Date: September 3rd, 2009 10:09 AM Author: carnelian senate voyeur
assuming this isn't flame:
on the grammatical and punctuation side, it's terrible. no commas where they are needed, commas where periods need to be, etc.
as far as content goes, i stopped reading after the first 3 sentences. you need to start out with a hook. add more emotive words to give it a 'personal' feel.
Date: September 3rd, 2009 10:47 AM Author: spruce native
My best friend, C+C, and I would ride the bus to school every day in fourth grade. He was a little taller than me, with a cool crew cut and a pair of white pump shoes that he'd bang against the seat in front of us to annoy Jenny or Samantha or Stephanie or whatever other girl dared to sit there. And we'd laugh the whole ride over, doodling on our Trapper Keepers or sneaking a peak at whether our moms packed a pudding cup in our lunches.
And every day, there was a kid, probably 15 years old, who stood in front of the school with a trunk propped open and dozens (to my 10-year-old mind, hundreds) of plastic toys, made someplace in southeast Asia, priced at unbelievable bargains. Once in a while, I'd sneak a dime out of my dad's sock drawer just to have the joy of handing it over and receiving my very own Chinese finger trap or monster finger puppet or whistle with a ball.
My friends would crowd around him as he demonstrated the new yo-yo that he had in stock, or a special purple three-pack of Pixie sticks if we wanted a little extra sugar. He deftly handled the wares and the money and the crowd, and everyone loved him. And I never even knew his name.
A few years later, grade school was behind me, high school was behind me, and I was an 18-year-old nobody without a college diploma and a "nice" personality (as my grandma always said). C+C had moved away; he'd received a football scholarship to Auburn. Without any real options, or, perhaps more importantly, any money, I picked up a gig selling cars at a local Buick dealer. Jim ran the dealership. He was a former tailback standout at a nearby high school who broke his clavicle one summer and would never play again. But he knew how to move cars. And in a few weeks, I knew how to move cars. Like that 15-year-old pushing plastic toys on wide-eyed kids, I was selling the finest General Motors had to offer to folks in my community looking for a ride that would take them to a vacation home or to the Washington Monument or to a niece's wedding in Kansas City or wherever they wanted to go.
I'd moved enough cars that I wanted to do something else. So I took a gig at a little mortgage firm in Long Beach, and I was doing the same thing, just a different amount of money and a different kind of property. With a few bucks in my pocket, I hunkered down to find a college that I could afford, still dealing mortgages, and still thinking of that kid selling me toys.
And it wasn't until I took a couple of economics courses that the thread was weaved. We were all selling property or buying property or "engaging in a business transaction," as one prof in a patched jacket and a bow tie liked to drawl in one upper-level finance course. And I thought about what it would be like to go to law school and do the same thing, from a different angle. I'd been the buyer; I'd been the seller. Why not be the lawyer?
And here I am.
---
OP, did this interest you?
Now, re-read your statement. Does that interest anyone?
Date: September 3rd, 2009 11:33 AM Author: Concupiscible ticket booth
You will definiteley get into the top schools, OK?? I mean law school is hard and I dont know what you got on the LSAT test but I would bet you broke 160 and the LSAT is hard too but you have a compeling story and I think you have a good shot. I mean maybe not Harvard but definitely near-top schools like NYU bc they love good stories and interesting lifes and you sold cars so that is good.
Date: September 14th, 2009 12:23 AM Author: tripping point ape
IN the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.
He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend — the kind efface you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone — any man, I mean — to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While they were talking round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner. The Italian raised his head and said quickly:
‘Italiano?’
I answered in my bad Spanish: ‘No, Ingles. Y tu?’
‘Italiano.’
As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.
I mention this Italian militiaman because he has stuck vividly in my memory. With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of the war — the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns farther up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains. That was when I knew I wanted to go to law school.
Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
I have just written the word ``infinite.'' I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope of attending the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.