Put a Twist on Your Life--but Beware the Spin-Busters

Here in Los Angeles, city of the big Smolders, Truth Butcher to the World, you’d better have a good story about yourself. In this cradle of the entertainment industry and its preoccupation with plot and character arc, merely going to work every day, engaging in reproductive-like activities and exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen aren’t going to provide a very convincing sense of your own existence.

No. What you need to do is impose some kind of narrative on the random chaos that led to your inhabiting the self you call you. You need to be able to project, from the acts that have gone before, how the rest of the epic drama might play out. Mercifully, originality is not required.

I got to speculating about this after reading, some weeks back, a Times report by education writer Kenneth R. Weiss about the essays that local high school students write in applying for admission to elite colleges and universities. Many schools give applicants the opportunity to describe the challenges they’ve overcome in life, and many students fairly leap at the chance to shore up their grades in advanced-placement chemistry with trenchant bits of autobiography.

While some of the students have tales of genuine hardship to relate, others suds up rather ordinary lives with strained melodrama and, in some cases, invent situations and characters altogether. Students can even get advice from private educational consultants whose function amounts to that of script doctor.

College admissions people are on to this game, though. Witness this letter, which recently came into my possession from sources I’m not at liberty to identify. It is to a certain high school senior I’ll call “G.,” from the director of admissions at Occiberkford Tech, the most prestigious institution of higher education in California. You can imagine how bloody the competition is.

Dear Mr. G.:

Thank you for having the exquisite taste to apply to Occiberkford Tech.

The volume of applications we receive usually prohibits us from sending an applicant more than the tersest notice of acceptance or, as is far more common, rejection. However, the extraordinary nature of your application essay has moved the admissions committee to respond in greater detail.

To begin with, we find it utterly remarkable that a child born with spina bifida could one day find himself playing forward on his junior varsity soccer team. We referred this aspect of your essay to a member of our medical faculty, and she, too, found it noteworthy in the extreme. In fact, she was unable to find in the clinical literature any other reference to that condition being “completely healed” by meditation and calisthenics, as in your case.

This is especially amazing in light of what you cite as the effects on your constitution of the Irish Potato Famine, which, you say, turned your once-proud family into penniless refugees to the United States. We suppose it is possible, if not exactly likely, that the deleterious genetic effects of malnutrition still could be operative after a century and a half.

We are inclined to agree that the steady stream of Bs you have earned in your high school English classes, as opposed to the A-pluses our applicants typically can point to, is more meaningful if one is willing to take into consideration that your “traditional family language,” as you put it, is Gaelic. One member of our committee suggested, in fact, that we write this letter in that language, but the one member of our faculty who is fluent is on sabbatical.

In addition to struggling with an education offered in something other than your mother tongue, the frequent gang beatings you allude to having endured en route to school must have sorely tested your resolve. We were not previously aware of the extent of gang activity in your community, but the tormentors you mention must be particularly insidious, as not even your local police department knows of the existence of the “Calabasas Deth Boyz.”

We have duly noted also the courage and selflessness you showed in helping your father rebuild the family home after it was destroyed by that unfortunate wildfire a few years back. Your father’s subsequent decline into alcoholism and your nightly visits during his extended stay in the rehabilitation center no doubt cut significantly into your study time, especially considering the predawn shift you were working in the kitchen at the International House of Pancakes to help your bedridden mother make ends meet.

The hand injury you sustained rescuing your younger siblings from the wildfire must, indeed, have presented a formidable obstacle as you typed your essay (to say nothing of the multi-volume novel you confide is currently the subject of a bidding war among publishers). Perhaps you have become skilled in the use of voice-activated software, although we’d think you would have brought that to our attention.

Taking all of this into account, we find your 3.1 academic grade-point average not only remarkable, but miraculous.

And because we are loath to disrupt the pattern of adversity on which you so clearly thrive, we are pleased to inform you that your application for admission to Occiberkford Tech has been denied.

James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com