pieces of grace

Our school decided to be kind to us this year and give us an extra two days off for spring break, and so, here I am trying to catch up on a crapload of work. I decided to check my school email, hoping to find answers about a certain paper from a certain teacher, whom I had tortuously emailed over break. Instead, I was met with a huge array of spam mail from, yet again, colleges – the kind that they email to everyone but pretend they don’t so that you can feel special when you really aren’t. My usual routine with these types of emails is to just quickly scan the titles and briefly check what colleges have decided to “single me out.” If my mother happens to be there, I’m often treated to a brief rant of disappointment about all these “bad colleges.” And just so you know, bad = any college that isn’t Stanford, Berkeley, or Ivy League.

After being treated to this rant, an email from Mills College caught my eye. It wasn’t the Mills College part that intrigued me. Oh, no. It was the title: “Smarter than Barbie AND Stronger than Ken.” Needless to say, I was deeply interested and amused and decided to open up the email, only to find this very unique and personalized message: “That’s what we say makes the students at Mills College so distinctive, Grace” along with a little link that said “Find out more about the dynamic students here at Mills.”

My gut reaction was to just laugh my head off, because, really, if Mills thinks that their students are unique (excuse me, I mean DYNAMIC) because they are all not just smarter than Barbie but also stronger than Ken, then they are wrong. Because we all know that this broad category of being smarter and stronger than little plastic Barbie dolls includes every human being on the planet (well, most of them anyway). And even if Mills’s Admissions Office was going for a figurative meaning, then they need to get their priorities straight – since Barbie’s brain is usually filled with statements along the lines of, “Hi! I love being your best friend. Let’s go shopping!” But if Mills was going for a good marketing strategy, then they succeeded because I definitely opened up my email out of pure curiosity and amusement. The only problem is, I now think Mills is somewhat ridiculous and now only look forward to future emails from Mills as sources of entertainment.