Modern Love College Essay Contest - The New York Times [REVISED]

I think I might actually submit something.

It's going to have the gravity of "The Waste Land" except in a love story form (which, if you read it in a certain way, parts of "The Waste Land" is a very cynical and depressing tale of romantic interests and the resulting passionless, unfortunate sex that follows). It's going to be brilliant, the best thing I've ever written.

Right?

And then I will get into Stanford or UC-Berkeley because I am an already published writer with success written all over me, not to use a cliche because those are boring--but this! People will recognize my brilliance for what it is!

And then I will marry some charming, handsome, intelligent, completely self-indulgant and self-obsessed, macabre English professor (just like my first psychiatrist predicted), who tells me that love isn't found in sexual expression but in self-sacrifice--only to be inordinately tormented by the frequency of his own orgasms. So, he will only bathe once a week (to save on water, of course!), and refuse to drive anything but a used Tesla (that his parents helped him pay for), and he doesn't own a pet because he doesn't believe in the subordination of animals to human's will, and aghast! The idea of eating meat is shameful, very primitive and awful! Those poor chickens and lambs and, oh my god, have you ever seen a steer knocked over the head in a slaughterhouse? And yet he ardently believes in the death of fetuses whenever Mom or God chooses. Not that there is a God, because Nietzsche said that God is dead! And he will lecture only to hear the sound of his own voice as it echos off of the four walls in a classroom, sometimes to a room filled with five instead of three hundred--and never notice the difference. And he will, of course, write long, aching lines of poetry about the evils of American Exceptionalism, consumerism and materialism and the destruction of the world thanks to the Industrial Revolution (nevermind that he writes using an Apple MacBook, which is of course a product of our technological advancements). And then he will cheat on me with a student, but insist it meant nothing because sex means nothing. Even she doesn't show up to his talks on Romanticism Literature.