Colleges

There were long days of summer, there are short days of frustration with deadlines fast approaching. The time between was survival.

"For the benefit of Mr. Kite, there will be a show tonight on trampoline..."

I have spent six hours today trying to reach a goal that doesn't really exist.

"Please keep your response to 500 words or less."
If I have 250 words, does that make me very concise? No, it makes my essay tenuous, because I could not express enough adulation for a school or for myself in so few words to be truly committed to the cause.

"And of course, Henry the horse will dance the waltz..."

I doesn't really matter, I'll get in somewhere. Some of these places have rolling admission policies, so I could wait quite a long time to turn them in. Of course, then I won't get scholarships, and that would be a problem. Do Canadian schools work with the National Merit folks?

"It's gonna be the future soon..."

If I fill up with too much nameless emotion, I have to go and do something. I ran around the trail a few times. If I run fast enough, sometimes I can leave myself behind. As I feel the toxins leaving my body, a smile creeps across my face.

"...it's already here."

When I started walking, I looked around and remembered that I was running in circles. I was jogging up the same hill I cleared yesterday. It was so pointless that I started running again, and the sunlight broke cruelly through the boughs of the trees to cast the light fantastic across a brilliant world of duplicity.

"You want a piece of my heart, you better start from the start.."

Around the swamp, I decided to stop running circles and try something else. I climbed a tree until I remembered that the branches just get smaller. The view was lovely and unsatisfyingly familiar. The branches were rotten, so I had to be very careful to climb down, as a foot holds more weight right off than does a hand. If only there were somewhere I hadn't yet explored.

I'm reading several books at the moment:
The Qu'ran
The Bible
The Fountainhead
The Blue and Brown Books
Double Helix
Something Wicked This Way Comes
I feel like I could learn so much more if school took up less time and I didn't have to worry about the future all the time. I would have done something real by now if I weren't so busy with everything I've been asked to do.

When I came down from the tree, I didn't go back around the loop again. I turned around outright and walked straight into the painful sunlight, because at least this way I wasn't pretending to run away again.

"Write about something you are passionate about."

"Please keep your response to less than 300 words."