<p>oh man, so many creative ideas... mine seemed good back in November... :(</p>
<p>roommate essay: a list of my bad habits and what I like to eat
Int. vitality: staying up once till 3 a.m. talking about politics and philosophy with friends
Why Stanford: It's been my dream school since I was in 7th grade.</p>
<p>what'd you guys write about in the short answer "history revisited moment"? I actually enjoyed that question. I described Beethoven's last performance, when he was already deaf. (please don't let anyone else have written about this!)</p>
<p>Talking to a citizen from the ex-Soviet Union who loved the ideals on which America was founded more than any natural-born U.S. citizen I'd ever met.</p>
<p>Roommate Essay...</p>
<p>Ummm...I didn't really talk about anything. I said something about rooming with my little brother and from there it degenerated into a rambling discussion of politics and music</p>
<p>Why Stanford...</p>
<p>Because it's hella boss</p>
<p>For the "History Revisited" Question, I said:</p>
<p>"The War of 1812. Mainly to invade Canada."</p>
<p>History revisited: I wrote about no event. Just said its a great resource for all of us and I work in my present with the knowledge of past to improve my future.</p>
<p>So what do you think about this one? Good or bad?</p>
<p>Intellectually engaging thingy:
Real extensions to discreet differentiation. Talked about the half-differential dx of x^2, and how the 5.32th differential of e^x defies intuition written as a generating function.</p>
<p>Roommate warning:
[Although I was once strongly bent to ask forgiveness for my weirdness, I did not. I changed my plan at the last minute because I was not really apologetic whatsoever.]
WARNING: I will hug you.
[In more polite terms, of course, and with details about my constant cheeriness.]</p>
<p>Why Stanford?
Here are the actual first two sentences.
"I am not one-dimensional. Neither is Stanford."
With the sole exceptions of those lines, the response was specific and religiously human.</p>
<p>Hey I know its pretty stupid of me to put my essay for public criticism (the pvt themselves were pretty demotivating) but heck, hows my essay?
The following is a fragment of my poem, 'Incarceration':
I see my body spiral down
as helpless as an armed warrior
I am somewhere in between
or perhaps nowhere at all
in limbo
in jeopardy
in solitude
When I look at the profound interpretations of the lines that I wrote I can't help but marvel at the associative properties of the human
mind. The excerpt talks about how life is often a choice between what is deemed correct, what we may find attractive and what we
think is correct, about how we may be denied entry into the "good" side as well as the bad side, and may remain in limbo forever and
about how people use opposing concepts (of good-bad) to fit the things that do not conform to their biases into their world view.
The concept of 'armed warrior' talks about how just the presence of defence makes us vulnerable to attack, how we are sometimes
forced into action because we are capable of it. How the act of simply arming oneself automatically means the choice to not fight
vanishes.
The 'stuck in between part' talks about one's sense of identity. One's viewpoint is always affected by the way one judges himself.
When we consider ourselves, our identities in limbo we consider the whole world to be a polarized version of the classic mythology
kind and we are stuck in between. Despite it being internal, we attribute it to the external.
This interpretation of a poem which I had written in a soporific state is something I find extremely intellectually engaging. A poem can
mean many a thing, but I never thought that something I had written out of gut instinct could actually mean so much. This experience -
of writing a poem and then re-discovering it - does stimulate my sense of intellectual vitality.</p>