While digging through my piles of digital debris accumulated during eight years of high school and college, I’ve gagged while rereading saccharine college application essays and barely understood incoherent essay theses. But once in a while, a piece of my writing pleasantly surprises me. This is one of them.
John and Mary had been accepted into X University, one of the most prestigious and excellent institutions of higher learning in the universe. It far surpassed Y University and Z College. In fact, X University boasted an admissions rate of a slim 0.001%. Millions applied, nine and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine had their hearts broken, and every year ten lucky individuals gained entrance through those pearly gates. Dinner conversations were terribly boring.
John decided to make things easier for his child, if he ever were to have one. Mary decided the same thing. Thus, they devoted the rest of their lives to engineering an individual that would be just as successful as they were. John and Mary had taken AP Biology and knew that an individual’s genes have an impact upon lifestyle. Since students with legacy had an advantage, each of them decided individually to seek a spouse who was already enrolled on campus. They each put up an advertisement of…well, themselves: “Seeking spouse, IQ at least 180, no social diseases, with desire to create successful child.”
John and Mary soon found each other, researched their compatibility, and married after graduating with doctorate degrees. They had a child. Their only regret during those nine months when Mary went on a special intellect-enhancing diet and placed headphones on her womb for the fetus to listen to classical music was that technology could not yet let them genetically engineer their offspring to be more physically and mentally fit than other children.
When the child was born, it was immediately placed in a controlled environment where the parents controlled the stimuli. They sent their child to special school starting from kindergarten all the way through high school. Backpacks were never heavier, eyes never duller, sleep never more deprived than at that high school. Finally, when it came time to apply to X University, the parents found out that due to bad public relations and lack of funds, the once prestigious and excellent institution of higher learning had been converted into an insane asylum.