Loves,
A story, much like those beloved to Amy, about circles.
Commence Monday! While swimming through maelstroms of pH and attempting
to discern the proper molarity of a base to make a buffer for some godforsaken element,
my college counselor called me to his office. Being the terrible bastion of academic entrophy
that I am, I expected to be throttled with a number of "I suppose you can have one more day"-s and other such guilt-assuaging (!) remarks. HOWEVER! As I rushed to confess about exactly why Grinnell, Amherst and Swarthmore were preventing me via radiation/telepathy/bonds of love from turning in a very thick stack of applications to his desk the Friday before, he stopped me and said that he had but a question for me, and a question, I quote, that I would "...like very much."
AND SO I WAS ASKED TO NOMINATE FIVE JUNIORS FOR TASP.
Dear gods! My mind began to reel. I did not realize how highly defensive I am of the program,
nor how absolutely unbending the criteria for moral/intellectual/spiritual charisma must be!
Alas! I flailed my poor limbs about in attempts to explain to him how absolutely no-one in the junior class would be fit to grace the hallowed halls of any of Nunn's institutions, and failed miserably to impart to him how ONE WILL ALWAYS KNOW A TASPER and how The Associate does a frightfully uncanny job of selecting them out from the foamy-mouthed masses of A-getters and bibliophiles. Indeed, it came out like such:
"OhhhhhhDanfortheverythingmadness
burningKerouacflagrantpoliticismswitwitwitwit
haughtysensesofhumorsocialconsciousnessmotivation
passionphilosophySPARKSPARKSPARK!"
And I did my best to not grimace when shaking my head "oui" to five names out of the crop of underclassman he had selected. There is one good junior. My dear friend Sarah. Except for the fact that she is one of those equine-girls. Ghost of Nunn, weep for your hold on New Albany, indeed!
Have any of you had similarly (jarring) experiences?
Is TASP well entrenched in your local school systems?
And how goes the life out there, across the seas and states (and seas of states?)
I miss you all immensely, and it is eating my soul and making me shed off all romanticism
in pursuit of the comforting arms of cold mechanical science.
Telluride, you have conquered me.
I think I shall go and sulk, I who stumbled upon the program on 06 Janvier and applied by whim. Nominations? Pshaw! It shouldn't be so easy!
Awaiting the Cusp of December,
Your Less-than-Toothsome Votary of Maria.
Post-Script: Letters of unspeakable length and stories from the Moralistic Midwest shall follow shortly, as soon as the chaos ceases. O, Dieu. May the chaos cease for us all! Keep well, Danforthians.
A story, much like those beloved to Amy, about circles.
Commence Monday! While swimming through maelstroms of pH and attempting
to discern the proper molarity of a base to make a buffer for some godforsaken element,
my college counselor called me to his office. Being the terrible bastion of academic entrophy
that I am, I expected to be throttled with a number of "I suppose you can have one more day"-s and other such guilt-assuaging (!) remarks. HOWEVER! As I rushed to confess about exactly why Grinnell, Amherst and Swarthmore were preventing me via radiation/telepathy/bonds of love from turning in a very thick stack of applications to his desk the Friday before, he stopped me and said that he had but a question for me, and a question, I quote, that I would "...like very much."
AND SO I WAS ASKED TO NOMINATE FIVE JUNIORS FOR TASP.
Dear gods! My mind began to reel. I did not realize how highly defensive I am of the program,
nor how absolutely unbending the criteria for moral/intellectual/spiritual charisma must be!
Alas! I flailed my poor limbs about in attempts to explain to him how absolutely no-one in the junior class would be fit to grace the hallowed halls of any of Nunn's institutions, and failed miserably to impart to him how ONE WILL ALWAYS KNOW A TASPER and how The Associate does a frightfully uncanny job of selecting them out from the foamy-mouthed masses of A-getters and bibliophiles. Indeed, it came out like such:
"OhhhhhhDanfortheverythingmadness
burningKerouacflagrantpoliticismswitwitwitwit
haughtysensesofhumorsocialconsciousnessmotivation
passionphilosophySPARKSPARKSPARK!"
And I did my best to not grimace when shaking my head "oui" to five names out of the crop of underclassman he had selected. There is one good junior. My dear friend Sarah. Except for the fact that she is one of those equine-girls. Ghost of Nunn, weep for your hold on New Albany, indeed!
Have any of you had similarly (jarring) experiences?
Is TASP well entrenched in your local school systems?
And how goes the life out there, across the seas and states (and seas of states?)
I miss you all immensely, and it is eating my soul and making me shed off all romanticism
in pursuit of the comforting arms of cold mechanical science.
Telluride, you have conquered me.
I think I shall go and sulk, I who stumbled upon the program on 06 Janvier and applied by whim. Nominations? Pshaw! It shouldn't be so easy!
Awaiting the Cusp of December,
Your Less-than-Toothsome Votary of Maria.
Post-Script: Letters of unspeakable length and stories from the Moralistic Midwest shall follow shortly, as soon as the chaos ceases. O, Dieu. May the chaos cease for us all! Keep well, Danforthians.
posted by goodbye, goodbye at 10:52 AM
6 Comments:
I have indeed! I have been asking everyone at school that I find moderately intelligent, or who I know associates with intelligent people if they know ANYONE who could survive and/or love the TASP experience. So far, not much has come up. I, like you Jessi, am apparently VERY protective of the TASP name also. sigh. the search continues.
the problem with my school is, everyones a boring bwrk. they all get good grades, test well, do a ton of ecs, and have no interest in thinking once they leave school. the prospect of tasp would be terrifying and disgusting to them. most of them either go on "community service" trips to the bahamas or back for their 11th year of sleepaway camp with some vaguely native american name.
Frankly, my counseling center knows jack shit about TASP and Telluride, even though I went there myself and raved about it to my counselor for an hour. The entire time it was a smile-and-nod-type deal. I really don't think they care about anything post-high school that doesn't concern them or their craptastic jobs. As such, nobody I've ever spoken to on the subject of summer programs or college knows anything about TASP. Even when I went to Williams and talked to the admissions people there, nobody knew about TASP. When I asked if they had heard about the Association, one person hesitantly nodded yes... but then when I asked him about what it was he stalled and finally admitted he'd only heard the name.
I think two other people had received invitations to TASP along with me but threw them out. One threw it out because he thought all summer programs were trash (since he's such a freaking genius), and the other didn't want to go because she was "going to work with sea turtles in Malaysia." She's going to be a polisci major. :P
So no, I haven't gotten anything like that. Thank you for reminding me, though, because I think the college counselor at my school (who only works part-time) would care enough if I dropped her a note about it. I really want some juniors to experience this. Only one person I've talked to has expressed genuine interest and he recently moved... to Maryland.
haha david, although the real meaning of bwrk goes with yours, it really means, bright well rounded kid. which is apparently, exactly what colleges hate.
haha, aka duke
We should all go to Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Especially because they send me at least nine pieces of email a week from no less than four different parties in the admissions office.
There are definite merits to the one-course-at-a-time program, but even this Ohioan must think twice about exactly what type of social awareness one would develop in rural Iowa.
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