Everything Had To Be Perfect.
Shane recently started working on his college essay – but he wasn’t happy with his initial results. I told him, “Just tell a story of something that was meaningful to you.” And then, like any insanely obsessed mother, I wrote several essays of my own – based on real examples from my own life – to show him what I meant.
Fortunately, each of these essays is just the right length for a blog post – so I am posting them all here. God knows Shane doesn’t need them! Thanks for reading.
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My favorite hobby is unlikely to be shared by anyone else applying to college. Sure, I’m a voracious reader and especially enjoy books about dogs. I walk my own dog frequently. I play softball and tennis and I love to swim across the bottom of the pool while counting the seconds to see how long I can hold my breath (53 seconds) and listening to AC/DC through headphones gives me an unbelievable thrill. But my favorite hobby is: bulletin board changing.
Surprisingly, some people will not know that bulletin board changing can even be classified as a hobby. However, I guarantee that I have spent more time on changing the photos on my bulletin board than I’ve spent floating across the bottom of a pool.
It all started when my parents said I couldn’t hang pictures on my walls because using tape on the walls would ruin the paint. So as a gift, they got me a bulletin board. To supplement this gift, I also received subscriptions to Sixteen and Tiger Beat magazines. For the uninitiated, these magazines contain full-page photos of some of the most beautiful celebrities in the world. And those are the photos I use regularly on my bulletin board.
When I was on the yearbook staff, which was my favorite high school club, I learned layout techniques from the publishing world. For example, if the person in a photo faces left, the photo should be placed in a way that allows them to be “looking” toward the center of the publication. This draws the reader’s eye to the center of the yearbook and it makes for a more unified, cohesive look.
So I scoured the magazines and found just the right photos for my bulletin board. Scott Baio’s face with a blue background looked amazing beside Greg Evigan’s orange-enhanced portrait. Leif Garrett’s flowing locks were showcased on the bottom of the board while Parker Stevenson made the top level. Everyone faced inward. This was not as easy a task as it may sound, since I often changed every single picture two, three – even ten times – before I finally settled on the final product.
A few days or a week would go by, and I’d find another photo that was so alluring that I simply had to put it on my board. Changing one photo was never an option; everything had to be perfect. So I would take the bulletin board off the wall on any given Saturday morning, and I would revamp the whole thing, start to finish.
Perhaps Matt Dillon’s brown eyes gazed so deeply into my soul that I used three photos of him, spaced apart so as not to create a cluster. Next to John Travolta’s dimpled chin was a photo of Michael Beihn or Lance Kerwin. And a gorgeous photo of Shaun Cassidy held my gaze long enough to make me tear it from the magazine and put it on that board immediately.
A new issue of Sixteen would arrive the following week, so I’d change out all the actors for rock stars. It was a glorious way to spend another Saturday. I may not be typical, but I do have a sincere desire to enjoy my surroundings in an obsessive but organized fashion.