I’ve been working really hard on this essay for a scholarship application, but every idea I’ve had has resulted in futility, and it was becoming quite depressing. So, I just started writing with a satirical slant, and here’s what I came up with: (the prompt was, “Describe a current event or issue affecting our world today that has influenced your goals and aspirations for the future.”)
There is no denying the jarringly real and totally destructive impact Global Warming has had, and will continue to have, on my future aspirations. Since my joyous days of my exuberant youth, I have always held dearly to a very precious goal of mine. You see, my father, albeit a man of great upstanding and stature within the compassionate and affectionate aura of my family’s somewhat veiled obligatory love, was worth less than that two thousand year old “antique” sofa my neighbors have been furtively trying to sell at every one of their three or four annual garage sales in increasingly more and more desperate ways. Despite his absolute lack of worth, my Father carried a vision with him, a dream to travel across the entire continent of Antarctica. Unfortunately, this vision would never develop into anything more than a rather tiresome and trite joke that certain ignorant relatives relinquish at every single family gathering. The joke was always very inappropriate because the punchline is that my father spent thirty years of his life as a quadriplegic and would need another thirty just to travel half the distance of a continent covered in more snow and ice than Fargo, North Dakota. The joke has since become doubly inappropriate because my father has been deceased for ten years. Now, I have taken it upon myself to live my father’s dream and experience what the poor man never would. Of course, I do mean that in a literal sense because I was actually planning on walking, and my father would have been relegated to the use of that defective wheelchair, which was really the only one we could afford from his welfare checks, and he wouldn’t have been able to walk, you see, because he would have been “riding”, and … you get the point. But now, now I will never be able to realize this dream! Damn that inconsiderate Global Warming! Did Global Warming ever consider Antarctica may one day become a place for quadriplegics to live their dreams, to become empowered through a harrowing experience that will almost certainly result in their obituary being more comical than the not-so-comical political editorials in the local newspaper? No, Global Warming has had no such considerations, and now it is with a few dozen tears streaming down my face that I write this. Tears of despair in the knowledge that Antarctica will actually be sunk beneath the watery depths of the ocean. However, I will triumph! I will have new aspirations and new goals that will lead me to even higher heights! I am going to become a deep sea explorer! You know, like those one guys that traveled around in a tiny submersible vessel and shrieked in geeky joy when they discovered the dining area of the Titanic was still completely in tact.
1 Comment
February 27, 2008 at 5:44 pm
liking it man. You were always good at writing.