Choose from among the following topics:
1. What’s the most unexpected thing you’ve encountered at college so far?
2. What would you need--besides food, water, and companionship--if you were stranded on an island?
3. Is there anything you wish you had paid more attention to in high school?
4. Describe a flaw in an otherwise good movie.
5. Describe a small, but valuable lesson you learned from some fairly insignificant event in your life.
I’ve written a response to #4 so that you might benefit from an example.
Good Will Swearing
Ever like practically everything about a movie except for one thing? For my mom, it’s steamy love scenes that ruin movies. In fact, she gets this pained look on her face every time the characters move in the direction of a bedroom. More often than not, she’ll just leave the room. Now me, I don’t really mind the love-making depicted in movies (so long as it’s not too graphic), but I am starting to have a problem with all the foul language. This fact really hit me when I rented Good Will Hunting, the Matt Damon-Ben Affleck film about a working-class schmoe who works as a janitor at Harvard but is really a super math genius.
Now, this is just the kind of plot that appeals to me, but I found myself disgusted by the movie from the very start, for it begins with an absolute onslaught of profanity. For fifteen minutes straight, it was one raunchy curse word after another. I’ve never heard the f-word so many times before in my life. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not the sort who wants movie characters to go about saying, “Fudge” or “Fiddlesticks,” and I’m not above a few “damns” and “hells” myself, but I believe Good Will Hunting crossed the boundaries of good taste.
Th e characters weren’t even speaking in anger. Apparently, swearing was their normal speech pattern. I kept trying to overlook all the bleep-able words, but I was so distracted by them, I couldn’t really concentrate on the storyline. For me, the movie was ruined. “Oh my,” I kept saying to myself over and over again with each casual four-letter word that flew from the characters’ lips. “Oh my.” In my shock, I headed toward the kitchen. And, like my mother before me, I didn’t come back.

Choose from among the following topics:
1. credit cards
2. public education
3. sports
4. babysitters
5. new cars
I’ve written a response to #3 so that you might benefit from an example.
Olympic Chess???
I read in the paper recently that the International Olympic Committee is considering adding chess to the line-up of events at the next Summer Games. The writer of the article was against the idea. And then, just the other night, Bill Mahr was making quite a few jokes about it on Politically Incorrect —you know, gags about geeks in Speedo and puns about being “rooked.” But I don’t know what all the fuss is about. The Olympics has a long history of incorporating “non-sports” into its competitions. I mean, think about some of the goofy
“sports” medals are given for—Ping-Pong, synchronized swimming, and rhythmic gymnastics. Do you know what that last event involves? In it, skinny, spandex-clad preteens toss up embroidery hoops and run around a tumbling mat waving long ribbons attached to sticks. Real sporty, huh? Why in Sydney, I even saw coverage for the trampoline events. Can you believe somebody won a gold medal for hopping up and down on an oversized JumpKing?!? Now, don’t get me wrong; these competitions are entertaining enough, and the people who perform in them are physically talented, but are these things truly sports and are these people really athletes? I think not. The non-sportiest sport in the Olympics is one that has been a staple of the Winter Games for decades. It’s called curling, and it’s the strangest thing you’ll ever see, for, in curling, three men sweep furiously at ice trying to stir up enough breeze to keep a three- or four-pound stone sliding down what looks like a frozen bowling alley. If you think I’m making that up, believe me, I’m not. I couldn’t conjure up such silliness if I tried. And, even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face while I called it a sport. I can hardly believe the announcers are able to do it. They even whisper play-by-by co mmentary about the curlers’ technique and non-
Olympic pursuits. So, I figure, next to that, what’s a little chess?

Choose from among the following topics:
1. Pick a proverb, motto, or a well-known expression and write a short narrative paragraph that illustrates the truth of the saying. I suggest you do this by describing some experience you’ve had.
2. Which famous person's child(ren) do you think has led (or will lead) the most interesting or difficult life? Why?
3. Pretend that all the sci-fi aficionados are right and eventually Earth will be visited by aliens. Pretend, in fact, that a flying saucer full of Martians lands--plop--right here in
North Texas. What social customs do we all engage in that would be hardest for the aliens to understand?
4. Think about something you learned recently that, upon reflection, you are a little embarrassed to admit you hadn’t already known?
5. Think about an attitude that you had about someone or something that has changed over time. Compare your feelings now versus your feelings then. What precipitated your new perspective?
I’ve written a response to #1 so you can benefit from an example. (It’s on the next page.)

The Noodle that Broke the Camel’s Back
Have you ever hea rd the expression that “ anger is just one letter short of danger ”? I myself only ran across the expression a few months ago, but, just two weeks ago, while I was on vacation in San Antonio, I was witness to a living example of this saying. A man began m aking a scene at the River Center Mall’s food court. He was very upset that an Italian fast food restaurant would not serve him any lasagna. Apparently, the manager of the place had already put the lasagna away and was unwilling to bring it back up and re-heat it for him. You see, it was about 8:45 p.m., and the mall would be closing in only fifteen minutes. This was the crux of the problem, in fact, because the man was insistent that if the restaurant were still open, he must be served whatever was on the menu. I could see the man’s argument, but only up to a point. He lost me when he started yelling and making boisterous threats to call “the corporate office.” I guess he lost he manager, too, because, though he himself was also growing louder and more agitated, he turned and asked the girl behind the counter to call mall security. In the mean time, the irate customer stormed over to his wife and children, who were sitting at the table next to ours, chomping away nonchalantly at hot dogs and French fries bought from another establishment. He was grumbling loudly about poor customer service and the state of American business. Then the cops arrived (real ones, by the way, not rent-aones), and that’s when the situation really began to spin out of control.
The man spotted them before they spotted him, and so he skedaddled out the door.
But, just as soon as they left the area to find him, he came back in through another door and resumed making tacky comments and obscene gestures toward the pizza place. I was amazed that a plateful of baked pasta could be the cause of such turmoil. What lesson did I learn from all this? I learned that people who come up with old sayings know what they’re talking about. Anger is just one letter short of danger . It’s also just five letters shy of crazy.

Choose your topic from the list below. An example follows.
1. Do single people miss out on life compared to married people? What about childless couples or “only children?”
2. Analyze a weakness in the skills of a well-known and well-liked actor (or singer or novelist or athlete or whatever).
3. What's adequate punishment for people who kill or torture animals? (Be specific!)
4. Explain a bit of slang to someone so that the individual not only knows what the word or expression means but also how, when, and with whom it should be used.
5. About eighteen months ago, a prisoner in a Forth Worth jail killed another inmate over an argument about TV. What questions does this incident raise for you regarding the daily activities of imprisoned criminals?
I’ve written a response to #1 so you can benefit from an example.
Count Me In
I have this friend. She’s in her mid-forties. She’s never been married. She doesn’t have any kids, either. And she told me the oth er day, “I don’t count.” It turns out that she and some of her coworkers were standing around the break room and talking about life’s stresses. It seems that everyone was adding their gripes to the conversation, but when she tried to throw in her two cen ts’ worth, this lady stopped her: ”What do you know about life?
You’re unmarried and without kids, so your opinion doesn’t count.” Now, I imagine this woman made her statement in jest, but it’s a telling sort of comment nonetheless. I sometimes get simila r kinds of comments about my having just one child. “You’re not really a parent unless you have more than one kid,” my sister-in-law once told me. I can remember other such remarks: “You’ve got it easy,” “Just try having three,” and “Let me know when you become a real mom.” Again, I don’t think the people who say these things are trying to be mean, but, gee, where do folks get off dismissing other people’s lives so easily? I mean, my skin is pretty thick, and I figure raising our thirteen-year-old is as challenging a parenting role as any parents will ever face, but still. My friend and I count — no matter what our marital status is, no matter how many kids we have or don’t have, no matter who else says differently. We count. All of us do.

Choose from among the following topics:
1. Look over the editorial section of your local newspaper. Find a letter to the editor with which you disagree. Write a response that either points out the flaw in the letter-writer's argument or develops your own point of view.
2. Pick a decision made by some leader--religious, political, business or otherwise--and explain in detail why you think that person “missed the mark,” or made a poor decision, even though the decision was a popular one or one tha t didn’t generate much public controversy.
(Please don’t write about a hotly debated issue or one that’s received extensive news coverage.)
3. An acquaintance of mine told me she was going to offer her nine-year-old boy a choice between $100 cash or a birthday party. What do you think of her idea?
4. What harm, if any, do "the-end-of-the-world-is-coming" religious cults do?
5. A research group recently published findings that indicate that many people do not wash their hands after using the bathroom despite the fact that most people say they do: 74% versus 97%. Also highlighted were statistics that showed that women wash their hands only a few percentage points more frequently than do men. Is research like this useful?
I’ve written a response to #2 so that you might benefit from an example. (It’s on the back.)
Nonsense to No Nuns!
Recently the pope commanded an order of Carmelite nuns to close their convent at Auschwitz,
Poland, the site of the infamous World War II concentration camp. I don't understand why he did that. Perhaps it was political, and he felt the pressure to bow to the Jewish groups that were arguing that a Catholic presence was "inappropriate" at a place at which so many Jews died such horrible deaths. But I don't see the logic in that argument or the sense in the pope's actions. The holocaust is not, was not, and never will be a Jewish tragedy. It is, was, and always will be a human tragedy.
It is true that mostly Jews suffered at Auschwitz, but it is a logical fallacy to assume that only Jews can properly appreciate the atrocities that were committed there. That would be like saying that
Martin Luther King, Jr. can be a hero only to blacks, or that men cannot be outraged by crimes against women, or that only mothers truly understand the miracle of birth. Clearly, such thinking is wrong headed. Those displaced nuns are not trying to undermine or supplant anybody's history.
They only sought to restore a little love and hope to a very dark, bleak place. And I say, let them!
Auschwitz needs as much help in this regard as it can receive--from anybody who cares to give it.
As far as I'm concerned, the pope just blew his "infallible" status.
--responding to "Farewell to Auschwitz." Time. July 19, 1993. 17-8.