Listen up, kiddies, because this is going to be the nicest damn thing you hear from Sherman Ave for the next three years.
You’re going to rock your finals. Because we said so.
Remember the first house centipede you found on your wall freshman year? You captured it live in the free purple plastic Northwestern cup with the weird straw, dropped it in the toilet, watched its disgruntlement as it flailingly realized its own mortality, and showered urine and verbal profanity on it before flushing. That centipede was a mild and euphemistic foreshadowing of what is going to happen to your finals this week.
Many previous students have been defeated by your finals. The battlefield of blue books is littered with the smudgy erasers and good-for-nothing quarter-inch-long broken mechanical pencil lead refills of Wildcats who just didn’t have the strength to endure.
You are not one of those Wildcats.
That final has final-ly met its match. When you go in to take that test, your pencil will glide over the essay portion as if you were writing in cursive, but you’re not because your third-grade teacher lied to you when she said you’d have to use cursive for the rest of your life,* but it’s okay because you have the neatest printing and the clearest and most beautiful thesis your TA has ever seen. And when other students puzzle over whether the correct answer is B or C you will breeze over the bubble with the grace of Mila Kunis in a bikini. Not that Mila Kunis is more or less graceful in a bikini, it’s just a nice image.
And you’re not going to bubble your name in until you’re finished, so that as you repeatedly drive your pencil through the pale dead paper, the final will wonder, enraged, What is going on? and the burning ignorance of its conqueror’s identity will add insult to injury-- like being cyberbullied or groped by a man in a ski mask-- and then you’ll write your name on it and the final will say Oh.
The final will say, Of course; I should have expected my eventual defeat from such a handsome and intelligent Sherman Ave reader. And the final will use a semicolon when it says that, because it’s a pretentious fuck.
So go forth, Wildcats. Collect the carcasses of your finals the way Vlad the Impaler collected rotting corpses, the way Sir Edward Twattingworth collects his boogers, the way Whole Foods collects your paycheck. By the time you’re done with them, your finals will be a crumpled mess of tears, vomit, sweat, blood, snot, and every other bodily fluid you can think of excepting vaginal fluid and semen, because those generally indicate pleasure rather than pain.
Good luck this week, kittens. We believe in you. Always remember:
"The heinous behind us and the heinous before us are tiny matters compared to the heinous within us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love,
Ellie
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*She also did silly accents when she read the class Roald Dahl’s BFG, and she set you up on a playdate with a girl who’s your best friend to this day, so you’ll have to let the cursive thing slide.
