How I Spend New Year's Eve

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As New Year’s Eve draws near again, I know where I will be: in the mountains of Colorado curled up in front of fire, perhaps with snow gently falling outside. My family owns a ski condo, and the extended clan has gathered here between Christmas and New Year’s for umpteen years in a row. After a cheerfully chaotic dinner, assorted brothers- and sisters-in-law discuss which bar they will head to to toast the New Year in. But I will not be going. I will remain behind, curled up before a crackling fire with my lap top, reading college essays. I started my career in admissions at Pomona College, founding member of the Clairmont Colleges etc etc etc, and in the two years I worked for them I read essays by approximately two thousand applicants. When our Dean came across a particularly pitiful attempt, he’d yell, “I’ve got one!” and rush out into the main room of the admissions office, and the rest of us would pour out of our offices to listen to Jack read-- with feeling--the more deplorable of these teenage literary efforts. One was a classroom topic on Virginia Woolf, where the student had written about the declining population of wolves in Virginia. I kid you not. Jack’s rendition was hysterical. One can’t come up with this sort of parody on purpose. Another essay described the applicant’s forays into science by turning up the heat in her fish tank to see how high it could be before the fish started to die… or how many days the poor pet fishies could go without food. THAT student was coded “Do Not Take”—budding psycho that she revealed herself to be. And then of course there was the classic “up yours, admissions!” answer to our question “What change in the next twenty years would improve humanity the most?” The complete submission: “Only fools profesize.” Yeah. The poor kid wrote a three word essay and butchered the spelling of a non-existent word. Not
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