My Harvard Application Essay
After I was accepted to every school in the world anyone in the world could ever want to go to, ever, a lot of people asked me, not knowing my name wasn't actually Ted, "Hey, Ted, what do you think got you in?" To which I would sagely reply, "It is not necessary for speech to come from the tongue." Most people would be sort of intimidated by that response because they figured I was so smart, and they'd stop and think about it as if it contained all the answers they sought, but the truth is I was just being weird. Looking back I guess that's sort of how Jesus or Bob Dylan must have felt before they jumped the shark and got crucified.
The truth is, though, I actually know what got me into Harvard. It was my essay. They even wrote me back and said, "Ted, we don't really like you and we don't think you'll be a very good student, but your essay was one of the best we read this year." Actually, they didn't really write those first seventeen words--only the last eleven. But the rest was implied.
So I've decided, since people have asked me in the past, and I miss those people, since I guess most of them are dead by now, that I'll put up my winning essay. So without further ado, this is what it takes to get you into Harvard:
In response to the prompt, "Describe a fictional character, historical figure, or creative work (art, music, science, etc.) that’s influenced you and explain that influence."
Toast, by Tim Lambert
If I could do any one thing in my life—anything—I would be a space dolphin hunter.
Why? I hate dolphins. They're trash to me. They're scum. And everyone knows that by the time I'm out of college—about nine years from now—they will be in space…lurking in the darkness.
And someone's gonna have to kill 'em.
When I was just a wee little boy I watched my first Crocodile Dundee movie, and it changed my life forever. When I saw ol' Mick Dundee dive into that river and come out with the carcass of a ten foot lizard slung over his back, I knew what I was meant to do. I would dream at night about sharpening knives on the ice caps of Nepal, in frantic search of the Yeti. I figured since it was so elusive, it must have done something it was ashamed of. And when a Yeti is ashamed, you know shit has really gone down.
Anyway, I basically just killed stuff. All the time. For looking at me funny, and for having no souls.
Someone once called me a sociopath. She had a degree in psychology. But if she was so smart, how come she's dead now? Huh? The answer is she's stupid.
But space dolphins aren't stupid. They're cunning bastards, and it takes a truly sharp human intellect to trace them through the vacuum of space. But I figure that won't be a problem, since I aced two of the sections on the SATs.
So back in the jungle, I was wading through a river dyed red with my blood, draining rapidly out of an inch-wide gash circling my abdomen like a hoola hoop. I knew I wouldn't make it much longer if I didn't make it to the helipad by the time the sun hit the jewel of the monkey idol I had placed at the top of the Incan ruins. For the first time in my life I stopped to consider what I was still living for. What was there? Another endless line of vacuous monsters just waiting to be made into corpses. It was the same grind, over and over. Couldn't there be something more to life? Shouldn't there be? What had happened to those high-minded dreams of meaning and morality that I had held so dear long ago?
But just then my bullshit was cut short by a huge fireball that broke through the canopy and landed on the bank behind me and exploded. I was knocked face first into the water before I could even manage to take a breath. I lay below the rippling surface for nearly a full minute before finally collecting my senses and pushing off the muck below. But as I rose slowly from the deep, having been pushed into the center of the river, I felt something cold as death itself slide against my leg.
Dolphin.
Fast forward to space. I'm floating around in a strange embryonic sack of fluid that the government assures me will keep my alive for up to six years in the void. I don't plan to take that long. Five hours before I made a near-fatal mistake by wandering into the den of the space dolphins in the midst of a spontaneous orgy. I only managed to escape after having my left leg severed by one particularly raucous female.
The sack has started its slow process of rebuilding my leg, but I've taken the severed one for my own purposes. For the past three hours now I've been pulling away the skin and muscle fiber. My femur will make an excellent cudgel—and I know who my first target will be. That horny dolphin she-bitch-slut.
I take a break for breakfast. It was here that I first found solace in toast.
I was the first person in the history of my school to come out as toastsexual. I'll never forget the first day after I broke the news. I only told a few friends, but word spread overnight. In my first class, during a test, a boy behind me made toaster noises. Everyone laughed at my expense. Then in the cafeteria I went to buy some milk and one of the lunch ladies threw a fork through my eyelid and farted aggressively. I found out later that she was actually having a psychotic breakdown, but at the time I took it really personally. I went outside to eat under the dock, alone with my toast.
At least, I thought I was alone. I was almost finished when a dolphin walked out of the ocean, dragging what I estimated to be several thousand of those giant barbed things that were all over the Normandy beaches in the D-Day scene of Saving Private Ryan. She glared at me, and made a noise that sounded like "Blomph."
If there's anything I've learned from killing dolphins it's that love can be a funny thing.
