The Piano Knows Something I Don't Know

How could a seventeen year old say that he's truly experienced failure?

How could a seventeen year old say that he's truly experienced failure?

I spent the summer before my senior year on my piano bench, bent over the keys and pondering the meaning of life, which I still haven't quite figured out. I've always found that I think best while playing the piano, and I suspect that it's because the piano only lets out its secrets when I'm playing another Chopin étude or Beethoven sonata. I needed all of the brainpower that I could get as I prepared to apply to Kale University, my dream school.

I did take my counselor's advice and find a few other schools to apply to, just in case I didn't get into Kale, but I didn't love any of them in the way that I loved Kale. Was there any other school out there like Kale? I wasn't certain, but I doubted it. There was a certain indescribable quality that Kale possessed that I couldn't seem to find in any other college or university. To be honest, I had no idea what I would do if Kale rejected me.

Therefore, my best bet was to submit an application to Kale that was so stellar that they wouldn't have any choice but to admit me, despite my aforementioned low ACT score. I didn't know how I would go about doing that, but there had to be a way. After all, that boy from my school had gotten into Yale, and that was a much more difficult school to get into. Kale admitted people with mediocre test scores all the time. How painful could the process be?

On August 1st, in the midst of the dog days of summer, I logged into the Common App and looked over what I had to do to apply to Kale. I briefly looked out the window at the boiling hot sidewalk and dry grass, and then decided that I didn't give a damn about the weather and shifted my attention back to my computer screen.

At first, it didn't look too bad. I had to fill in the Common Application, write a personal statement, answer a few Kale-specific questions, send in a letter of recommendation from one of my teachers, pay seventy five dollars, and possibly sell my soul to Kale University, and then I would be all done. I immediately started filling in my basic information.

First Name: George

Middle Name: Ryan

Last Name: Ross

Suffix: III

Preferred Name: Ryan

Sex: Male

Date of Birth: August 30th

Address: 333 Mulholland Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada

I continued to fill in meaningless questions for the rest of the afternoon. However, I froze when I saw the essay prompts. Everything else had been simple enough, with the possible exception of the question about my religion, which I didn't quite know how to answer in a single word, and the activity section, where I tried to pass off "questioning life, the universe, and everything" as an extracurricular activity. I'd estimate that I spend at least ten hours per week in a state of existential angst. The essays, on the other hand, weren't nearly that easy.

At first, I considered writing about the first prompt (some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story), but I then realized that I didn't have a meaningful background, identity, interest, or talent. I could have written about my dad, but that would have depressed me, and besides, I had already covered that in the family section. My interests had already been covered in the activities section, I had no talent other than the piano, and how could I write about my identity when I hadn't yet figured it out myself? No teenager knows who they really are, and in fact, it could be argued that nobody understands themselves. Of course, that begs a different question. If nobody understands themselves, then who can say for sure that we truly exist? My point is that it was silly to ask about identity for something like this.