Hear that? The soft sigh of satisfaction. The silence of the keyboard. I'm done, done, done with the U Chicago app.
I think finishing my first college app should be some cause for celebration, even if it's just running around my house 5 times. Now is the hard part: the time for laborious finger-crossing and half-drawn breaths. I got the U Chicago course catalog in the mail yesterday and wow! I can study ancient American civilization in Oaxaca, Mexico. And rub shoulders admist a sea of lovely British accents at the London School of Economics. And take classes in dinosaur science, and transsexualism (Claudius, here we come), and the economics of crime, taught by none other than S. Leavitt of Freaknomics! And spend Friday night coffee discussing Marx and Smith. Okay, that last part is slightly less exciting.
If I don't get in, I think I'll start a massive hunt for razor blades. My dad keeps expounding that "Chicago is a safety! Duh." (He got this bit of wisdom from a random lady on the train.) People me that I'll get in without a problem, which is comforting to some degree, even if I know they just say that to be nice. Actually, what really shook my confidence was when my counselor said I had an equal chance of getting into Harvard and U Chicago. Either he grossly overestimated by chances at Harvard or he thinks my chances are so small at both schools to have little difference. Neither explanation bodes well.
Back to more positive thinking, I managed to write an essay that works on both the Uncommon and Common Apps. This is a rather remarkable feat I say. Despite the notoriety of UC's app, it's really not that bad. Hell, talking to Olga made me realize it's actually much shorter than Brown's. Through some economizing and strategezing, I only need 3 essays between 10 colleges. What I have left to write: a dozen short responses, UMich essay/Common App short, Harvard/Yale supp, scholarship essay for WashU...hey that's it. Not too bad if I leave it all to winter vaca, right? Especially because the two other essays are mostly written and the scholarship essay is on film, which should be rather easy. What is hard is answering questions like, "Why do you want to attend BU?" when the honest answer is, "I don't want to attend BU!" If all goes well, I won't even have to apply there. Hopefully.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
The Bluest Eye
"Then she stopped staring at the green chairs, at the delivery truck; she went to the movies instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as a possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assess in it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scales one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the long roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and white images came together, making a magnificent whole--all projected through the ray of light from above and beyond."
Silly girl, this does not happen to you, does it? My dad actually accused be of this a while ago, telling me I was lost in a fantasy world. Seeing that this accusation came from my dad, I immediately leapt into a defense without thinking about the possible truth in his words. I still don't think it's true, but maybe I should at least consider the possibility. As much as I revel in the depressing and the abstract , I've realized that many films I love are unrealistic. Amelie? Pure whimsy. Wes Anderson? Encased in his little hermetic world. But then there is a strain of the bleak and oppressive: Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Fat Girl. Perhaps the opposite is true of my father's words: cinema has aged and jaded me to the world.
As for The Bluest Eye the novel, I think I've encounter one of the formative books of my reading. Yes, that's a little hyperbolic, especially considering I hated and promptly wiped it from my memory when I read it 2 years ago. Silly sophomore then. It's funny how I so wholly repudiate my past selves, always establishing my present person as the most superior. I also think I sound like a douchebag right now. It wasn't until Dan and Katie remarked on the stilted vocabulary that I realized how pretentiously I write. Ack.
So for more disjointed thoughts (or stream of consciousness as more literary types would call it), the irony of Crick lecturing us on black "funkiness" and "vitality" is rather. . . disconcerting. New England high school valedictorian, Harvard grad wants to teach us the black american experience of poverty? What? I have to say though, he's a very competent English teacher even if discourses on "funkiness" seem pretty hokey coming from Crick.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assess in it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scales one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the long roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and white images came together, making a magnificent whole--all projected through the ray of light from above and beyond."
Silly girl, this does not happen to you, does it? My dad actually accused be of this a while ago, telling me I was lost in a fantasy world. Seeing that this accusation came from my dad, I immediately leapt into a defense without thinking about the possible truth in his words. I still don't think it's true, but maybe I should at least consider the possibility. As much as I revel in the depressing and the abstract , I've realized that many films I love are unrealistic. Amelie? Pure whimsy. Wes Anderson? Encased in his little hermetic world. But then there is a strain of the bleak and oppressive: Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Fat Girl. Perhaps the opposite is true of my father's words: cinema has aged and jaded me to the world.
As for The Bluest Eye the novel, I think I've encounter one of the formative books of my reading. Yes, that's a little hyperbolic, especially considering I hated and promptly wiped it from my memory when I read it 2 years ago. Silly sophomore then. It's funny how I so wholly repudiate my past selves, always establishing my present person as the most superior. I also think I sound like a douchebag right now. It wasn't until Dan and Katie remarked on the stilted vocabulary that I realized how pretentiously I write. Ack.
So for more disjointed thoughts (or stream of consciousness as more literary types would call it), the irony of Crick lecturing us on black "funkiness" and "vitality" is rather. . . disconcerting. New England high school valedictorian, Harvard grad wants to teach us the black american experience of poverty? What? I have to say though, he's a very competent English teacher even if discourses on "funkiness" seem pretty hokey coming from Crick.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Load! Lock! Launch!
Physics rocks. Today's physics adrenaline rush lasted long into French class, where I could barely concentrate on Claude Chabrol with my head lost in carbon paper and shiny ball bearings. Never had I been as pumped as with this Hitting the Bulls-eye lab.
The target of our projectile launchers was a 3 centimeter strip taped onto the linoleum floor. Before reaching this landing strip however, our ball bearing had to first arc through the air and pass a 10 sq cm hole. Only then could it land to crossed fingers and held breaths, hopefully within that strip. With some nifty finagling and not-so-clever math tricks, we tickled our calculators into producing the correct numbers.
To chart my emotional well-being during physics lab, I'd use the graph y= cos x: we begin at a peak of excitement, plunge to the minimum value somewhere around 3.14, and then slowly claw our up through hairy equations and crooked rulers until we reach that emotional high water of launch time. That pi mark represents the time when we were hopefully lost in the quagmire. Only through playing the "dumb girls in science card" did we get McClung to show that we could in fact change our projectile launcher to zero initial height. But after that, the sudden breakthrough sparked a torrent of calculator punching, where more progress was made in 10 minutes than the entire previous 50 minutes.
It sounds really kind of cheesy, but it's moments like these that remind me of college essays. For a moment, I think I finally understood the sweet taste of teamwork and success.
Yea, but physics. I don't often give much thought to the male/female disparity so decried by educators, but it is ridiculous in higher level classes. AP French only has 2 guys out of 20, and our physics class is 20 guys to 8 girls. I found out that Sue, Steff, and Mary are all considering dropping physics, which made me really sad. Not only will there be serious testosterone overload in 3/4 Physics, but if these are Asian girls--an especially resilient breed in math and science. How does this bode?
The target of our projectile launchers was a 3 centimeter strip taped onto the linoleum floor. Before reaching this landing strip however, our ball bearing had to first arc through the air and pass a 10 sq cm hole. Only then could it land to crossed fingers and held breaths, hopefully within that strip. With some nifty finagling and not-so-clever math tricks, we tickled our calculators into producing the correct numbers.
To chart my emotional well-being during physics lab, I'd use the graph y= cos x: we begin at a peak of excitement, plunge to the minimum value somewhere around 3.14, and then slowly claw our up through hairy equations and crooked rulers until we reach that emotional high water of launch time. That pi mark represents the time when we were hopefully lost in the quagmire. Only through playing the "dumb girls in science card" did we get McClung to show that we could in fact change our projectile launcher to zero initial height. But after that, the sudden breakthrough sparked a torrent of calculator punching, where more progress was made in 10 minutes than the entire previous 50 minutes.
It sounds really kind of cheesy, but it's moments like these that remind me of college essays. For a moment, I think I finally understood the sweet taste of teamwork and success.
Yea, but physics. I don't often give much thought to the male/female disparity so decried by educators, but it is ridiculous in higher level classes. AP French only has 2 guys out of 20, and our physics class is 20 guys to 8 girls. I found out that Sue, Steff, and Mary are all considering dropping physics, which made me really sad. Not only will there be serious testosterone overload in 3/4 Physics, but if these are Asian girls--an especially resilient breed in math and science. How does this bode?
Thursday, October 12, 2006
It is the pursuit of the goal, not the realization. Right?
This is patently ridiculous. I'm in the middle of reading all the following books:
- The Bluest Eye
- Blink
- The Good Earth
- Lolita
- I Capture the Castle
- Atonement
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
Even throw in a few textbooks for extra measure. How many will I actually finish? All. Someday, someday. In the same land where Gmail inboxes fill up. Randomly starting and never finishing books is a very, very bad habit. I have to kick it.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Searching...Literary Eloquence
Aside from being unworthy of comparison to classics and the Bible, college essays are not the place to look for literary eloquence. They are the place to find amateur writing, cheesy posturing, comma splices, and thesaurus overuse. They are not repositories of any kind of insight or enjoyable reading experience.
Unless you are some damn genius who writes with skill, authenticity, and flair. And we have way to many of those in our school. I've come across quite a few poorly planned and written essays, but there is more than a fair share of great. Reading Daphne's oh-so-brilliant college essay only exaggerated my personal inferiority complex. What am I? Woefully untalented at sports, art, and music. Inadequacy reigns supreme today. Flipping through books of "successful" (keyword is successful, not good) college essays, I realized I must really try to find disappoint in my charmed life.
My essay is such a load of bull. There's enough quirk to register on U Chicago's eccentro-meter but it'll tip the weird-o-meter at other schools. Laurel, a perfectly nice normal person, reminded me of this.
Sigh. Must study for physics quiz NOW. Poor little rich asian, Acton, emo girl signing off.
Unless you are some damn genius who writes with skill, authenticity, and flair. And we have way to many of those in our school. I've come across quite a few poorly planned and written essays, but there is more than a fair share of great. Reading Daphne's oh-so-brilliant college essay only exaggerated my personal inferiority complex. What am I? Woefully untalented at sports, art, and music. Inadequacy reigns supreme today. Flipping through books of "successful" (keyword is successful, not good) college essays, I realized I must really try to find disappoint in my charmed life.
My essay is such a load of bull. There's enough quirk to register on U Chicago's eccentro-meter but it'll tip the weird-o-meter at other schools. Laurel, a perfectly nice normal person, reminded me of this.
Sigh. Must study for physics quiz NOW. Poor little rich asian, Acton, emo girl signing off.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)