I'm signing up to try and win a Trip with NY Times journalist Nick Kristof. He selects two people, one student and one teacher, to accompany him on a trip to Africa to report on... uh... Africans, I guess.
Anyway, the application requires an essay of 700 words or less. Mine checks in at a hearty 678. And here it is:
Under the orange glow of the sodium arc lights, I gave 57 copies of The Gospel of St. John to various friends, acquaintances, strangers and passers-by at a house party in the 19th Ward of Rochester, NY. Religiously, I'm unaffiliated. I was testing myself and looking to start a lot of conversations.
Lately my conversations with strangers have been of a more biological impetus, but the thrill of discovering people remains.
I have been writing since at least the fourth grade, including investigative journalism. Apart from a fiction story about time-traveling cats, that year I wrote an article about the student at the neighboring desk and his propensity for passing gas. I took a few liberties, as I recall, about the teacher passing out and the class guinea pig dying, but the article remains one of my fonder grade school memories. It was one article I had written in a self-produced journal of four pages. The other was about a ground-hog we had espied traversing the grounds from bush to bush.
Maybe it is because I'm an only child from a quiet, rural town in a quiet, rural state or maybe it is because my family has a long-standing history of activism but I have a drive for humanist causes. I firmly believe in the power of people to do the Right Thing. Sometimes a little prodding or poking is needed, gentle nudging from those in the know. I would like to be one of those doing the prodding.
I'm tired of standing aside and talking with friends who largely agree with me. I'm tired of preaching to the choir, of not making waves and of not informing. I got a taste of it writing for my school paper and it whet my appetite. I'm ready for more.
I have traveled. Not extensively but I've been around a bit. I have not had an experience yet that I have regretted. When I was sick in New Zealand and vomiting water and mucus, I was pleased the perfumed air was not the air of home. The insomnia brought on by travel and the undying day of Summer Solstice in the Åland Islands was a delight. Listening to birds tweetling and twittering at midnight in a hazy, purple dusk enchanted my Mother and I and eternally endeared me to that land. The Bahamas are a lovely place but in desperate need of environmental reform. For every sun and rum soaked tourist there has to be half a ton of waste and refuse. Styrofoam and bottles litter every inch of Eleuthera that isn't a lived in tourist abode.
I know something about determination, drive and sacrifice for your art. During High School I broke my thumb in a poorly executed stunt for a movie that wound up abandoned. The director, Nick, was less than sympathetic.
“Nick, I think I really hurt my thumb.”
“Shut up, pussy, get back on the ground.”
I've made mistakes. In an article about the Middle East, I made some editorial slip-ups that were, unfortunately, interpreted as anti-semitic. But after a brief talk with Hillel House and a reconciliation in the next issue, the situation was ameliorated.
I've seen a man die. A heart attack at the bottom of a ski trail. I've been the ring bearer in a wedding. I've been pulled over for drunken bicycling. I've had a hamburger with a fried egg on it. I've broken up fights. I've witnessed an underground boxing tournament. I've sat by my dying grandmother and I cried when she walked again. I've looked ten generations into my past. I've driven 370 miles to sleep on a mattress on a floor and film a band. I've been in a car accident. I've fished in the moonlight. I've jumped off the top of a building. I've moved a ton of ice with a small push.
I've lived a good enough life for 23 years but I have not yet done what I need to. I have not yet done enough good for others.
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