1. I am grateful for hot, running water and sewer systems.
2. I am grateful for dental floss.

   

3. I am grateful for nail polish remover.

   

Today was my thirtieth birthday! I have lots to be grateful for, so here goes.

1. I am grateful for yellow cake with chocolate frosting, from a box and a can respectively. It’s my favorite! And I am especially grateful for two cute nieces who made my cake, put 30 candles on it and yummy pink sprinkles.
2. I am grateful for airplanes! Without airplanes, there’s no way my entire family could have been together for my birthday since it wasn’t a holiday weekend or anything.
3. I’m grateful for Muddy Buddies. That’s right. And if you don’t know what they are, I’m very, very sorry for you.

This is a test. I’m going to put a list of words and I want you to come up with at least seven synonyms for each of them. Good luck.

1. know
2. learn
3. appearance
4. change
5. challenge
6. decision
7. choice

Now, I want you to pretend that you are me and describe your experience during a challenging time in your life and explain how you grew personally, either despite this challenge or because of it and I want you to do it in 300 words or less. Oh, and because you’re me, you have to be worrying the entire time about what the essay readers will get out of this essay and how it pits you against other applicants, and you have to be honest and true to your own feelings because you would hate to get rejected for not being yourself.

P.S. The paragraph above is 103 words, in case you were wondering what 300 words looks like.

For the first time, possibly in my entire life, I hate words. I hate that I know as many as I do. I know, you all feel really sorry for me. I hate that I have to limit what I’m writing to a certain number of them. I hate that I am now über aware of just how many words pour forth from my head regularly. I hate that there isn’t a really good translation of the word réussir. The dictionaries say that it’s “to succeed”, but it’s just not exactly the same and réussir is the word I really want.

And I need to come up with the name of a pastry that is more exotic than a cream puff, but still recognizable to the average American. Do people know what a millefeuille is?

While I love that I speak two languages, when trying to write an essay, it is less than helpful. I keep thinking of the perfect words…in French. I’m sure that simultaneously translating documents is only making the situation worse.

While some of the French words exist in English, and they are the exact words I want to use, I just don’t know that they work. For instance, who actually says “ameliorate”? Oh, wait. I do! I do!

And “comportment”? I don’t even know that I’ve ever heard someone use it in English. I know it’s a word and I know what it means, but will other people? Will the people reading my essays assume I just pulled out a thesaurus to diversify my vocabulary and think I’m a complete idiot?

I HATE THIS!!!