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[fredericks]

The good thing about writing an 100 word max "essay" for a scholarship - 100 words is not a lot to work with.

The bad thing about writing an 100 word max "essay" for a scholarship - 100 words is not a lot to work with.

I don't do drabble for a reason, dammit.

*
That complaint right there? 56 words or so. Crap.

Edit -

One hundred words is not a lot for an essay; that's good and bad.

14 words but horrible English. Go me!

Comments

[mrblue92.livejournal.com]

Hey... I stumbled on this particular post after browsing here (http://community.livejournal.com/addme25_and_up/) and was vaguely fascinated by the "one hundred word essay" concept. [And, of course, brevity/wit/yadda-yadda, challenged to best the "least words" mark: "I'm ambivalent about 100-word essays." Five. ;)]

The truly curious thing, however, is this: as it is a simple matter of fact that among the very wide variety of English speakers on this planet, there exist certain loquacious individuals (such as myself, perhaps--insofar as the written word is concerned at least) who have the unenviable ability (or curse) to construct long sentences which serve to illustrate an entire chain of thought, and thus such a person might find himself (or herself) unable to issue much more than an implied disapproval of the one hundred word essay concept before reaching the end of his or her first . . .

. . . sentence. [101]

Anyway, it amused me at one in the morning.

[fredericks.livejournal.com]

*grin* And now I find myself mightily amused at ten in the morning.

Thanks for that.

[fredericks.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Since I have your window open still do you mind weighing in on something for me: Add Me comms are sort of like shopping for friends, is that good or bad? I bring this up because I know I'm not on the front page so I'm assuming you browsed back a couple of pages and didn't like the selection. I'd think it's empowering for both parties, but then again I'm still wiping sleep out of my eyes so things aren't quite working properly.

[mrblue92.livejournal.com]

Well, first to clarify, you were actually on the front page when I checked last night--the very last entry. I assume your post was pushed off in the intervening hours. I'm wouldn't say I "didn't like the selection", per se, although it did have the somewhat unpleasant taste of a personals page. Not that there's anything necessarily *wrong* with that, you understand... it's just that whenever people start trying to sell themselves, things tend to get... what's the word I'm looking for? Artificial, but still somewhat representative of reality in a distorted way... I guess I mean that people have a tendency to make caricatures of themselves when painting verbal self-portraits.

As far as "friend shopping" goes... again, I don't think there's anything wrong with it, any more than one might "choose" to be friend with those people who've been introduced to one's life "more randomly". Frankly I'd argue that trolling for friends is really rather random anyway, except the intentions are just the tiniest bit clearer when one person says "I'm looking for friends" and another says "Hey you look interesting".

And besides that, I keep coming to the inevitable conclusion lately that free-will is just a nice illusion that helps most of us¹ stay sane--which suggests that since we were bound to have this conversation, there's really no shame in having conversations of the kind. Except, er, if you can't help but feel ashamed. ;)

¹ "Us", or "the humans" as I often prefer to refer to them these days. Sometimes "those crazy humans", "weirdos", "idiots", or "*sigh* people". Depends on the mood, really.