I'm so angry, I don't think it'll ever pass

For your viewing pleasure, here is one of my application essays. While writing the first half, I felt cynical and ferocious--a feeling I quite enjoyed.





I seem to have been a late bloomer in some respects. Toward the beginning of senior year, when most of my fellow AP students had known EXACTLY where they wanted to go to college and EXACTLY what they wanted to be, I was just beginning to feel a shadow of an inkling that acting might be something that I wanted to pursue further. When November came around, I went through the motions of selecting and applying to half a dozen schools or so, but my heart wasn't in it. After many years of poor instruction, condescension, and unanswered questions about why-the-system-was-the-way-it-was, I was a volatile whirlwind of angsty, vengeful fury when it came to schooling. Most of my applications went unfinished and when springtime pranced into town, my mailbox was desolate for want of a single acceptance letter.

Faced with the age-old question of what in the world I was going to do with myself for the next little while, I decided to give credence to my shadow of an inkling and audition for the two-year acting conservatory at a local community college. What I discovered through attending this program was just how important I believe the arts are. In an age where most of the careers available to my peers and me are herding our already hectic and escapism-ridden society further toward our over-industrialized, sleep-deprived doom, I see the arts as a healing force. Instead of the typical concerns of achieving higher efficiency and dumping more responsibilities on workers, the arts are concerned with encouraging love and understanding, and figuring out how we can possibly survive in a lonely, frightening world.

One day I would love to create an arts school for young children that would chiefly focus on kindling their natural love for storytelling. With roots in traditions such as Commedia Dell'arte and Mime rather than contemporary realism, I would like the kids to understand how the imagination and sense of humor that is already a part of their daily lives can focus and expand into works of art. My choice to pursue a BFA despite my dissatisfaction with most of the schooling in our country has to do with my desire to--after my goals as a performer have been achieved or abandoned--teach. The degree is necessary to this end, and before I can solidify my theories about actor training, I need to explore the art of acting as fully as I possibly can.





Also, here's a sentence that I eventually decided to leave out:

I now have the drive to deal with the bureaucratic shitstorm that seems to be an all-but-inevitable part of organized education.