Today, to mix it up, I wrote my own personal essay-- no more than 650 words (the magic number). You can decide if this passes muster as a personal statement. While you read, play the all-powerful admissions officer, not the humble applicant. What, if anything, do you learn about the essay's writer? What, if you had to guess, might the writer be like to hang out with? And so on... * This morning, my husband John went to feed our two adult bearded dragons, and the big, beefy lizard, Drako, the one I called "fat old man"-- though he was really only a middle-aged lizard, if that-- the one who lazed around with his belly spreading out over his driftwood-- was dead. (Please hang in there, ye non-empathetic to the reptilian plight). LIke we say of dead people (some of them), he "looked asleep", but a little too stiff. There is something in our veins that recognizes our fate in that "little too stiff", no matter the creature. I admit I recoiled from his frozen body even as my heart leapt forward like a hopeful medic. The weight of any death, however reptilean, conjures every death I have been through-- every death, even that of our little plants that inexplicably and stubbornly failed to thrive, giving me the existential middle finger. Because John had to run to work, and because we did not know the cause of death, and because there was a second bearded dragon in the tank to worry about, John picked up Drako and put him hastily in our oversized planter, where our corn plant faltered and grew asymmetrically. In that dirt was the long-since-decomposed body of another baby beardie, the runt of our clutch. We'd introduced the fertile and lithe Sunny to Drako's tank last fall. After some awkward co-habitation, Drako had found (from his deep biological recesses) his ne'er-before-aired male swag and done the species-typical head-bobbing dominance dance atop her. He looked smug, not knowing Sunny was already pregnant from another male. Lizards don't make a Continue Reading …