I saw that some priority deadline for Duluth scholarship stuff is Wednesday, so I decided to get that done. I was presented with these questions:
Write a unified and cohesive essay of approximately 500 words using one of the four subject choices below.
We are looking for students' ability to be creative, analytical, and original – there are no right or wrong responses.
1.) Write an essay about an important book, film, poem, political or moral philosophy, role model, or friend that/who has had a profound influence on your thinking and/or belief system.
2.) Choose an everyday object and use its characteristics to describe your own.
3.) Write an essay about something you have outgrown and rejected based on rational analysis and reflection – a friend, a political philosophy, a favorite author or film, or anything that has had an influence on you. Explain and justify the process that led you to change your mind.
4.) Write page 162 of your autobiography.
I chose number four. If you're interested…
“I‚Äôm sorry, this just isn‚Äôt going to work out.”
–And with that, another fateful relationship had ended. I‚Äôve often considered to be an important part of life, necessary to make everything more positive, but I can say little in support of it. I sit here as an older man, but am I wiser? Have I ever truly known love? Will I, in my later years, know love? Love is tricky in its ability to change the way all other aspects of life are viewed. Without love, things may seem bleak, or hopeless. With love, everything seems to be coated with a new spark of life, albeit sometimes more hurtful because love is flawed. And the feeling after love is lost, that‚Äôs the worst. The gut feeling that you just aren‚Äôt good enough for someone or that there is no one out there for you. The period directly after love is lost is the hardest, as everything just seems so much darker, dreary, and drab. And so with my newly augmented resilience to the joke I then considered love to be, I said “drats!” and moved on.
–This was the fall of my 27th year and I wasn‚Äôt about to let another of my brilliant failures of a relationship stop me, I was going to move on and excel in other fields. After all, the other aspects of my life were going pretty well. I was supporting myself, living in a studio apartment in London just like I‚Äôd always dreamed. I had a great job working on the core design of a subtly popular “culture” magazine as it was called at the time. This was what I wanted, wasn‚Äôt it? A job that allowed creative output and control, an acceptable life in a country I wasn‚Äôt born in, and a whole new world of opportunities out there to choose from. The clarity achieved post-relationship was an immense benefit that set the tone for the years to come.
–It was then that I was able to realize there are different kinds of love. There is love of another, which is physical, spiritual, social, and overall beneficial, then there is love of yourself, which can come to no good end, and there was the kind of love I was then learning. The love of life and the love of work. I don‚Äôt mean work in the sense of a job per se, but more so in the sense of the fulfilling accomplishment of enjoyable tasks. I became absorbed in my job and created my best work for the magazine, and I also started on several projects at home. Ever since I was a teenager, I had an intense desire to create projects of an immense scope, projects larger than myself. It was during this time that I conceived the idea of turning my entire living space into a work of art. Every wall, every appliance, every aspect would have some meaning and be in some way uniquely mine. This was my genesis project.