Simply for your enjoyment

This has nothing to do with anything. It is a draft of an essay I wrote for one of my applications. Enjoy.

Briefly describe your most satisfying experience related to community service.

As I lugged cartfuls of food to my car through the pouring rain, I thought about how unfortunate it was that none of the other volunteers had shown up. I was tempted to back down, to say that I could not handle all of that food by myself and that a lot of it would probably get thrown out at the shelter anyway. But the shelter was counting on receiving food from Wash U that night—maybe not so freaking much food, but I couldn’t be sure. All I knew for sure was that I had a responsibility to Dining Services, to Feed St. Louis, to the shelter, and to its clients. Inclement weather and lack of help were hardly excuses to evade my duty. The woman who answered the door at the shelter was impressed by my dedication, but delivering that food was the least I could do in the noble effort to reduce waste and give to those in need.

So imagine my dismay when I learned that Feed St. Louis would no longer be collecting leftover food from the dining halls. In fact, they would no longer exist. They were now a Campus Kitchen. I regained my sense of purpose, however, when I learned that the Campus Kitchen group desperately needed someone to pick up donated food from a local grocery store on Thursday mornings. I didn’t start class until 1 on Thursdays, and I could not think of a better way to spend my mornings than contributing to the worthy cause of feeding the hungry in St. Louis. Except perhaps sleeping or studying, but I volunteered anyway. I began to regret that decision as I struggled to see out the back of my car, which was practically exploding with perfectly good bread that had not been sold by its sell by date. Still, there was something satisfying about dragging two bags of buns behind me down the stairs to the kitchen—thump, thump, thump. "It’s going to bruise," someone warned me. "It’s already smushed from the journey in my car," I said. "Besides, I don’t give a fuck." The freezer was still packed with bread from the previous week, so I left the new batch sprawled across the floor. "Bread—50 solar masses" I wrote on the food log. I came to the unfortunate realization that much of the food I was salvaging would eventually be thrown out anyway. "Are there other groups that can use some of this bread?" I asked one of the Campus Kitchen coordinators. "There is an abundance of bread everywhere, but we are working on it," she assured me. For the time being, all I could do was keep lugging that bread, with the hope that one day bread production in St. Louis would decrease to reasonable levels and funds would be redirected to areas in need, like the production and distribution of other kinds of food.

Where do I go from here?

Do you ever feel... stuck?



In OCD, there's a problem with the feedback loop that tells us that we are no longer in danger, or that it's okay to move on.

People with "obsessive slowness" may take 20 minutes to walk through their front door.

I get stuck on tasks like writing an essay. Or an email. Or a blog post.

I don't know what to write about. I don't know how to word it. That's not good enough. Sentence by sentence, I recite and revise in my head what I want to say. Too much effort. I am getting sleepy. Time for a break.

I am stuck in the molasses swamp, waiting to draw the card that will get me unstuck. (I just came up with that one. Clever, eh? No? I don't care. I am tired.)

*Wait a minute, are you saying that if I struggle with writing essays, then I have OCD?* No. *But you are implying that you have OCD, right?* No. Many behaviors are best characterized as lying somewhere along a continuum. For any given behavior, most of us fall somewhere in the middle. So how do we decide what's pathological? Good question. Stay tuned for DSM-V.



Now what?