Applications

      Applications are strange. Resumes are strange. Why must all of my activities over the past three years somehow contribute to an artificial list of skills and practices that make me a marketable seventeen-year-old to companies that are supposed to teach me the very skills I’m applying with. Seventeen is too young for so much experience to have been had, especially when one spent two years being tired and three more waking up and is just now sunflowering to meet the rays of motivation. Seventeen is too young to be expected to fill a full page of things done and things learned and things taken from those things learned. Why must each of my activities be audited by a board of future employees when the word “employee” has not yet reached my vocabulary, and my interests are nothing more than an amorphous blob of tepid interest? An amorphous blob of interest that is being slowly charred by the sugar-coated flames of expectation while being frozen from the inside out by the icy currents of regrets and comparison. Why must my passions be chosen by their translatability into summer work? Why must my schedule be determined not only by Expectation and Requirements but also by sellotaped activities on mile-length, unstretchable parchment.
      Dear world: I want to sit and hear the birds calling and write down their names and run towards them and call back.
      I’d like to be able to sit back and throw my head to the sky and yell into the open-ended world “show me all you have to offer, I am ready to learn.”