This was my college-admission essay to William and Mary. It's also proves indisputably just how low the bar is for higher education. Actually, I wrote this originally for the first English assignment of my Senior year- I think it was the lowest grade (on a piece of writing, at least) that I got in that class. Oh well, at least it got me into college.
I’ve been sitting in front of this computer, a half-glazed expression filming my eyes, for the past half-hour now. This essay’s first incarnation began with doddering lists of facts about my life as it is now. Ample time was spent on the fact that I was only three days into the school year and already my life was filled with Early Admission applications to William and Mary and mounting piles of Godwin homework, not to mention English compositions. Violin recitals, my decision to join the concert choir, and newly begun fencing lessons dominated the hobbies I planned to discuss in my writing. Meanwhile, dates and places of birth and similar factual, but ultimately irrelevant, pieces of information overflowed my sentences. Alas, something still seemed absent in my little “ode de le James.”
Thoroughly frustrated with the way this paper was turning out, I took a break to clear my head. In a fit of juvenile angst, I decided that, in my mounting desperation, there was only one viable path of conduct left – to complain about the essay to whomever was within hearing distance. My mother was granted the dubious privilege of listening to my rants, as she was the first person I could find. In a clear sign of parental love, she even bothered to listen. The fact that she did bother to listen, and always does, is something I’m always quite grateful, despite being rather baffled by it. After a bit of idle banter between my parental unit and I, mixed with a number of amusing declarations against “personal essays”, epiphany at last struck.
The reason behind my difficulty in writing the essay was simple. My life has been terribly uneventful and generally quite dull. This is probably for the best, as I’d likely be unsuited for a life filled with plane crashes and soap opera plot lines. Still, even I was bored to tears reading my first banal attempt at an essay on the Story of Myself.
In truth, even the most interesting thing that’s occurred in my life, or at least the one that immediately springs to mind, is a rather dull affair. To put is succinctly, at a gathering of my closest friends over Spring Break, we decided to take scooters from our friend’s garage. Lacking more exciting entertainment, our plan was to ride it gloriously down the largest hill we could find. Looking back on the event, going down a very steep hill as fast as one can, having never ridden a scooter before in one’s life, is clearly a bad idea, and even more so when the brakes failed on my scooter. Oh well, as they say, “Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” On the other-hand, perhaps, “Stupid sees as stupid does” is somewhat more befitting.
Luckily, I was not seriously harmed despite my fragile flesh meeting and scraping along very hard pavement. Although, I’ll admit to a certain amount of enjoyment in feigning unconsciousness with my limp body, marked with scores of raw cuts and scrapes, strewn haphazardly across a couch as my friend’s mother returned to her home from a movie. At the time, she was completely unaware of my accident. Suffice to say, her reaction to the network of bloody scrapes I had become over the course of her two-hour movie was almost worth falling off the scooter. Superficial wounds abounded, however, but I had generally recovered by the end of Spring Break.
Still, even this little adventure hardly qualifies as a wondrously interesting event. Indeed, I hardly consider it worth a moment’s pondering, and certainly do not consider it a life-altering event. In fact, to anyone except myself, and those of my friends who witnessed the scooter incident, it probably holds only the most trivial interest. Of course, I like to think that’s because I’m still only sixteen. The course of my life’s barely begun, much less comprised enough time to have something worthwhile to write about. I honestly don’t know what I’ll make of my life, but I certainly hope there’s more to it than the little that’s occurred over these beginning years. So, as to what the Story of Myself is, I can only say, “Ask again in fifty years.”
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