Blog-Stretching Time

In response to recent pressures those of us on this blog have gone through, I must address the vicious cycle that is senior year. First of all, we are all quite sick of school by now. We're sick of teachers who can't teach and teachers who think their class is so important that they can give hours of homework and assume that you can ignore other classes (this is particularly annoying in classes such as Calculus or Health which I will never use in my current career path). We're sick of not having time for our beloved nerdy/geeky things such as video games and webcomics (or two novels stuck in the planning stages in my case). Most of all, we're sick of dumb people in our classes.

Senior year is also annoying from a social point of view, particularly right now. For one thing, we have no time to be social and actually *gasp* have fun. I can list several things I want to do with my friends that will be postponed indefinitely because of this idiotic work. One of these things was supposed to be started two months ago *cough* TCRH *cough*, but school has stabbed it in the metaphorical heart. The second annoying thing that I feel I must mention is prom. The venue for prom was announced recently and now the school has come down with prom fever (I'm sure this is a real and classifiable disease considering the consistency of the symptoms and the general unhealthy effects on wallet contents and single people). Anyway, in the week or two since the announcement I have probably heard the word "prom" 200 times and I have been dragged into the seemingly-satanic ritual of "finding a date." I won't be able to make coherent sentences if I get started on that, so I'll skip it. Use your imagination. In short, prom is an event that, if it were not so overly glorified, would be extremely exciting and fun. However, in similar spirit of any holiday, the prom season begins far too far away from the event itself to hold my interest for that long. Last year, I took to ignoring it until a time I deemed reasonable to think about it. Unfortunately, this year it won't work due to the fact that it's our senior prom and I am actually obligated to find a date this year. Imagine the hype of previous years and multiply by infinity.

Before I go on, I feel I must mention that I actually am excited for prom and I will go. My issue with it is the sheer amount of shallow chatter it generates.

Now that I have deviated a bit, I return. The point of all of this is, we're mentally done with high school. 'What's the solution?' you ask. College.

College is the solution to high school just as high school was the solution for middle school. It is the logical next step, it hopefully contains more interesting subjects and I pray it contains smarter people. The idea of college itself is a bit exciting. We imagine more freedom of self, money and study - not to mention more time to spend with our favorite nerdy/geeky people. However, there is one major problem: college applications.

College applications are a plague upon us high school students who actually take challenging classes. The baseline is: WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS! The personal information is easy. It's not fun, but it's do-able considering it's the same thing over and over again. Plus, with the miracle that is the Common App, I only had to fill out that info 3 times for the 7 colleges I applied to. The college-specific supplements are the things that really get complicated. Filling out your interests and prospective major are simple enough. The only differences there involve format. Then the eye catches on the colleges' not-so-secret weapons: THE ESSAYS [insert dramatic background music and extreme close-up here].

I don't mind writing essays. Generally, I like writing anyway. I write fiction mainly, but obviously nonfiction is not that much of a stretch for me either. In such things as blogs and college applications, it tends to be about myself and I have more extensive information on that than most other people. Besides, I'm Irish. I can write about nothing for pages (not as much fun though). The part that angers me most is the fact that A) the prompts are usually generic, boring and overused B) the word/character limits stifle creativity and C) most colleges require several essays EXCEPT, of course, the one college you actually need to entice to accept you. On a slightly related topic, I move that we make it illegal for a college to require 4 essays AND an interview unless it is something similar to Harvard or Princeton.

Right now, I am finally done with my applications and nearly done with my interviews. I am infinitely glad that I've made it this far and I wish the colleges would respond sooner, but overall that piece of the process is good. My goal now is to apply for every scholarship known to man to get money to fund this escape from high school. Needless to say, I don't have $100,000 on hand or anything nearly like it. I need as much money as I can get from these scholarships. The issue is that the vast majority of them take quite a while to prepare an acceptable entry for. Also, the deadlines are quite often on the same day. With school work and all of the scholarships I have to fill out, I may spontaneously combust. However, I did find a small glimmer of hope when I saw a $5000 scholarship for simply drawing some species of duck or goose in its natural habitat (to be made into a stamp). Obviously, with such a diverse array of subjects there must be at least one with my name on it. I just hope it's the $20,000 one.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my ranting. I'm sure some of you can empathize.

~The Minister of (not always) Silly Posts