hey everyone I'm submitting this essay for a national competition to get a scholarship, I hope you enjoy it, please let me know what you think about it.I am hopping to get into GeorgeTown.
thanks!
-Amber B.




I still find it strange that I discovered who I wanted to be in a dive bar. Even stranger that I was there to begin with, I suppose, were it not for the circumstances. After all, I was seventeen, a senior in high school, and doing everything I could to avoid the college applications screaming from the other side of my computer monitor. What made them so scary was the row of teeth asking me to declare what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. How could I have been expected, at seventeen, to know what I wanted to do with my life? It was this thought that pulled me from my tower one evening and to that seedy little bar.
While the name will elude me forever, the building itself will not. The walls were impossible to see under the hundreds, possibly thousands of posters that plastered them. I could only assume that what I stood on was once a wood floor, but had since become a strange mix of beer and whatever else the patrons felt like adding to the mess. The bar itself seemed to be the victim of ten too many bar fights, and there was a sinking suspicion that nearly everyone present had been a cause for the hurricane that made it so. The most important part of the bar was not the bar, though, but the stage against the back wall. The stage was actually fairly non-descript as stages go, but what made it important was that it was where my friend, and ride for the evening, worked.
Dani was always a series of blurred colors. While working, she glided across the floor in leaps and twirls, hands kept securely in front of her face, holding her camera. A short, dark mop of hair alternated between framing her pale face and concealing it from the crowd, making it difficult to see in those rare moments a camera wasn't in front of it.
In contrast to the dark and the pale that she was born with, her body was always bright and happy. Every bit of ink that covered her visible arms is a piece of the sun, including the words scrawled into her skin. On her wrist, the reminder "be calm." was printed in bright red. Lyrics in blue were on another arm, while a shoulder carried a very stylized, cartooned boy staring at clouds with more lyrics inside of them. Around her ankles were various band logos and musical notes, things that she spent more money on than she had to spend. It was only when she stepped away from the stage to spend her absent money on T-shirts and CDs of whomever was playing that evening that her posture changed and her shoulders dropped, no longer held in the proud fashion she kept them at while working. Even when she's giggling and flirting with clients around the bar after the music has stopped, she never stood quite as tall as she did when she had a camera in her hand. Even when she held herself in this position, I envied her. To me, absolutely everything about Dani screamed who she was, and loudly. She and I were polar opposites, as I had no idea who I was, let alone who I wanted to be.
The band playing that evening was a folk band from some exotic part of England, and they grew on me rather quickly, though it took me a long time to keep their name from being drowned out by their accents. I found myself standing atop a barstool to see over parts of the crowd, and there was Dani in the thick of it all, completely meant to belong there. She was two years my senior at that point, and just getting back on her feet after a rather distressing and failed attempt at university. Up to that point, neither of us had really discussed it in-depth, both preferring to leave those demons in their pit.
When the band she was photographing closed their set, Dani came to join me at the bar while waiting for the next act to set up. She glanced at the soda I was holding in one of my ex-d hands and called for one herself.
"Shouldn't you be drinking water after all that running?" I yelled over the crowd.
"Probably," she said, sipping her drink, "but this tastes better."
I gave her a moment to catch her breath and looked at the crowd. Some people were leaving, having seen who they had come for. Others still moved to the bar for drinks, or even closer to the stage to try and squeeze into a space against the stage. I was not a huge fan of the headliner, so I was more than happy to stay where I was, comfortably against the bar. It was at this moment that I realized Dani had asked me a question.
"What?"
"I said, do you need me to take you home after the next set?"
"Probably; I still have homework to do!" I paused. "Can I ask you something?"
"Absolutely not." One of our greatest shared traits was our never-ending sarcasm.
"Well, I've always wondered how you manage to look so happy when you're slammed against the stage like you are."
Dani shrugged, flicking through the gallery of saved moments on her camera. "I'm doing what I love, now."
"And you weren't when you were still at school?"
"No; formal education didn't work too well for me. I'm still taking classes, you know. Just online now, and they're all for photography, so that I can get better." She extended her hand to me, so I handed over her camera bag. She opened it, trying to find a different lens.
"So you really like it then, huh?"
"I don't see the point in wasting energy on anything that you don't love. Recognize what makes you happiest, then pour all of your energy into it."
Her statement was so simple, so matter-of-fact, that it queued a small heavenly choir in my mind. I felt silly for having ever been confused at who I was or who I wanted to be. In one small moment, leaning against a bar that may or may not have been the cleanest thing in my life, I felt everything come together.
The next band that played was okay, but I was only half-listening this time. I was, yet again, bust paying attention to Dani using her energy on something that she loved. It was her passion for what she did that had me scrawling ideas on bar napkins until the end of the concert. When she returned me home that evening, I spent far more time than I should have typing my scribbles into the computer. I knew what made me happy; it was time for me to pour all of my energy into my writing. The college applications could wait until the next day.

Are you a lesbian?

yea good luck with that, lol!
Attachments:

Pretty sure no one is going to read this thing, except for maybe BTYB..

I have everything you said I wouldn't, HA!
#stillwinning

makes misery look like fucking Dostoyevsky...

GeorgeTownWriter Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Are you a lesbian?


I was hoping for this the whole time. It starts out like it could be good.

yeah it started out like it would be a hot lesbo story or something. really dissapointing.

yeeeeeaaaaahhh.....ummm...that's not...good..


maybe you should lower your expectations....have you considered Devry?




you are not good at writing...some people have probably told u that u are, but they were probably just being nice to you. ur not talented, babe.

-

Blessed are the murderous.
Attachments:

that story wasn't very good

what does Lizzie think about this essay?

That's a good story right there!

I agree its aprety good story!

Why are you hopping to get into Georgetown?

Do you have a broken foot? Or do you mean you are hopping mad to do so? Or, does it mean you homebrew, and this is slang for making beer?

Also, if you mean Georgetown University, would suggest you spell it correctly...not GeorgeTown.

Best of luck, then.

Bob Dole approves of this message.

super fun essay. good use of interior monolgues

You may get into Georgetown, but only to clean the bathrooms.