Undergraduate / Stanford roomate essay...vampire [9]

Dear Roommate,

I'm just gonna come out with it: I'm a vampire. I don't like secrets--and it's not as if my sun-reflecting skin, Transylvanian heritage, and razor sharp canines wouldn't betray me anyhow. Now, being a vampire has its fair-share of disadvantages, but the ability to stay up all night is not one of them. In the wee hours of the night, when I'm not out hunting large-game in the Washingtonian backwoods with Robert Pattinson, I can frequently be spotted doing any of the following:

1. studying like a madwoman
2. running (in the dark nobody sees my dorky running gear)
3. dancing with my mother (also a vampire) to 90's throwback jams such as It Wasn't Me by Shaggy or Killing Me Softly by The Fugees

4. watching the news in french to improve my listening skills
5. painting that impressionist painting that I've been working on for three years
6. finishing a book (when I start a book, I finish it. That said, Pillars of the Earth was a long night)
7. reading the latest developments in Syria
8. pulling up to the drive through window of Taco Bell on a bike during a midnight potato soft taco run
9. reading fun facts about our presidents. Did you know teddy bears are named after Teddy Roosevelt, who refused to shoot a cub in the woods?

So if I ever keep you up, I apologize in advance. But on the bright-side...

11. You won't be doing the cleaning. I will. At 4 am.

Is this too weird? I feel like this essay is informal and I don't need to spend too much time worrying about it...Thanks!

Undergraduate / Stanford intellectual vitality...Turkey [4]

The limit is 250 and I am at 283. What would you cut out? Please help me! Also, does it fit the intellectual vitality prompt enough? I think so considering the word limit. I had much more to this essay, about how it affected me, but I had to cut it out :(

I step off my private helicopter onto Turkish soil, where a woman in a headscarf greets me with a warm smile and hands me a pink-lemonade. Soon, I am on the beach. The sand, like the sea, rolls up and down in waves; the stark contrast in color is all that differentiates sand from sea. The sand's current pulls me in, and I run with it, over the waves of sand, toward the sea...

"BEEEEP!"

My alarm clock pulled me out of the warm Mediterranean sea and plucked me back in my room. In class, Turkey fluttered in and out my head. My middle school brain only knew two things about the country: its people were Muslims, and it was named after a bird. What on earth had inspired such a dream? I thought one thing: destiny. From that moment on, I acquired an insatiable interest in Turkey. I spent weeks reading about my favorite historical figure, Ataturk, and the separation of church and state in an almost homogeneously Muslim country; months trying to convince my mom to buy that seaside apartment in Fethiye; and two laborious years teaching myself Turkish.

My Turkey infatuation awoke my love for other languages and cultures and I decided I would devote the rest of my life to diplomacy. Currently occupied with Spanish and French, I can no longer devote my every second to Turkey, but it hasn't been forgotten.

Just recently, one of my teachers lectured that Turkey would never enter the European Union as long as church and state remained entwined.

My hand shot in the air. "Actually, Ataturk removed Islam as the state religion in 1928 and..."

Nobody bad-mouths Turkey while I'm around.

Undergraduate / 'I have been knocked down by grief' Essay about moving on after a death in the family [5]

So I found this old essay I wrote for nothing and thought, why not use it for something? Maybe it would work for a common app prompt? vassar, william and mary, and georgetown all have prompts where you can do whatever so maybe for these schools. Just any thoughts in general. For people who know absolutely no spanish at all, can you understand?

Carla

"Look up," I tell her. "There's a spider on the ceiling."

She understands only spider and up and asks, "żArańa? żArriba?"

I tell her, "Sí, está allí, en el techo," though I am not supposed to speak to her in Spanish.

She knows the trick by now and smirks at me but looks up anyway. "No la veo," she says with a tilt of the head.

"Sí. Hay una arańita negra."

I hurry to rinse the water out of her hair, taking care to guide the water with my hand away from her eyes, which are still staring up at the spider on the ceiling. I turn off the water and she starts to shiver. "Toalla."

I take the towel and wrap it around her nice and tight, up until the nose. She points to me, "You," and then back at herself, "sujet me."

I pick her up and lift her out of the shower and we sit down on the toilet seat. "You sing me."

I sing "Hush, Little Baby," rocking her back and forth, making up the lyrics as I go along, like my nana had done with me. "...and if that rocking horse should break, Momma's gonna buy you...a big fat slice of cake."

She laughs, though not at my lyrics, which she couldn't have understood, but because she detects that I'm making up the song. "No sabes las palabras de la canción."

"Pero, żQué me dices bichito mío?"

I continue, and as I sing, I see my grandma pointing up at the imaginary spider on the ceiling washing the shampoo out of my hair. I see her rocking me in her arms as she invents lullaby lyrics. I smile and think of the my grandma's memorial card; crinkled and worn from love, it is safe-guarded in my wallet.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there; I did not die.

I have been knocked down by grief, but it is in little moments like these that I realize I will heal. I see that I am able to make what is gone--come alive. I see my little Carla--from her house in Spain--telling her daughter to look up at the "arańa en el techo." No, nothing is ever gone.

"żPorque no me cantas?"

I kiss her on the forehead. Somehow, we have all been connected. Everything lives on. And I find a little comfort in that.

Undergraduate / Being given €1500 - Transition from Childhood to Adulthood [5]

This is a first draft, still not sure if I'm going to even use this essay. So not sure if this fits the prompt well enough. Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family. I would appreciate any general feedback (grammar, content, syntax) and will read your essay!

Stuffed in the metro, with €1500 tucked in my bra, I try my best to appear normal. I tap my foot nervously and look around the train: rather than staring at me, the other passengers fiddle with their phones and kindles. I mimic the others and read an email under the subject "Anna Nicole wanna b?" for the seventh time."I heard what happened to you and the words that come to my mind are brilliant, weird, bizarre, lucky, and strange." [..]