Undergraduate / Eliot's "Prufrock"; College essay on literature that changed me [5]

Any help would be appreciated:

Self-proclaimed mature people all assume that the entirety of our existence can somehow be boiled down or extracted to a series of "significant experiences" (or "events" or any other synonym for punctuated equilibrium) which sculpt who we are, as if Michelangelo tossed a few unwieldy stones at a boulder and up sprung David. Yet the reality is that I traveled to Ecuador and came home me; I did not stand atop a mountain and shout and pound my chest and find myself. I know now, though, that carretilla means wheelbarrow and llucho means naked, that you can always cut more meat off a seemingly exhausted raw chicken, that roosters are unreliable but cows always moo at dawn.

The first time I read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I found myself utterly uninspired by it, disaffected by the fact that I found it unattainable. Like true beauty, though, it grew on me ever so slowly, like you do not realize the idyllic elegance of a sunset until one day you glance out your window and find the sky ornamented in hues of fading orange that progress to throbbing crimson that transmute to opulent violet, adding childlike caricature to figures captured in its rays.

Maybe I'm naive and have yet to realize that this day will never be as good as - can never be as good as - days remembered. In fact, I know I am naive, that I have not yet "measured out my life with coffee spoons."

I am eighteen. I say this as if to remind myself of the inevitable - we are products of sun and wind and oxidants and the thousand other elements that add stubble to the chin and canyons of collapsing collagen to the face. I am eighteen, as though that is the magic number at which point life is illuminated through cigarettes and voter registration cards and legal consent and adult correctional facilities. I am eighteen, as though that makes me (as my favorite teacher once put it) recognize my own hypocrisies. Nevertheless, I am eighteen, and Eliot's "overwhelming question" has assailed me, perhaps not with full force but rather with a soft nudge to introduce me to the intricacies and eccentricities and other "-ies" of life that (as Hamlet would say) our fool flesh is heir to.

"Do I dare disturb the universe?"

I have nothing more in life but to address his overwhelming question - although I suppose that is the very purpose of life. And in that realization I have begun this protracted period of maturation, of the recognition of hypocrisy, of the denial of naivety. So the answer is Yes, but it comes not from the grand and magnificent - the "significant experiences" - but rather from the seemingly trivial, the insignificant which make life beautiful. And life is astonishingly beautiful if you love the occasional inconsequential, if you love laughing, and smiling, and climbing hills, and wearing socks, and eating Junior Mints.

Undergraduate / Common App Main Essay - "The Bidding" - Topic is a bit out there [6]

I think the essay is different, it might be too different, I don't know. Is the writing style too vague/different?
Intellectual Experience:

The swarm of butterflies. Lovely, beautiful, vibrant, canary-winged butterflies - flapping awkwardly, gracefully. But even beauty is mortal, and I abridge destiny, disturb Prufrock's universe - me, so harmless, deadly. My foot pulls off the accelerator until I halve the speed limit, but still they bump soundlessly, skate across the dusty, littered, tragic window, suspend in the jet stream behind my car. In the mirror I watch them flutter tenderly, confetti falling to the ground.

The carnage is done; beauty lies awfully across the dirt road, trapped between sad, dusty, aching stalks of alfalfa and cotton, tended callously by withered, hard farmers. And just like that I call chance an omen, an omen to the dreaded, unfortunate day.

Stop, listen, do you hear that? Can you taste the smell? Step out of the car. Feel the whip of merciless, dry dust and think of Steinbeck's Joads. I have arrived.

Parched earth cracks under the soles of my shoes as I approach the county fair; I leave remnants, regrettable prints tell I was here. And the smell - it burns. Tobacco and whiskey and manure and diesel.

Sitting, blue-eyed, hard-faced, Coors in hand, Faulkner's Bundrens - and then there is me. The greetings, exchange of hands, uncomfortable silence. Talk about sports, yes, sports; ask about cows, they'll talk about cows. I hear beef prices run low this year. Oh, tell me about it, they say; lucky to get a dollar a pound. How's Mom? they ask. Good, couldn't come, busy as always, - it's the disguise. She's sick really, but I keep quiet, sick with multiple sclerosis. Sick from the weekly interferon shots, shivering and sunken, but she will not tell. Not her, not proud, motherly Mom, will not tell anyone. Sit down, they say. I do.

The sun, remorseless and uncompromising, warms my neck and legs. It glitters off the slick black steer being washed and readied for bidding, makes the beast shine and sparkle like polished coal. I sip water, washing away gritty dust. [Name] got blue ribbun gran chumpun carcass for that steer, my uncle says to me privately. How 'bout that? goin' a get two bucks a pound, sure is somepin'. Sure is, I say. Proud of that boy, he says, he goin' do better than me, sure is. Truck driver ain't no kind of life, he goin' do better than me. For an instant the hard face relaxed, the furrowed brow softened, from somewhere deep within, the poison known as Regret escaped, sullied and unwashed.

You know somepin'? I tell that boy, look at your aunt and cousin up in that Big City, look what she done, look what he doin'. You ain't goin' be like me, no you ain't, you goin' do somepin', you goin' be like them. And just as soon as Regret escaped, the hole it seeped from closed up, the face tightened, the brow wrinkled, and he was gone, turned back to the family, picked up the perspiring can of beer.

Holden Caulfield can attempt to escape life, but eventually T.S. Eliot must disturb the universe, Ralph Ellison must emerge from his hiding, Maya Angelou must sing. Eventually we must all disrupt destiny, whether we realize it or not.