This was, or I guess still is, my college essay. Enjoy!
It was the first official Wednesday of fall, and it felt it. Bundled up in a gray drama sweatshirt reading “Act Justly,” I closed the red door behind me and shuffled down the eroding brick stairs covered in mutilated acorn husks from the hungry squirrels’ gluttonous debauchery. I paused halfway down to admire the handiwork of one of my favorite natural artists, an elegant spider displaying her expansive, dewy web polka dotted and heavy with gutless mummified corpses, twenty-seven unfortunate victims in all. Preparing to continue my descent, I was stopped again by a peculiar sound, the buzzing vibration of two candy wrapper wings fluttering against each other. Turning, I encountered a fat and juicy, humming bumblebee, his thighs thick with yellow pollen like a very unflattering pair of leggings from our miraculously reblooming azalea bush. I watched along, fascinated, as he bumbled on his way, hovering over each flower to find one untouched and going in for the landing, flailing his wings to steady himself as he scraped out the amber staple and unwillingly made the silence-shattering buzz. He left the bush, hovered in front of my face, traced a doughnut around my curly head, and flew off to pay his golden taxes to his tyrannical queen; only after his departure did I notice the few other bees busily and noiselessly at work.
Noticing their lack of buzz, I observed them closely and realized they also lacked bumble: they would land, gracefully and perfectly, on each flower, fold their wings behind their backs, and crawl across the petals, extracting the pollen carefully. My attention was recaptured by a familiar hum, and I quickly sought out the flower my fuzzy friend had restarted his pollen picking on. This time I studied him vigilantly for what seemed like an hour, though it couldn’t have been more than half a minute. Having found a suitable source, he landed on the delicate wiry stamen and began beating his glossy wings furiously, fumbling to gather the pollen. Once, twice, three times he fell out of the pinkish purple flowers, and three times he fell half a foot, making me flinch and gasp, before he painstakingly restarted his flying and returned to his post. As he clung to the petal to rest his weary wings, I noticed a chunk of gossamer missing from his left wing.
I was shamed by that bumblebee. He worked hard, despite his shortcomings, to meet the standards of his fellow workers. I have the potential to excel in all I do, and yet I often merely get by, procrastinating and slacking in any dull or difficult subjects. I have challenged myself in classes I enjoy and subjects that come easily to me, but I usually brush off topics I find uninteresting as unimportant. Yet here was this maimed bumblebee, scrounging for food for his family as best he could, which was still mediocre.
And suddenly, a new layer of insight and understanding was revealed. I was no longer a squished moth on the windshield of this bee’s life, but a passenger beside him. This humble bee and I shared a love of creating and living food. My academic successes no longer mattered, for I know how to cook, an art that seems to be dying out in this age of microwavable delectables. What will knowing the laws of sine and cosine, the phases of mitosis, and the different mounds of the Mound Builders do for me if I am unable to feed myself? How can a doctor measure her worth if she goes home to feed her children Chef Boyardee every night? Isn’t it soul-crushing when people know of nothing better than Poptarts, Campbells canned soup, and Betty Crocker brownies from a box? Is quality and flavor so far gone that we must stoop to these minimal levels of taste bud stimulation? When will the future come, when we eat little vitamin-like tablets for nutrition and get on with our lives? Or does the future hold in store beauty, art, and flavors unexplored and unimagined, waiting in some obscure cave in the recesses of genius?
Mine does.
I was shamed by that bumblebee. He worked hard, despite his shortcomings, to meet the standards of his fellow workers. I have the potential to excel in all I do, and yet I often merely get by, procrastinating and slacking in any dull or difficult subjects. I have challenged myself in classes I enjoy and subjects that come easily to me, but I usually brush off topics I find uninteresting as unimportant. Yet here was this maimed bumblebee, scrounging for food for his family as best he could, which was still mediocre.
And suddenly, a new layer of insight and understanding was revealed. I was no longer a squished moth on the windshield of this bee’s life, but a passenger beside him. This humble bee and I shared a love of creating and living food. My academic successes no longer mattered, for I know how to cook, an art that seems to be dying out in this age of microwavable delectables. What will knowing the laws of sine and cosine, the phases of mitosis, and the different mounds of the Mound Builders do for me if I am unable to feed myself? How can a doctor measure her worth if she goes home to feed her children Chef Boyardee every night? Isn’t it soul-crushing when people know of nothing better than Poptarts, Campbells canned soup, and Betty Crocker brownies from a box? Is quality and flavor so far gone that we must stoop to these minimal levels of taste bud stimulation? When will the future come, when we eat little vitamin-like tablets for nutrition and get on with our lives? Or does the future hold in store beauty, art, and flavors unexplored and unimagined, waiting in some obscure cave in the recesses of genius?
Mine does.
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