I finally got my act together and sent out my last grad-school application over the weekend. After grappling with these things for several weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that admissions offices design their applications as a test of the applicants’ dealing-with-hassle mettle, as a way of weeding out the non-serious. Prospective students must negotiate a bureaucratic and intellectual obstacle course of forms, essays, and mailing instructions that should really become a medal event in the next Olympics. “We’re here at the Pavilion Of Champions, Bob, awaiting the starting gun for the 2 x 400 Paperwork Hurdle Relay. The runners have taken their places in the blocks – and – they’re off! The pack is staying close together through the GREs as they round the first turn and head into professors-they-haven’t-spoken-to-since-late-in-the-Bush-presidency stretch to pick up their recommendations, and we’ve got some stragglers now, Bob, but most of the field has cleared the professors and we now see them heading for the personal-statement rope course – oh, too bad for Team Three, they didn’t get the signature across the flap! That has to hurt! The runners really have to dig deep here, a lot of them floundering through this section, knee-deep in bullshit, but just about everyone has disentangled themselves, and now we’ve got the hand-off to the registrars – what an exciting race! Transcripts in hand, the second legs of the relay teams have really kicked it into high gear, and oh boy, time to format the writing sample. Bob, the writing sample is often the undoing of a talented relay team, and we’re seeing that here today, as Team Seven drops out of the race due to a printer driver problem, but the rest of the pack has a clear shot to the post office, and we’ve entered the homestretch! Here comes Team One, and they’ve opted for a Priority Mail strategy with package tracking, so we’ll see how that works out for them. Ouch! Team Four gets hung up on the difference between registered and certified letters! Here comes the finish line, Bob, and – it’s Team One, by a merit-based-financial-aid form!” At a certain point, having used the “insert header/footer” function about seventeen thousand times in a row, MS Word threw out a little dialogue box that said, “Again? The hell? [OK] [Cancel],” and I also started to spell my own name incorrectly, because when I write or type or say a word a bunch of times, it begins to look weird and somehow wrong, so if anyone at the Columbia admissions office sees this, could you please put all the materials that say “Sarah D. Bunting” and all the materials that say “Sharha P. Bantong” together? Thanks.

I still can’t believe some of the things these applications wanted to know. I mean, “next of kin”? Why? Do they think I’ll kill myself if I don’t get in and they’ll have to notify my mother or something? “Um, yes, Mrs. Bunting? So sorry, but we’ve decided to decline your daughter’s application for admission, so if you could just pop over to her apartment and cut her down from the shower-curtain rod, we’d appreciate it. Oh, no, thank you, Mrs. Bunting.” One application wanted to know why I wanted a masters of fine arts, which seemed like a reasonable enough question, but then I thought about it and I got annoyed. Look, I just do, okay? If you want to ask the MBA applicants the same thing and watch them try to wriggle out of saying “because I’ll make more money,” go ahead, but leave me alone, because I’ve just given you eighty bucks to process my application for one of the most useless post-bac degrees this side of Sally Struthers. Another application asked me to comment on a work in my field published within the last ten years, another question that seemed fair at first but upon further consideration began to seem ridiculous – my field is non-fiction, for god’s sake. I’ve got everything from The New Joy Of Cooking to Hunter S. Thompson in front of me, so could they narrow it down a trifle? I considered writing a snotty tongue-in-cheek critique of a self-help book, but I don’t own any self-help books and didn’t intend to buy one for this purpose, so I wound up blathering on for a thousand words about Bill Bryson’s book A Walk In The Woods, a book I’d only bought in the first place because a literary agent had told me to make my own sad and unwanted book “more like” Bryson’s, and in retrospect I realize that I should have written about another book instead, because when you open an essay with, “I wanted to hate Bill Bryson’s book, but I didn’t; now I just hate Bill Bryson, because he got published and I didn’t,” it probably doesn’t really do you any favors in the eyes of the admissions officer reviewing your file.

Still another school wanted a current résumé. I hadn’t updated my c.v. in over two years, and I dreaded updating it for the app, because the MS Word résumé template hates me, and it loses items that I just got done cutting before I have a chance to paste them back in, and I have to re-craft the little descriptive portion of the entry that gives the job in question the appearance of legitimacy. I can’t stand dealing with my résumé. Every item seems so transparent, like I’ve “boosted” it, even when I haven’t, to the point where I phoned up my best friend and asked her to go ahead and kill me because I’d just used the phrase “served as liaison” in total seriousness. “Well, at least you didn’t use ‘to liaise’ as a verb,” she said, trying to comfort me, but I wouldn’t have it: “That isn’t the point. The point is that I ‘served as liaison’ between pieces of paper and the file folders in which they belonged.” “No,” she corrected me, “The point is that you didn’t ‘serve as liaison,’ you ‘coordinated and distributed printed matter, semi-colon, implemented and managed systematization of information.’” “Ernie, I did not ‘implement’ the goddamn alphabet,” I grumbled. “Well, they don’t know that,” she said, adding, “Look, don’t worry about it – I mean, I listed my ex-boyfriend as a job reference once, and they called him and everything.” I snorted, “Oh, man. So what did he say?” and she said matter-of-factly, “Oh, you know – ‘willing to take on new positions,’ ‘flexible,’ that kind of thing,” and then we both giggled, “Ew, ‘flexible,’” and then I had to get off the phone and think up ways to spin my internship at American Woman, which pretty much involved my tallying the results of the “Who’s Hot In Daytime Drama” poll, without coming right out and calling myself a pollster.

I can’t imagine having a job as a recruiter or HR person (a.k.a. “serving as liaison between résumé and eyeballs”). Anyone with a little bit of creativity and a thesaurus opened to the page with “oversee” on it can fluff a c.v. into the stratosphere; headhunters must have a little red ink-stamp that says “SECRETARY,” and whenever they see the phrase “managed the flow of information,” they stamp the résumé and put it into the slush pile. Even my cat could probably slip through the cracks at a temp agency if I massaged the wording well enough. What does a cat do? Well, a cat – in this case, “Hobey Katt” – sleeps a lot, right? Right – “coordinated leisure activities.” Cats also give themselves baths. Perfect – “led hygiene team.” Better still – “headed up sanitation division.” Even better than that, I’ll merge the napping and the bathing, which gives us “instituted in-house health-and-wellness program.” Playing with his mousie toys becomes “brainstormed responses to crypto-rodent-based market infiltration,” and hiding under the bed becomes “spearheaded security solutions,” and coughing up a hairball becomes “redistributed pre-owned retail goods.” The next time I have a friend over and Hobey strolls out to say hello, I’ll just introduce him as “our new VP for consumer outreach.” See what I mean?

I wonder why people bother. The padding of résumés isn’t exactly a secret, so why can’t people just put down “administrative assistant” and leave it at that? And why does a writing program need to see my c.v. in the first place – to prove that I can sell myself to other people too? I hate selling myself, because it makes me feel all squirmy and false and I don’t like coming off as a pest. I can’t get over how fake I sounded in these essays – “great opportunity” this, “looking forward to expanding” that, “creative flow” the other thing – and I kind of resented having to sling the bull that flagrantly. I had to fight the urge to print up the URL of this site in 32-point letters and scribble on it, “Check it out. If you like it, let me in; if you don’t, don’t.”

Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got to get back to steaming open my transcript so I can falsify my C+ in ENG 341: History Of Linguistic Thought.

Oh, brother.
Speaking of shoveling…

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