Astronaut applications

This is something I wrote for a scholarship application while I was just finishing up film school (we got scholarships for after we matriculated.  I know, it didn't make much sense to me then, either).  Anyway, I found this on my computer, and it's something that helps to remind me that, no matter how difficult the path may be or how discouraging it might get, there is only one thing that I can imagine myself doing for the rest of my life.

Capturing the Mississippi

I am sometimes dismayed to learn that some things I count on as constants are not necessarily so.  Like Polaris being eternally set as the North Star, the June Gloom blanketing the skies of Los Angeles during the month of June, and Pixar inerrantly producing near-perfect films (well done, Cars 2).  Neither is something like the course of the Mississippi River as reliably fixed as I had thought.  It turns out that every thousand years or so since the end of the ice age, the Mississippi River overflows its riverbanks and stakes out a new course to the Gulf of Mexico.  And, according to a book I just read (don't ask me why I chose a book on this topic, I really couldn't tell you), the Mississippi is long overdue for a course change.