not doing a statement
2004-11-30

I hate writing personal statements. I think it's because you have to write about yourself as if you have these Official Interests in Life. I'm tremendously bad at that. Does anyone really have these interests that they can write down in capsule form? And shut up your mind if you're thinking, "Well, I have hobbies I like to talk about." This isn't about hobbies! It's about academic interests and life paths! I can't put down "knitting" as evidence that I am a viable grad student!

I want to be able to write a personal statement about how the admissions committee should let me into their school because I'll end up swiping money from charity* if they leave me any longer in the private sector. Either that or I'll become a Republican. They're probably equally horrid concepts to the admissions committee anyhow.

* It would be a charity for babies. To make the possibility even more horrible.

Does anybody think I can get away with doing a statement on Peggy Noonan and Maggie Gallagher? God, I can't count all the things wrong in this article - the out-of-left-field ethnic references, the tone that comes straight out of an elementary school textbook, the idea that "normal" equals "right."

This has to be my favorite part of the article, though. It's in reference to those mean people (as opposed to "nice people," a description Noonan actually uses) who called Bush a cokehead, and how they're Wrong Wrong Wrong.

"I don't know about that, but I know [what] America went through [in] the 1970s, and America is still in recovery."

First of all, what the hell? Is all America one giant Betty Ford clinic? Does Noonan have some nasty 70s memories that she's now projecting onto all America? And how does the time period excuse Bush from being a drunk and a cokehead? Recreational gak has been around since at least the thirties, and people have been getting drunk since long before that, and both activities have been generally frowned upon by society. But it's perfectly all right for Bush to do it because he picked the exact right time period to do it in? I'm glad Bush cleaned up and all, but if, say, my dad went around saying that he was "still in recovery" from the 1970s, people would smack him down with a vengeance for being a lazy tool.

(My dad actually works with the one group of people who I think have a claim for "recovery" from a specific decade - Vietnam vets. Seeing as how Noonan is part of a gang that is all for cutting veterans' benefits, somehow I don't think she's all that interested in the betterment of man.)