since college shit has been taking over my life and most of my writing ability, I might as well post some of the things I've been writing for it.
my supplemental essay for Bard College:
School– a blur of classes, raised hands, sidelong glances, inventing new methods of shorthand. Final bell, the end, le fin, get out.
Ten minutes of precious free time, spent at locker doors and snack machines. Rehearsal starts. The plays change, but the core group, the basic schedule, it remains ever-present, a structure to work within. This time around it’s a student-run production of Hamlet II: Better Than the Original, a modern comedy version of Shakespeare’s legendary bummer. Two and a half hours of running lines as a promiscuous Queen Gertrude, laughing ‘till I cry, then home. Macaroni and cheese and, finally, a nap. It’s always been easier for me to sleep in daylight.
I dream about Rasputin’s ghost, returned to pursue an acting career. I dream about an angry pack of wolves running rampant across the countryside, controlled only by my friend-turned-vampire, Christie. I dream in sketchbook animation, riding in a bus past a crosshatched landscape.
My mom wakes me up for dinner. Occasionally I exchange a hot meal for a few more hours of dreaming. If not, dinner table conversation runs the gamut. There are conspiracy theories and tales of high school antics from my father, my mother’s explanations of biology or family trees, my kid brother making noises like a pheasant.
In my room again, I build elaborate paper castles, organizing my work. I like to make lists and then discard them. I like to write essays with my mouth full, do my reading wrapped up in blankets at dusk. A few hours of homework, interspersed with phone calls, bad poetry, Internet communication. At some point, after unintelligible things are scribbled off lists, there is the camera, or the “personal notebook” (I prefer this ambiguous term over “diary”).
So many pages, pictures, chocolate chips later, I start to get sleepy, calculating the too few hours until school. I call up my best friend to say goodnight, nine hundred eighty miles away. I’ll convince him to move closer one of these nights. A lot of mornings, I wake with the phone propped against my cheek, or lost somewhere in the blankets, and smile as I stumble around again.