How to Apply to Yale Law School

A foolproof method of throwing the doors of the Ivy League wide open.
  July 22, 2002

Upon graduating from college, I decided to go to law school and study international law.  I foresaw a glamorous future of prosecuting war criminals, facilitating free trade and prosperity for poor nations, defending oppressed peasants in Honduras and making oodles of money in the process.  Delicious, embarrassing dreams swirled in my head.  I would have my offices in Paris.  I would yell and cast withering stares at Slobodan Milosevic or some such crook by day and then the defense counsel and I would share a bouteille of Dom Perignon before flinging figurative excrement at each other in interviews on CNN.  In the evening, I would come home to make tender love to my beautiful wife.

“How was your day, honey?” she would ask, breathless, with stars in her eyes.

“The children of the Third World sleep safely tonight,” I would declare solemnly and sweep her up in a passionate kiss.

What a life!  I eagerly filled out application forms and wrote essays.  Some were horrendous, others just bad.  The Yale essay assignment stumped me the most.  “Write about anything in 250 words or less,” it said.

“Fuck!” I thought.  “How am I supposed to do that?  What if I pick the wrong topic?”

After days of painful deliberation, I wrote about Karl Marx.  Yale admissions officers were not amused and wouldn’t have me, although other schools were more charitable.  In the end it all boiled down to a simple, eternal problem: I had no money to pay for law school, and no one in their right mind would lend me any (there are embarrassing stories concealed, like gunshells, inside this sentence).  My dreams of sybaritic altruism scattered like so much other piss in the wind.

I have since rethought my approach to essay-writing.  Were I faced with the Yale challenge today, I would probably send them something like this.

Bananas Are Evil

I will demonstrate, in 250 words or less, that bananas are evil.  There are other known efforts towards this end but I daresay mine will be definitive.  Let no one be fooled by the docile inanimateness of those penis-shaped vessels of woe.  They will do us in unless we strike first!

We need go no further than the basic facts to deduce bananas’ infernal nature.  They are oblong and yellow.  They are the favorite food of monkeys.  They grow around the equator.  They crawl into our windows on quiet, moonless nights and suck the blood out of babies and pet parrots alike, leaving behind a trail of indiscriminately desiccated corpses.  Studies have shown that consuming bananas leads to lung cancer, impotence and painful rashes on one’s bum (the right cheek is particularly susceptible).  Anecdotal evidence suggests that in certain places in Siberia, shamans use bananas to induce an altered state of mind that allows them to glimpse a vision of hell; a few have gone insane from the experience and moved to tropical locations afterwards.

All this points to one inescapable conclusion: the supremacy of man on this planet is being challenged by a silently encroaching enemy—a soft, squishy vegetable!  It has already penetrated key consumer markets stretching from the deep South to the Pacific Northwest.  Its grip tightens over free people from Alaska to Alabama.  These facts plainly indicate that I must be admitted to Yale Law School and given a full scholarship.

P.S.  Apparently, some scholars classify banana as not vegetable but mineral, along with mustard.  Consider yourselves warned.

< | Words Archive | >