There are some days you just can’t make lists for. Today was one of them. Too much stuff in a whirlwind in my brain and me catching drifts here and there but not really cruising on any of them. Still not quite sure what I did today or what I should have done, or what I should or will do tomorrow, but I know I don’t have the mental wherewithal (love that word) to make a list.

I do know that I need to define myself in 2,000 words or less, which is always a ridiculous and hazardous exercise in luck and hideous pretension. The sample personal statements I was looking at all say things like, “I first developed a keen interest in representations of the body in 18th century literature while playing in my grandmother’s attic as a small child.” Really. And those are the people that get accepted. I find myself wanting to say things like, “I hate mayonnaise, I can cook green chilaquiles, and I once crossed South America on buses. I also write, and I would like to go to school for that.” I was thinking, as I served myself a glass of Corona with Sprite and mowed down Cheese Ruffles in a bout of junk food revenge, about how in these circumstances a personality imprint would be really useful. Like a fingerprint scan, the kind they do at immigration, but for personality and life goals. You’d just stand in front of the machine and it’d trace you up and down with its electric red line, and then your personality – how you dressed up in scarves when you were four and played veterinarian with the cats, how your stepmom once told you “you have a fierce sense of justice” and that quote still bounces round your head, how you like to think about eggs and want to write an essay about that, how you could go on and on about language and how it is lost or gained in translation, about how nostalgia is the prevailing sensation that drives your life, about how you love dogs, about how when you get fired up on something man people around you are going to squirm a bit in their chairs, about how your female friends are strong and quirky and funny and have evaded the whole career-life-plan thing. Yeah, that. And maybe some stuff too about the kind of smells you like and the people you don’t know why you’re attracted to and the things that make you feel guilty, regretful, ecstatic, sad. The empathies you feel. Those would all be part of the imprint. And you’d scan it and send it off with your transcripts and GRE’s and the admissions committee would say, “Interesting. She has a weakness for Mexico even though machismo still stirs up imperialist righteous American tendencies she’s not willing to fight off just yet. And she loves the thought of winter although the actual experience of it tends to piss her off. And what’s this little line here? Oh, right, she can send small novels of emails and sometimes, she actually prints them off and binds them together and thinks of them as books. Noted.”

And then, taking the writing sample and the personality imprint and the recommendations and the accumulated dots and numbers into account, they’d accept you or not. But you wouldn’t have to use eight hundred words talking about how you discovered subverted feminism in Sense and Sensibility in your grandmother’s attic, and how from that very moment every channel in your life has fed into the dream of going to XYZ university in XYZ program.

Sigh.

Am I bitching?

The personality scan would probably show a bright black curve there ; tendency to go on winding rants when provoked, can ride the updrafts of these rants until her companion offers another beer. Noted.