The envelope, please
Nussbaum, Anna
THE LAST WORD THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE Anna Nussbaum My friend Vinnie is trying to test out of Computer Appli-cations class. It is a required course for high school graduation. He's miserable. I...
...But in the end I sent the essay with the FFL reference to every school...
...Prayer is like meditation," you hear yourself saying to a suspicious yoga class friend...
...If you study all the time, you probably aren't the most popular girl in school...
...Skip the narrative, and go straight to the highlights...
...Tutor a poor math student...
...Explaining your life, rationalizing your existence, to a college admissions officer is a lot like justifying your faith...
...I just decided it is too hard to reconfigure every essay to meet each school's agenda...
...In the world of college application essays, you aren't supposed to have problems that you deal with daily...
...We learn how to mold our lives so that, at least on paper, they meet expectations...
...You aren't lying, but you're choosing your words carefully-too carefully...
...Or would I? I would hate for the school which thought it was negotiating with a size one petite to find out it was getting a size twelve long...
...Humankind," we agreed...
...But the prompts in Computer Applications aren't much worse than those on the college applications we've stayed up late filling out...
...Such exercises reduce us to our parts, and we try to sell the parts...
...A life becomes a resume, a list of accomplishments...
...Colleges want a person who, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't exist...
...Who's to decide which is which...
...Likewise, privileged high school students know what "highly selective" colleges want...
...The things not on my resume are the most important things of all...
...You are supposed to have already overcome adversity by the age of eighteen, when too often adversity (if you've known any in the first place) has overcome you...
...Looking back, I could have stood more hanging out and less "accomplishing...
...I have learned a lot, and I will love college...
...Have a friend...
...Some of the most valuable things I've learned thus far I figured out while laughing and talking and listening to music on my friend Melissa's bedroom floor...
...You're playing it extra safe...
...I listen to his stories about writing journal entries where one is asked to respond to the inspirational statement "Whatever you are, be a good one...
...Make sure your project placed first and that you successfully cloned the first frog embryo...
...If s not that I can think of a better system, or that I haven't learned a lot in high school, or that I won't love college...
...The things for which the world gives you no credit are important...
...Make sure you helped her through a drug addiction or an attempted suicide...
...What makes you "special...
...I was taught the adage from To Kill a Mockingbird: It is how you behave when no one is looking that matters most...
...Yes," I answered...
...First, you assume the worldview of the person on the receiving end of your explanation...
...Went to the science fair...
...If s a journey I'm still on...
...If you were a car, what kind of car would you be...
...This is simply not true...
...Every choice generally limits or influences the next...
...College-bound seniors become advertisers, with ourselves as clients, and advertisers know their market...
...if s been drummed into us for so long that it's almost a priori...
...Growing up is not about successes...
...Ironically, if we make the sale, we still pay them...
...How have you succeeded...
...People rarely grow up in foster care, get straight As in AP everything, and become Prom Queen...
...they want to hear a story-about success, incredible success...
...I certainly wouldn't reconfigure my heart...
...She stumbled on a word: "Are you sure you want to say 'mankind...
...It centers me...
...Good point, we had to tone it down...
...It's just that I've been taught by the application process that life is short and that if an experience can't be put on your resume or quickly understood to be an achievement, then it isn't worth having...
...But college admissions officers aren't interested in reality...
...It's a journey that, in my experience, involves some success, a lot of perceived failures, starting over and failing again, and sometimes just hanging out...
...We laughed...
...We can't remember not knowing...
...Last fall, while saving a baby bird fallen from her nest, I...
...she asked...
...I presume I am writing to a sympathetic audience, a Catholic market...
...A mind becomes a number, a score on a sheet...
...That's deep," I said...
...I wrote an essay for a small, left-wing liberal arts college in the Midwest and my mother, a published author, proofread it for me...
...I wrote another essay for a Catholic school...
...But what if you have a feminist reading your essay who finds this term offensive...
...What have you overcome...
...If s safe...
...Some of my least measurable insights have been had there, among the dust bunnies...
...So we give them success...
...Make sure he's a fourteen-year-old crack dealer living in the projects, whose grades have gone from Ds to As since he met you...
...Okay, I thought, I can write about the ideas in Feminists for Life (FFL) literature that have been influential for me...
...they aren't interested in hard-working normal...
...You're making a sale...
...I listen to his stories about learning how to center text and make spreadsheets...
...Trying to make yourself sound good is exhausting, and it makes for bad writing...
...If you grew up impoverished, you probably aren't valedictorian...
...They don't want to hear your truth...
...And the lesson is essentially the same: Whatever you are make it look as if you're a good one...
...dust bunnies...
Vol. 129 • April 2002 • No. 7
