I lived Chapter 25, or I served as an AP exam reader

I have a new deeply felt appreciation for the term “mind-numbing boredom.”

About six months ago, I received word that my application to be an AP exam reader had been accepted, and I shortly thereafter booked my flight and hotel for the weeklong reading in Louisville, Kentucky. Then a few weeks ago, as my school year came to an end and before the ink on the diplomas was even dry, I was on a plane to Louisville.

We began at precisely 0800h in an enormous conference room subdivided into three separate reading rooms. Each reading room went through an extensive calibration process: reviewing the essay rubrics, reading and discussing sample essays, reading and discussing more sample essays until all 3000 readers were on the same page, so to speak, capable of giving an accurate score to each essay they would read. Ready for the task of scoring some 440,000 exams.

Approximately forty tables filled each reading room. Five rows of eight tables each. Eight readers and a Table Leader at each table. Several number two pencils and a College Board-approved eraser at each reader’s spot. Three or four candy dishes in the middle of each table filled with M&M’s or Starbursts or Red Vine Licorice. The Question Leader sat alone at a table on an elevated platform at the front of the room.  No clocks anywhere in the entire room.

E– turned a page. A– raised her folder in the air to get the attention of a aide to bring her a new folder. V– stood to stretch her legs while opening a new test booklet. I bubbled in a score. A– reader at another table coughed loudly.  A yawn proceeds across one row by unconscious influence.  T– flagged a booklet with a sticky note for the Table Leader to double check. F– turned a page. E– turned a page. A– grabbed a handful of M&M’s from the bowl in the middle of the table. F– sniffed loudly, attempting to clear her plugged sinuses. T– turned a page. V– bubbled in a score. I turned a page. The Table Leader brought a booklet back to T– to discuss the essay in question.  Ambient room temperature 62° F. F– put on her sweater and zipped it all the way up.  A– turned a page. V– sat back down.  Most sit up straight but lean forward at the waist, which reduces neck fatigue.  A scooting chair echoed through the room.

The Question Leader sounded his duck call to get our attention. “Good work. Enjoy your break. Be back in 15 minutes.”

Long lines formed at the coffee stations and at the restrooms.

The duck call summoned everybody back to the table to work. T– turned a page. F– turned a page. E– reached down for her water bottle on the floor.  The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. V– turned a page. I raised my folder in the air to trade with an aide for a new one. V– cleared her throat.  Some with their chin in their hand.  A– turned a page. T– bubbled in a score. E– turned a page. A sneeze could be heard from some far corner of the room. F– raised her folder.  Exterior temperature/humidity 96°/74%.  The Table Leader took an essay booklet to the Question Leader for a second opinion. F– turned a page. I bubbled in a score.

Every love story is a ghost story.

Seven days, eight hours each day. A fifteen minute break in the morning. An hour for lunch. Another fifteen minute break in the afternoon. Fifty-six hours of reading and scoring essays. Some 900+ essays were placed in front of me.

Nearly eight hours in the air and over two hours of layovers to get home. Screaming children on the plane with over-indulging parents. Congested freeways made the drive home longer than it should have been.

And I eagerly await for my invitation to return next year.

The Pale King – Chapter 2

Dear Dave,

“The flight took fifty minutes and seemed much longer.  There was nothing to do and nothing would hold still in his head in all the confined noise and after the nuts were gone there was nothing for Sylvanshine to do to occupy his mind…” (page 6).  That first sentence describes exactly how I felt in reading chapter 2.  It probably took me just under an hour to get through it, but it felt so much longer as I bounced along inside the turbulence of Claude Sylvanshine’s muddled mind.  Like Sylvanshine, I would look up from the text at some distraction, then have to search the page for my lost place, often rereading the same couple of sentences several times as I regained my bearings.

The chapter seemed a big incoherent mess until I realized you simply provided us a transcript of Sylvanshine’s thoughts as he travels the last leg to Peoria to sit for his CPA exam.  His observations of the interior of the plane mix with his observations out the rain-laced window mix with his memories of the Rome REC debacle of 1982 mix with his trying to remember equations and information that will be on the CPA exam that awaits him.  His line of thinking is a tangled, knotted mess, a reflection of the rest of his life.

Claude Sylvanshine is the very embodiment of a person running on the “default setting,” a “slave to the terrible master” which is his mind, a person with a “tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside [his] head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of [him], paying attention to what is going on inside [him]” (This is Water).  He is what you warned the 2005 graduates of Kenyon College they would become if they did not break free from their default setting and exercise the conscientious ability to choose how to view and interpret one’s surroundings that brings real freedom.

This short plane ride is a microcosm of his entire life.  He has been studying[1] for his third attempt at the CPA exam for three and a half years, something that his roommate, Reynolds, was able to do with little trouble in a much less time.  He finds himself distracted by the claw-like hands of the woman sitting next to him or by the pimples on the back of the pilot’s neck.  He even worries about whether worrying about the exam will cause him too much stress, and therefore sabotage his attempt that the exam.  He has tried various anti-stress coping mechanisms to overcome this anxiety, but he can’t even seem to do those right.

The entropy that is his life seems to reach its climax in the last sentence[2] of the story in which he is rendered nearly catatonic with worry about how exactly he will get to the testing location and whether he packed his alarm clock or not.  He is frozen on the tarmac, unable to move, all but sealing his disastrous fate.  He is, in your words from the Kenyon speech, “totally hosed.”

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[1] “Studying” might be too strong a word here.  He has been worrying about the exam and trying to get himself organized so that he can prepare to study for the exam, but it seems that he does very little actual studying for the exam.

[2] A sentence that goes on for nearly three pages, mind you.

A New Endeavor: Supposedly Fun Things…

It started as a fleeting thought as I walked through the turnstile of the Magic Kingdom at about 11:30 pm.  What would Dave make of all this?

My wife and I were chaperons for my school’s trip to Grad Nite, an annual all-night party for the year’s graduating seniors.  Eighteen-year-olds from all over Southern California flock there for a night of fun and frivolity to celebrate their commencement and new-found freedom.

As we fought our way through the crowds and onto Main Street, I was reminded of scenes from some of Dave’s travel essays: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All,” “Consider the Lobster,” to name a few.  The ironies, the absurdities, the things young people do in the name of a good time.  The contexts and details were different, but what I witnessed of my fellow man that evening couldn’t have been that far from what he witnessed and documented years ago.

On a whim, I wrote a brief email to my fellow Fantods on Wallace-l to share these thoughts.  Replies came from those who had shared my experience as Grad Nite chaperons, as well as from those who had witnessed other local fares and festivities and wondered the same thing.  What would Dave have to say about all this?

The discussion grew and evolved, and at one point someone threw out the idea of starting a group blog through which we could explore the ironies and foibles of the human condition through our own creative non-fiction.  George, a long-time participant on the Wallace-l discussion board, sent out an email soliciting participation in a group blog, desiring to make the casual comment into a reality.  I replied, offering to not only contribute essays to the blog but also to help manage the blog.  After some back-and-forth about the logistics, the idea became real.

Supposedly Fun Things… is an outlet for writers to attempt to view the world around them and articulate their observations in a way that aspires to DFW’s style and methods.  We are not copycats or imitators, but rather we allow ourselves to be influenced by his writing and the aspects that make it unique.

So while I continue the Letters project, I will also help in facilitating Supposedly Fun Things… (the name taken from the title of Dave’s essay about a week-long Caribbean cruise).  I invite you to read what others have already shared with us, and if you are so daring, to contribute some work of your own.  However you participate, I know you’re in for a treat.

Join us at Supposedly Fun Things…