Satire

Satire. Now, before I begin, I’d like to touch on the word itself. As it happens, I never actually bothered to copy down the word in class the other day (who needs formal notes when you have intuition to guide you along assignments?). So when I finally got home to type this piece out, I had the darndest time actually spelling the word in the first place. Was it… Satir? Sauter? Satirize—no wait wait, that’s the verb… Maybe if I take the root noun, turn it into a verb, and then tack on a noun-suffix or four. Oh, oh, and a pair of those double-negative prefixes. You gotta have one of those. Anti… dis… satirizi… tarian… fication… ology… ism. The English language is really beautiful. Affix an extra suffix and you’ve got a noun. Two and you’ve got an adverb. Three and you’ve got raves about your extensive vocabulary.

So last week I was assigned to write an essay about antidissatirizitarianficationologyism. Imagine my shock when Webster’s said that there wasn’t such a word. Undaunted, I entered ‘antidissatirizitarianficationologyism’ into Microsoft Word, which it did find, and after 5213 degrees of separation, the thesaurus was able to find a synonym that the real dictionary also recognized as an actual word, that word being “satire.” Doesn’t quite have the same ring, I know, but it’ll have to do.

So last week I was assigned to write an essay about satire. Now, being your typical Westmoor AP student, I really hadn’t the faintest idea about what satire was. Look it up online you say? Let me tell you, trying to access hyperdictionary.com’s server with a slow modem would be a chore in excess of half of 15 hours, especially with all those broadbandeers (doubtless looking up last-minute vocabulary themselves) hogging all the bandwidth. And after slogging through 5212 synonyms of antidissatirizitarianficationologyism, you would have burned your Webster’s too. So, I was left with no recourse but my trusty intuition, which is inherently more intuitive than formal sources most of the time anyway. So that works out pretty nicely.

Satire… Must be one of those fancy compound words… Sat-ire… SAT-ire? Oh, woe is me; I had to take the nefarious SAT. I guess that’s pretty prevalent in today’s society. All around the school, it seems like everybody has it in for the SAT. You’ve got the students who whine over their unsatisfactory scores; paranoid liberal-art sorts who fear the conspiracy to brand students as numbers; the lazy folk who can’t be motivated on a Saturday morning to do any kind of work; and the zealot revolutionary types who just fight everything. On the other side of the desk, you’ve got the arch-nemesis teachers, and their constant class-time battle over standardized testing (and alternatively, the evil Sith Kaplan teachers, who have fallen to the Dark Side and now embrace standardized testing).

The SATs are actually not so hard of a test. The one and only key is preparation, preparation, preparation. You should start off by registering for the SAT. Most of the testing dates are on the first Saturday of every month, so think long and hard about which day you choose. Are you likely to have the flu during that cold March season? Maybe you’ll have contracted hay fever if you try for the June one. You could take it May, but then again you might be still reeling from the preceding AP test week. Or maybe May would be the perfect date to take the U.S. History subject test because all of the AP history trivia you memorized will still be fresh in your mind. Better make the right decision; pick the wrong session and that increased chance for test-day distraction could set you back to community college.

After you’ve lamented and agonized and finally registered for an SAT test date, it’s time to practice, practice, practice. Anxiously check online every hour to see if they’ve updated the “SAT Question of the Day” on the College Board website. Buy one of those SAT books and drill until you’ve got the order of the multiple choices memorized by heart. Your parents will have undoubtedly already signed you up for those free seminars at the local library, but don’t stop there. Beg and plead with your parents to drop down another thousand to take a real course from Kaplan or Princeton Review. Natural talent and work ethic help, sure, but sometimes you just need to buy your way to an extra 100 SAT points.

But hold on, you say? Doesn’t this give an unfair advantage to the students who are able to pay $1000 for SAT prep classes? Well yes, it does give an advantage (after all, the 100 point boost is a money-backed guarantee), but is it really an unfair one? Taking a test prep course only helps a student to succeed in getting into college—it’s not like it’s going to hurt another, poorer student’s SAT score. Besides, countless athletes pay for steroids to help them perform their sport duties (it’s called “taking one for the team”), and countless actresses pay for breast implants to help perform their acting duties. What’s wrong with students paying for test preparation courses to help them perform their testing duties? In sports, they don’t make exceptions for scrawny ballplayers, and in entertainment, they don’t make exceptions for girls with flat chests, so why should education give handicaps for impoverished families?

So-called “advantages” are inherent in society anyway, and to make the most of them is only the capitalist way. There are people who are born with large muscles, breasts, or brains, and when they use them to their advantage, no one accuses them of taking unfair advantages. Similarly, we shouldn’t criticize people who are born into money. When they use the money to buy implants, steroids, or test scores, they’re really just doing what they can to compete with those people who are intrinsically born with advantages. Why, to get rid of “unfair advantages”, we’d have to remove every advantage available. Not only would we have to redistribute wealth to remove the advantages of rich people, at birth we’d have to bang smart babies’ heads to give them concussions, inject muscle-killing enzymes into strong babies, and lop the boobs off of large-breasted ones. And how about more embedded traits, like the charisma that constantly hampers the social lives of the geek populations? Would we have to stitch down the tongues of charismatic babies at the first sign of “How you doin’?” No sir, to take away such alleged “unfair” advantages would not only be communist, but it would lead society down the path of the corporate police state. To do so would be to homogenize the masses. To do so would be to retard progress and advancement. To do so would be to promote the breeding of a world culture, entirely nondescript.

You’re probably all wondering if I’m being serious or not. Well, that’s the beauty of antidissatirizitarianficationologyism.

So now that we’ve gotten the ethics out of the way, feel free to take that SAT preparation course without guilt for the impoverished masses. You’re only protecting yourself before they inevitably try to stab you in the back and climb over you with their natural-born intelligence. You should be working at breakneck speed all the way through to the week before your test date. There really isn’t any excuse for you to be working on things from your actual class, although taking breaks to watch a show or go out with your friends is perfectly acceptable (to relieve stress so you can practice harder later, of course).

When you get down to your final week, it’s time to get serious. You should be doubling your workload to at least 48 hours a day, and preferably get your family to help automate your routine by feeding dinner trays and #2 pencils under that bathroom door. The night before, pack your backpack with everything that you’ll need, and be sure that you’re prepared for anything that might come up; you haven’t come this far to let a runny nose or stagnant air circulation prevent you from achieving the best score you possibly can. At night, carefully measure out your polyphasic sleep schedule to maximize your REM cycles and keep you alert throughout the test day. In the morning, choose the most comfortable clothes you can find: sweat pants, slack pants, no pants. You want to feel as comfortable as possible when taking the test, aesthetics—and public decency—be damned. Under no circumstances should you ever drive yourself to the SAT—that’s 15 minutes of valuable drill time.

Once you get to the SAT, find a nice aisle spot to situate your calculator, photo ID, and pencil sharpeners next to your ionic air purifier, DC power generator for calculator backup, and robotic heated electric wristpad for writer’s cramp. Don’t listen to your proctor’s objections—you’re entitled to a 3-foot radius. And then? Well, with all that preparation, the test itself should be a breeze. And if it isn’t, then you probably didn’t prepare enough, so rinse, wash, and repeat for a $35 fee. And that, that is how to get a good score on the SAT. I really don’t see what’s so ireful about it.