The College Board Essays, Part 1: Atwood and Addison

Senioritis is real. Like a twelfth-grade chemistry experiment, it requires a nucleation site to crystallize - but once it gets going, it quickly spreads forth, its wispy tendrils extending in all directions and ensnaring everything in its path. It took hold in our school as much as any other, with many students essentially abandoning schoolwork after the promise of a college admission. Some didn't wait for acceptance to start slacking off. Some, of course, had been slacking all along, and simply found senior year a capstone in a life of leisure.

As part of their slacking programs, several students made verbal mention of blowing off their year-end Advanced Placement (AP) exams, since their near future, they thought, was assured. Why not just skip the test, or treat it as a joke? Well, somebody decided to do just that, and after he did so, and publicized his exploit, other students followed. In fact, they were so proud of their work that they kept copies of it, and handed them to me immediately after the end of the test!

How did they manage this exploit? These are, after all, official standardized tests, and they are supposed to be tightly monitored. Well, in two of the cases (including today's excerpts), the students' tongue-in-cheek essays took so little time to write that they were able to fully copy out the text onto scrap paper and smuggle them out. As for the other...you'll see.

Our first exploits are two essays, written by the same person. The first is a racy, but rather legitimate, comparison essay on Homer's Odyssey and "Siren Song" by Margaret Atwood; the second is a combative deconstruction of an unknown work by Joseph Addison. Transliteration will follow below each image.

The mythical sirens are portrayed in 2 very distinct manners in these passages. While Odysseus describes the sirens as seductive spawn of satan that stir the very core of his unrealized sexual feelings, Atwood writes from the point of view of one of the sirens, saying that she doesn't enjoy the malicious tempting of sailors, and that she would gladly get away from the hellish island if she could.

The excerpt from the Odyssey is packed with fallic imagery and allusions to emphasize the feelings of the hero, tied to a mast screaming in heat. In line 10 "whitecaps stroke on stroke" is a phrase that shows how the strong, primal sexual fervor begins to rise within Odysseus. The sirens sing "moor your ship on our coast" (line 15), which can easily be interpreted as "we want to have sex with you," when clearly, the reader knows that these evil temptresses will not indulge the hero in any such activities. Odysseus speaks of the "honeyed voices pouring from [their] lips" (line 17). Again, this strong fallic image insights a sexual riot in the hero. Finally, as a counterpart to the "whitecaps" line that began Odysseus' sex drive, a phrase in line 20 marks the gradual fading of Odysseus lebido: "the heart inside me throbbed to listen longer." I don't think it was just his heart that was throbbing.

The character that wrote this journal has no life. He wastes his time writing down all the dumb and trivial things he does. What kind of an idiot writes about tying his fucking shoes in his diary? Addison's satirical purpose is completely achieved, for he successfully created a character that does nothing of importance. This guy's life is the perfect example of superficial aristocracy. Just like the phony rich people in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, this character does nothing but take care of himself and go to the club, coffeeshop, and field for a walk. When he walks in the field, he notes the way in which the wind is blowing. This act of stupidity can only be explained by the guy being stoned. He doesn't really put tobacco in his pipe, but he puts weed in it and gets stoned every day before he runs around in a field writing down that the wind is blowing Southeast. What a dumbass and a bitch faggot Addison has created in this passage.