My Struggle with Personal Statements

The personal statement is one of the strangest writing assignments that can be thrust upon someone. With almost no direction you are asked, in a 1000 words or less, to tell your story. This is ludacris. It is founded on several outlandish assumptions.

First the idea that I have idea what my story is or that it has any degree of a reasonable progression or plot that I can easily understand is wishful thinking at the best. My "story" is a series of impulsive decisions made moment by moment by former versions of myself that are as unrecognizable to me now as a stranger form halfway across the world. To hold me not only responsible to these former version of my self but to expect me to be able to justify them and assemble them in some compact linear form is simply asking the impossible. 

Secondly to expect me to be able to convey my entire essence of being in a form of prose limited to 1000 words is like asking Da Vinci to invent a helicopter with only lead as a base material. Prose is fine for stories, narrative, and essay but what in God's name makes you think that my heart and soul is most readily conveyed in any of those forms? And on top of that you impose a word limit! Oh tyranny! What if Dickens was limited to only 1000 words in writing David Cooperfield? Imagine the beauty of growth, the ebbies of conflict, the shades of morality that would have been forsaken for no other purpose than convenience! If you wish for convenience then please do not be so brazen as to ask me to lay bear my soul! 

Finally, and probably most idiotically, is the assumption that you or anyone is capable of assessing this rendition of my being. That you can somehow judge the quality of how someone chooses to present their "story". Were I too send you a black and white picture of Nietzsche or a Walt Whitman poem who are you to say that this some how lessens my potential contribution to the world? These things may hold unknowable value for which you could not possibly begin to understand and I certainly couldn't describe in prose in 1000 words. Ah but for convenience, for convenience and clarity it is that we must apply these assumptions and constraints. I only warn that these constraints for convenience will not end with application and paper processes that these constraints become a state of thinking and soon, if something is not convenient it is simply not worth doing.

The State in Which I Live

You may remember that I have taken up residence in a small home in the town of Teaneck. It is next to a middle school and a turtle conservatory of which I have grown overly found. The town is peaceful and the nights are quiet. This subdued atmosphere however does not carry into the home in which I am resident.

I now like with three other people. Without exception they are all mad. Let us begin with the most humorous of the trio.

“They call me ‘The Rat’” were his first words to me. The fat, heavily bearded, sharp toothed, Saudi Arabian man that was sitting in my living room thought not to give me his name or extend his hand in greeting; rather he offered a decidedly unflattering nickname and an unbalanced smile while he continued to scratch his balls. This could have been our only interaction I would have known enough about the man. My expression of surprise must not have been well hid for he went on to explain the origin of this title. “You see, in college, in the dorm, I would become very hungry, and at night I would awaken and scrounge about for food, collecting in my bed and eating for sometime before falling back asleep…like a rat!” The Rat looked at me expectantly, perhaps waiting for a laugh, I let my cocked eyebrows relax and said “So it is, it’s nice to meet The Rat” and turned upstairs to lock up all my food.

The first few nights living with the rat were unremarkable but then the nightly grumblings began. I would just finishing my reading and having had a long day of work and class was half between dreams and wakefulness when I would hear a long sigh erupt from The Rat’s room, or hole as he might have called it. There would follow a period of between 40 and 50 minutes of his stomping around, moving boxes and furniture, with a desperation that was reminiscent of a beast in its final moments. The door you fling open and The Rat would go vaulting down the steps, the sighing becoming more of moan. The lights crept in under my door and the shadows of his movements danced on my walls. I heard the refrigerator door thrown open and its contents assaulted. This would go one for a period of minutes and then quietly all the passion gone The Rat would stumble back up the stair and into his room. When the dawn came the only evidence of the raid that had occurred were a misplaced bag of cheetos forgotten on the stairs.

The resident in absencia is apparently named Brian. Although only having meet him twice in the 6 months we have both been living there I really have no proof of that. Brian lives in the basement and apparently designs suitcases. One might consider Brian to be in these matters a relatively normal renter; however, Brian is also subject to some rather strange circumstance. To start, Brian is married. He has a wife and she lives just down the street. She lives alone in a big house. Why does Brian not live with his wife? No one knows. Brian also takes phone calls in the middle of the night beneath my window in which he discusses rather interesting things; the “moving” of things, the “purity”, and the “price” of these things without ever naming the things. Brian also never comes upstairs or is in the kitchen despite not having any access to a fridge or a stove in his basement. In fact Brian is never anywhere but under my window smoking a “cigarette” or in the basement. In fact The Rat has never even seen Brian. It is very possible Brian may not even be real.

Finally we arrive at the master of this house, Olga. One day upon returning home from week I realized that my room was absolutely frigid. I saw that the heat was turned off. I assumed I must have mistakenly left it off and fixed it and went on with my day. This would have been unremarkable except this happened everyday for the next week. Now, some nights I come home pretty late because of my class schedule and it is difficult to sleep in a glorified ice box so I thought I must get to the bottom of this. The next day that I left I placed a small rubber ball just behind my closed door so that if it were to be opened it would be struck and sent to the other side of the room. Sure enough upon returning home I saw the ball underneath my desk nowhere near where I had left it and the heat turned all the way off. It was clear from this that Olga (The Rat had not moved in yet and Brian leaves and arrives earlier and later than I do) was sneaking into my room every day after I had left and was turning off my heat. This is in and of itself is not a terrible thing. It is an invasion of my privacy and it is rather annoying but Olga was also charging me $50 extra dollars for heat during the winter. Heat that I was never getting to enjoy! What a scam she was running! Ah but I out smarted her. For the Rat’s room was still vacant. So every day before I left I would go across the hall and turn the heat all the way up and leave both doors wide open. Thereby I would suck all the out of the Rat’s future room and find myself nice a cozy despite the treachery of Olga.