Now that I've finally taken the GRE, all the stress and self-imposed isolation of the past few days feels a little silly.

Not that you shouldn't study for the GRE. A shocking number of words in the verbal section — which is basically an elaborate vocabulary test — were ones I already knew from studying the "high frequency words" page of my test prep book. I only wish I'd remembered a few more of them.

A simple analogy for the uninformed: the GRE is to graduate school as the SAT is to undergraduate institutions. Except that you take the GRE on a computer. There's a verbal section and a quantitative section, both of which are graded on the same 800 point scale as an SAT test.

There's also an analytical writing section composed of two essays: a longer "issue" essay reacting to a quote, and a shorter "argument analysis" essay wherein you pick apart the logical flaws in a given argument. That last part was actually fun.

After the test I got my scores for everything except the two essays (which some professors somewhere have to look over first) and I decided not to submit them to anywhere just yet, even if it was free.

I'm happy with my scores, it's just that I still have no idea whatsoever what I'm going to be doing a year from now. Or even what I want to be doing.

But those nagging questions about the future can wait for now. I'm just happy to relax again.

I can already sense the boredom waiting for me out there, now that I've lost the purpose of the past few days…