If I find it on a map, can I touch it?

I wasn't exactly a Rhodes Scholar during my undergraduate years. My notebooks from over a decade ago support more doodles, Pink Floyd logos and weak abstract poetry than notes on US foreign relations with Djibouti.

Nevertheless, when I maintained focus and attended class with enough regularity, I did pretty well. Not spectacularly, but well enough to be invited back year after year, for nearly six years. Since education is our future, won't somebody think of the children, etc, I've decided recently to pursue graduate school. Living debt-free has become boring, really, and I'm hoping the school paper will let me write their sex-advice column. My five sex partners can all attest, I've got game.

My B.A. was in political science, which I declared when I was eighteen. Why I decided on a field with such limited employment potential is unclear now. I thought Bill Clinton was kind of cool, and that Wellstone guy drove a green bus. Now, I can't watch Bill Maher without wanting to bite off my own fingers. Politics is boorish, inelegant and every guy who goes into it has the same stupid white hair, parted conservatively down the side. I use too much product, wouldn't work.

Weighing my other options, I've decided on psychology. I'm a good listener, write well, speak articulately, and want an office with one of those Freud-couches. For about two years, I even owned a pipe. I even occasionally put real tobacco in it. Behaviors, motivations, aversions, dreams, ambitions, all fascinate me. I'll deconstruct psychobabble for sums of money per hour, tell them to chew it over with a Prozac, and schedule them for the same time, next week.

Metropolitan State University sits atop the bluffs in St. Paul, not far from my apartment. Sarah will be attending there in a few months, for their teaching program, so inquiries into their MA in psychology seemed reasonable. After multiple attempts at reaching them by phone, leaving messages, emails, I finally got a response. The grades I got, twelve years ago, at age eighteen, would force me to start the degree program as a freshman. Screw that. I mean, I spent the better part of my formative years lumped into crowded lecture halls, getting ignored by girls in sweatpants, and trying to decipher professors straight from Tehran.

Here's my point: If you pulled admirable grades as an undergraduate, you probably missed some social components that contributed to growth and development more than the Djibouti lecture. C'mon, say it aloud, it's a blast! Yes, some manage both, and that's admirable, but most people I've known didn't have their beer and purge it, too. I know that grades are a standard of measurement, broadly used across academia, but to have to re-start as a freshman? What about a GRE, or a physical fitness test? Wait, scratch that last one.