COOKIE-CUTTER.

i've never liked cookie-cutter molds. not even when i was little and my family would make christmas cookies the "old fashioned way" (mixing sugar and flour and eggs and milk to make the dough. rolling it out with a rolling pin.) i used them, sure, but i always hated the "perfection" of it all. how if it wasn't just right it was bad. how the dough had to fit perfectly into the gingerbread outline.

so i'd "imperfect" them. i'd add a bit of dough to the head of the gingerbread man to give him hair, i'd make a three-legged reindeer, i'd make a star without points - anything to prevent myself from coming up with an army of perfect cookie-cutter molds.

i think, even then as a meager six year old, i recognized and appreciated the deviation from 'perfect.' i saw the merit in an imperfect army of amputee gingerbread and reindeer with an extra head, not in my mother's cookie-cutter exact models. i knew that i wanted something different.

so yesterday, when my interviewer asked me if there was anything else that i wanted duke to know about me the first thing that came to mind was 'i am not a cookie-cutter college model of the perfect student.' instead i pride myself on my ability to embrace identity, be different, and be okay with 'not fitting in.' i don't want to be perfect.

mainly because people who strive for perfection end up unhappy.

but also, they irk me.

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