For those of you who aren’t familiar
with the Second-Semester Senior stereotypes, allow me to refresh you. Lazy.
Unmotivated. On Cruise Control. Maybe even a tad neglecting? (Particularly
Second-Semester Seniors with blogs to uphold…) All these characteristics serve
to define that seventeen or eighteen year old who is already into college,
finally realizing that all that work they did Junior year is actually paying
off. Right now.
However, despite the moans and
groans of many of my classmates (I’m sure), life goes on. Yes, I know, this is
getting into the Twilight Zone of clichés and vague, blanket statements. But
every Second-Semester Senior has to eventually reach this conclusion: that what
we do now still matters, we aren’t done, and there’s still much more to do.
I literally reached this conclusion
less than five minutes ago, when mindless YouTube browsing brought me to this.
After watching this, at first I felt
guilty for all the sleeping I’ve done this spring break. But then, I clicked
refresh, and watched the video again. And again. And I found myself feeling
less and less guilty. With every tap of my mouse on the replay button, I got
more and more excited. I remembered why I wanted to go to college in the first
place: all of the opportunities. (I know I’m straying into that Twilight Zone
again…) My favorite quote of the video was when 50 Cent said, “Sleep? When you
sleep, you miss the opportunity to be successful.” Just, Wow. Needless to say,
this video got me excited to work hard. Which, coming from a Second-Semester
Senior, is a hard thing to achieve.
Since I haven’t done much writing this
semester, to keep you all interested, here is one of my college essays that I
really liked and wanted to share with all of you. In roughly 500 words, I
answered the question: You saw something while walking on the sidewalk; what
was it? Even if this might deem me an official, certified nerd, I have to admit
that I had fun writing some of these college essays. Since I didn’t end up
applying to the school that this essay was for, I figured, why waste it?
Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? So here it is!! I hope to have new stuff for you
all to read really soon. J
Walking down Sunset Boulevard, I saw her.
I saw her spiky blondish brownish hair, her Botox-ed face, her sharp green
eyes.
“I have to spit every time I hear Jane
Fonda’s name.” My English teacher, Mr. Scott, cracks his knuckles as he says
this. We’re sitting outside of the cafeteria and he crams his long legs under
the wooden picnic table to face me. I flip to the second page of my yellow
legal pad – the one without doodles slithering across it. My pen sits heavy in
my hand as I write, “JANE FONDA = BAD” under “interview notes”.
“You don’t know the story about Jane
Fonda?” I shake my head, and he mutters something about it being old news under his breath. I scribbled
furiously in dark ink as Mr. Scott told me about Fonda’s visit to the Vietcong
POW camp.
“Men were tortured into visiting her. As
she scolded them for killing babies and
children, they slipped tiny notes into her palm for her to take back to
America. She shook all of their hands, looked them each in the eye, and just
handed those letters over to the North Vietnamese.” He spit into the grass, and
I thought about doing the same, but decided against it. After listening to Mr.
Scott’s first-hand account of the Vietnam War, I felt that it was not my spit
to spit, so to speak. There is that moment in everyone’s life where they
realize that there are “two sides to every story”, as the saying goes, and Jane
Fonda marks mine. I couldn’t believe Mr. Scott’s story. That night, I googled
“Jane Fonda Communist Traitor” and found a plethora of opinion pages about the
rumor. Reading a series of anonymous perspectives, I realized that there
weren’t only two sides to every story, but thousands. The GPS inside my brain
repeated recalculating, recalculating,
as my definition of truth changed. Truth was no longer concrete, it was an
abstract blob built by piecing together the millions of human perspectives. On
just one webpage, one woman turned into twenty.
However, a story from just one perspective
was no less of a story, and I realized this as well as I sat at that picnic
table, transfixed by my English teacher. The fat words that ballooned out of
his mouth smacked me in the face. Words scrawled on tiny pieces of paper home,
words on a blog furiously typed by a lonely veteran. All of these words linked
arms and made millions of stories, one no less captivating than the next. I
knew I wanted to tell my own stories, some even with words that caused grown
men to clear their throats and spit.
As I walk by Jane Fonda, I stop to see if
she has fangs. I squint my eyes tight, but still can’t tell if little devil
horns stick up from that blondish brownish spiky hair. Looking at her Botox-ed
face, I try to read the truth right out of her pores. But then, I decide I’d
rather have a million stories than just one “truth”, and keep walking.
MOVIES WATCHED: 19
SCREENPLAY PAGES WRITTEN: 44
NOVEL PAGES WRITTEN: 76
PAGES LEFT IN FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS: 336
