The other night, someone mentioned the standardized tests we all took in grade school. I don't know how it worked nationwide, but in Illinois we had the IOWA tests each year. Individual Something Something Achievement. There was a special day, where we all for some reason got a bit dressed up, teachers and students, to come to school and fill in some little circles with a number two pencil.

Our hard work would pay off some time later, when our parents were given those futuristic looking computerized printouts, with bars and numbers along the lower half representing our test scores. I remember my young nerdling self thrilling as I looked at the bars for language comprehension pushing themselves off the right edge of the paper. And when I think back on the math bars firmly occupying the middle ground, a big fat black line straddling the 60's, 70's and 80's, I was disappointed, especially when I thought of little Nicky Bianchi and how he probably scored high on both, the jerk.

But I didn't care that much, it being just math and all, and therefore not important at all.

That got me thinking about grade school in general. When I was a kid, I absolutely hated the drudgery of going to school. I thought it was the worst thing a person had to endure, and as I got older, I developed more sophisticated means of faking illness, until that backfired on me at the age of 8, when I held the thermometer over the stove's open flame, only to have it explode in my hand.

My mom refused to believe that I was just that sick.

I was kind of a brat that way. I remember that I once stabbed a nearly full milk carton with a knife, just to see what that would be like. I stood in front of the open refrigerator, watching the wounded carton spurt it's contents onto the kitchen floor like it was bleeding. I finally called my mom into the kitchen, as I reaized that someone was going to have to clean this up, and explained the situation with an old classic: "I don't know."

I thought that the best week of my life was the week I got the chicken pox. Good lord, it was sweet. My little brothers were incredibly jealous as my mom dressed them each day, and I would smugly wave goodbye from the couch in the living room, eating ice cream straight from the carton as I settled in for another episode of Sesame Street followed by Eddie's Father.

I had no idea how good I had it in grade school. In hindsight, it was the best job a person could ever have. Mine was a five minute walk from my house, which of course, took a million years. Two million in the snow. Then, the hours. 9am to 3pm! Six hours. Torture! And the stuff they made us do once we were there. Oy! We had to sit there and spell things. Multiply things. Sometimes we had to multiply things with three numbers.

And I don't know we all did it, but somehow we managed to survive 40 minutes of daily art, in which we cut up construction paper and glued cotton balls and glitter to it for some God unknown reason. And gym? Being forced to play all that kickball and dodgeball?

Oh, and field trips. The Lincoln Park Zoo. Lamb's Farm. The Field Museum. Once, with the intent of some community service type idea, we had a field trip planned to a retirement home. I begged out of that one, having already been there once for Vacation Bible School. I remember being quite freaked out by an extremely ancient woman in a wheel chair who could barely speak. That, too, backfired on me, when I learned that I wouldn't be home that day playing with my GI Joes but instead spent the day stuffing envelopes in the office with the principal and his secretary. I got over my fear of the elderly pretty quickly after that.

Hot lunches (pizza day and hot dog day, especially), little cartons of milk (an extra one for ten cents, if you liked), and making Danny Nieman laugh so hard that Cheez Whiz literally came out of his nose. That was still a legend in eighth grade.

Sometimes I think about picking up a Master's degree, and then I realize that what I really want is another crack at grade school.

Tonight: If you've got five bucks, half an hour, and a yearning for the funny, you should be here.