Transfer application essays

When I'm in gear, the words I'm typing and re-reading feel vivid, alive and immediate. When I'm not, they seem distant and curiously flat. And I have no idea which is more like the way the administrator in Admissions is going to read them.

Recreational reading

"'South Station Under - Washington Under* - Park Street Under-Kendall - Central - Harvard - ' The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it."
- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness", March 1931

It's an odd sensation, in the middle of a horror story, to feel sympathy for a character as he traces part of my commute. One might even say 'warm' and 'fuzzy' and 'tone-destroying'. (Why yes, I do like subways.)


* Former name of Downtown Crossing.