plumbing my life

I've been tasked, by a new remote supervisor at YB, with writing a slew of essays in the style of the ACT English section. For those of you unfamiliar with the ACT, the English section contains short prose passages-- about 300-400 words-- written in the relaxed style of a precocious high schooler. The passages have deliberate errors in them, and the examinee's job is to determine, first, whether any underlined clump of text requires improvement and, second, if so, what improvement should be made. A very good example of what I'm talking about can be found here.

The essays' topics range all over. I was given a memo stating that the normal distribution of topics looks like this:

2-3 out of 5: personal/memoir
1 out of 5: history/biography
1 out of 5: art/culture
1 out of 5: science

I'm almost done writing my first batch of ten assigned essays. The five autobiographical (personal/memoir) essays have required me to plumb my own life, and my sixth essay, which treated a science-related topic, was on the impending collision of the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies. I'm tempted to slap those essays on the blog, but I do wonder whether there might be copyright issues, since the essays I'm writing technically become the property of YB, for use in YB's textbooks.

In any case, my five autobiographical essays deal with the following topics:

1. my first month in France
2. my pet tarantulas
3. how I discovered my fear of heights
4. how cats show love (praise for our late cat Mozart)
5. how college ruined my sleep habits forever

I'd love to write about tasteless topics, such as the way my brothers loved to fart on my head when I was sleeping (I did the same thing in return); the way my brothers would torture me when I was on the shitter by sticking their lips into the crack between the door and the jamb and breathing heavily, like perverts; the way I used to smash my brother David's face into his spaghetti at the dinner table. But I know such topics won't fly for the ACT; I've been told to avoid controversy. In fact, I've already been told to excise a sentence about two friends of mine, a Jew and a Palestinian, who used to argue about the Israel/Gaza situation; and I've been told to alter a reference I'd made to Jack Black, a singer/actor/comedian who might be considered non-family-friendly.

I'm supposed to be writing twenty essays per week until the project is finished. After that, we shift into the "error introduction" phase, i.e., we go back to our essays and slip errata into them. My main worry is that I'm eventually going to run out of things to say about my own life. Forty-three years is a long time to live, true, but such a life is not an infinite source of trivia.


_