fun in the class.

As exam time quickly approached, my teacher openly wondered aloud how I would pass the exam. My test grades consisted of low Bs from which I managed to pull off simply by reading through the chapters 30 minutes before the test, which meant that I was retaining absolutely nothing in my memory bank beyond two hours. But I was not worried, for I was confidant in my abilities to not only wing through something I didn’t care about, but to wing thought it with style. Goob Style.

The day of the AP exam finally had arrived in mid-May and as we filed into the library, I sat down at my alphabetically assigned seat next to my good buddy Fellner and began chatting with him. My lore for having done just an hour of studying was known far and wide by this point and we discussed how in the world I thought I’d be able to pass this baby. I wasn’t worried about the multiple choice section since I knew I could pull that off somehow, but instead it was the essay section where my qualms lied. It was broken down into two essays, with each essay having two possible questions to choose from. It was pure luck of the draw in this section and the house had the advantage.

At the mid-way point, we received a few minutes break while the multiple choice portion was collected and the essays were distributed. I whispered over to Fellner in the next cubicle that now was the time of reckoning as we were about to find out what kind of essays we had to choose from. As the teachers told us to begin, Fellner chuckled and wished me luck as we both tore open our packets.

I scanned over the first two questions and distinctly remember thinking “……………Oh shit.” Deciding that I might have to bullshit the first essay, I decided to skip ahead to the second essay and try to answer that one first. I flipped a few pages, found the next set of questions, and again distinctly remember thinking “Wait….I thought Pavlov was the dog’s name! You mean he was the psychologist? Then what was the dog’s name?!” Apparently, Lady Luck was not smiling down on me that day.

So, seeing as how I had an hour and a half of mandatory silence to write two essays I didn’t even understand the questions to, I did the natural solution. I started whispering to Fellner about how fucked I was. Of course, this didn’t help his predicament any because he was actually trying to answer his questions, but it made me feel better, if only for a few minutes. But I soon found myself not only extremely bored, but receiving the evil eye from the teachers who saw me talking and not writing, which is when I arrived at my glorious decision. I’d just start writing. Not about the questions or even psychology, but about whatever came to mind. And for the next hour and twenty minutes, I wrote more babble than I ever have in my entire life.

I wrote about how retarded my psychology teacher was, about how fun my classmates were since they enjoyed my goofiness, and about how I wanted to know the name of Pavlov’s dog. I wrote about my top five favorite Simpsons episodes and about how Fellner was stifling his giggles over the fact that I was writing about the Simpsons on a Psychology AP exam. I wrote every single funny knock-knock joke that I know (all three of them!) and about how the Mariners were off to a hot start that April (This was in 2001, the year they would go on to win 116 games.) In fact, I filled page after page of random nonsense, right up until the point where the teacher pulled the paper out from under my pen. I’ll never forget the last few sentences I wrote, because I described how the bell had just rung, how the teachers were telling us to stop writing no matter what, how I was being yelled at because I was still writing about how I wasn’t supposed to be writing, and how a teacher started marching over to me to take my essay away from me. The last sentence was something along the lines of “Oh no, here she comes! Damnit, okay, I have to go, but remember, if you didn’t laugh at least once during this essay, your soul is dead! Oh shit, here she is! Nooooooo,” which was followed by a pen streak running all the way down the page since I refused to lift my pen as she pulled the essay away from me.

Needless to say, my friends and I had a great laugh for the next few months about how I had treated the exam. A few people didn’t believe me, but I had Fellner as my witness since I had continually kept giving him a hushed play-by-play as I wrote my babble. In fact, I would to this day give anything to be able to read that essay again. It might be some of the best coherent, balls-to-the-wall writing I have ever compiled. If only there was a way to get my hand on it…

Anyway, I went ahead and made plans to take Psychology during my second semester in college since I had no chance of passing the AP exam. I had taken a few other AP courses that year, and so when the results became available in July, I phoned in to see what I had made. The grading scale was on a system of 1 to 5. Five was perfect, four was good stuff, three was adequate, two and one were failing. So you can imagine my surprise when I heard

…blah, blah, blah…Psychology. Three. Blah, blah, blah…

Wait a minute. Did she just say I made a three? A THREE? I PASSED? WHAT????? To this day, I still have no idea how I passed. I like to think it was because I made the person reading over my essay smile and laugh. I like to think that my essay broke up his monotonous day of reading pointless after pointless essay about emotional development and children’s stress limits and guys named Pavlov who in the great realm of things were talking out of their asses. I like to think that it was my pure randomness and goofiness that let my grader say, “Oh fuck it, I’ll give this kid a three!”

And this, my friends, is pulling a Psych AP. I don’t plan on spending days in the library doing research for a topic I care little to nothing about. I want to have fun with these essays. I want one of the essays to contain “Flanders Sucks!” in each paragraph and also contain the phrase “groin-grabbingly delicious”, a la Homer when he becomes a food critic. I want one essay to contain a scanned drawing of one of the pictures my little sister has drawn me. And of course, I want to have enough facts in my essays to make sure I pass, which shouldn’t be hard enough given that all I need is a 50.

The melding of fun and facts should be an interesting venture. I’m actually kind of looking forward to it.