Word: kid
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...summer before your senior year, and you're sweating. The college brochures are spread across the table, along with itineraries, SAT review books, downloaded copies of Web pages that let you chart the grades and scores of every kid from your high school who applied to a given college in the past five years and whether they got in or not. You're hunting for a school where the principal oboe player is graduating, or the soccer goalie, so it might be in the market for someone with your particular skills. You can be fifth-generation Princeton or the first...
...parent watching your child, so proud, and so worried. Your neighbors' son was a nationally ranked swimmer, straight As, great boards, nice kid. Got rejected at his top three choices, wait-listed at two more. Who gets into Yale these days anyway? Maybe they should have sent him to Mali for the summer to dig wells, fight malaria, give him something to write about in his essay...
...college counselor at a public school in a hothouse ZIP code, and you wish you could grab the students, grab the parents by the shoulders and shake them. Twenty thousand dollars for a college consultant? They're paying for help getting into a school where the kid probably doesn't belong. Do they really think there are only 10 great colleges in the country? There are scores of them, hundreds even, honors colleges embedded inside public universities that offer an Ivy education at state-school prices; small liberal-arts colleges that exalt the undergraduate experience in a way that...
...totally get it. As a kid, my heart pumped in anticipation of a classmate's birthday and the inevitable arrival of that wide, low pink box. I'd pick away at the frosted top, then collect the remaining pure cake in both hands, eating out of my palms like a crazed bird on a sugar high. And when no one was looking, I'd shove the paper in my mouth and chew it like cupcake gum. Even now I like an occasional chai latte--flavored Sprinkles cupcake, just as I appreciate a great burger or mac and cheese. The problem...
That's what bugs me about cupcakes: they're fake happiness, wrought in Wonka unfood colors. They appeal to the same unadventurous instincts that drive adults to read Harry Potter and watch Finding Nemo without a kid in the room. They're small and safe, and so people convince themselves that they can't have that many calories. They are the dessert of a civilization in decline. The worst part is, I want a cupcake right...