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| Essay Questions |
What is your most memorable childhood experience? For the longest time, I thought that my most vibrant childhood experience had been a dream. I've always had this sort of lingering recollection of a long, earthen corridor. And I remember seeing gem-stones set into the walls, like the kind you'd expect to see the seven dwarfs filling sacks with. I've yet to encounter anything significant to this memory to strike me as so inherently "magical" or just "huge". I more or less accidentally mentioned it in front of my mom and got some clarification. She laughed and recounted to me, detail by detail, this exact place that I'd had in my memory for the whole of my life. I was boggled but she continued to tell the story of this offset vacation spot that they'd taken me to when I was younger, with an underground cavern that had been decorated with these back lit gems and textured, mesh stalactites. She told me about the cavern, and the vaguely animatronic creatures up on the walls. The water-fall that would rush down the hole ended up being half-natural/half man-made, something about the nearby springs that would build up pressure and push however many hundreds of gallons of water through this room every few minutes. I'm glad that I know the truth but I liked it better with the magic in tact. What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? Without a doubt, that would be my uncle on my mom's side. My uncle had always been an artist, displaying talent in several facets of the word. I tended to follow him around wherever he went and idolize him; he'd give me his novels and let me sit and "draw" with him (which meant I was scribbling incomprehensible gibberish onto notebook paper) or "play" his guitar. He just made me feel included. As I got older and was beginning to flesh out my identity, my relationship with him became more important. What character traits do you admire in an individual? I'm a huge fan of honesty. Not just "honesty" the way we were taught in Sunday school ("Never lie"), but I mean REAL honesty: where the person is not only honest with everybody but mostly honest with himself. What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? I was on stage (so you know it's going to be brutal) during a musical. I had just finished my song, and the guy acting across from me was supposed to stumble into the room in a sort of drunken stupor. Well, he did...but it was painfully evidence and and obvious that his fly was unzipped. The tail of his shirt, having been tucked down into his pants, had made its way through the opened front of his slacks. Now, you've probably seen people do this in an attempt to act drunk or slovenly but what made this moment so gut-crushingly funny was that this guy seriously had no idea, and the audience was feeding off of it. There's something about a grown man (with a spotlight on himself) being upstaged by his wardrobe malfunction that maxs people roll around until they could not breathe, especially when you're the one poor sap on stage with him, and you're supposed to remain in character. He wasn't able to deliver his line for about four solid minutes because of the laughter. Once I got out of there and my face was strained from stifled laughter, I started going over the next few minutes of the show in my head. My jaw hit the ground as I realized which song the fly-guy was about to have to sing: "My Little Green Snake." As expected, the song took longer than usual because the audience was in hysterics. Oh, I almost forgot, his name was Willie. If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? I would travel to California and spend a ton of money preserving the redwood forest. I would also like to visit an exotic island. When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? I would like to pass on to my children my compassion, open-mindedness, and humility for this world. | |||