Our Humble Proposal to the Dean of Admissions

During a visit to Ecuador, you are ambushed by a swarm of pygmy marmosets. Preparing to fight for your life, you unzip your backpack and find a boomerang, a comb, and a box of plastic sporks. How do you fend off the horde, and what is a pygmy marmoset?

Imagine that for the rest of your life you can only have sex with a “real doll” or a middle-aged man who has only ever had sex with a “real doll.” Which do you choose, and why?

You’re walking to class, already a few minutes late. You feel that familiar buzz in your pocket and pull out your cell phone, only to find an anonymous text message that reads, “Look behind you.” You turn around and there stands CavMan with an oversized plush phone, staring menacingly at you. What’s the deal?

You’re having a dream wherein you are perched atop a most magnificent iceberg. On top of the iceberg, you are conversing with a few most glorious penguins about a most beautiful, beautiful rainbow soaring majestically in the beautiful midday sky. You’re starting to get a little anxious because it is becoming increasingly apparent that the penguins are more well-read than you in areas of late 19th century German post-Hegelian socio-historicism and have interesting insights into fractal theory to boot! You start to freak out, and at the very moment you think the penguins are going to expose the drunken sham of a human being that you are, you wake up and realize you are dreaming, only to find that you actually are on top of an iceberg, but there are no penguins and it is actually night time, so, incidentally, there is no rainbow, either. Also, you are not wearing any pants. What feelings take hold?

Write about your favorite childhood memory. Now write about how much better it would be if your saxophone instructor hadn’t grabbed your boob all those times.

Imagine you’ve been cast as Holden Caulfield in the movie version of The Catcher in the Rye. How do you channel Holden’s disgust for the human race? Also, how do you cope with the fact that this crummy prompt’s main focus is not to help you develop your own writing skills, but to praise some lousy dead writer? It was probably written by a bunch of phonies, and just goes to show why you’re better off not listening to anybody.

It is your funeral, and you look up and watch from the black pit of hell as friends and loved-ones and formaldehyde junkies pay their respects to your embalming fluid-infused shell of a body. You start to get a little anxious that the mortician didn’t do your “I’m still kind of alive-ish” face makeup right, so you begin to smoke a cigarette. Not wanting to seem rude, you offer a cigarette to Beelzebub as well because, hey, you guys are gonna be spending something like eternity together, right? Turns out Satan is actually a way lonely dude and is so struck by your act of camaraderie that he offers to let you come back to life (with all that smoking, he knows you’ll be back soon, anyway). What do you do? Do you do a comical surprise-jump-out-of-the-coffin and make a hilarious joke along the lines of “something something looks to kill” or “Aunt Sally’s cooking something something I always thought it would kill me something or other”? Or do you just let the opportunity slip on by because, really, what’s the point of it all...

When you wake up one morning, you find a mysterious book under your pillow, full of erotic diagrams and written in hieroglyphs. On every other page there is a puzzle of sorts. Eventually, you begin to recognize a pattern and realize that what you have in your hands is a divine tool with the power to seduce anyone. How often do you use the book and why? Ain’t got no skillz?

Your plane has crashed in the desert and the only other survivor is the guy that made a passive-aggressive comment when your baby wouldn’t stop crying. You need to get him to share his water with you. What “my-kid-sure-is-dead-now” joke do you make to break the ice?

There are 200 red apples, 300 green apples, and 120 yellow apples. If Tommy eats 30 red apples, Jenny eats 67 green apples, and Florence eats 2 yellow apples, how does gender affect the apple color chosen and the quantity of the choice?

Your hair becomes sentient and threatens to eat your brain. How do you politely dissuade it?

The environment around your home has been overrun with slugs the size of hotdogs. You’re sure this is a direct result of the decline in squirrel population, and increase in golden eagle population. You run across a contraption strapped around a lower limb of a tree in your neighborhood. A sign next to it reads: “If you set off this contraption, you will successfully rid this suburb of all giant hotdog-sized slugs. But you will also finish off the squirrel population.” It’s also lunchtime—which do you relish more, ketchup or mustard?

A trolley with 30 passengers is speeding out of control, towards a warehouse holding 60 brains in jars that are all living simulated lives as Brendan Fraser. There is a woman standing by the road, pregnant with octuplets, seven of which will grow up to start successful non-profits while the eighth becomes a mass murderer. She could be pushed in the path of the trolley easily, and weighs enough to stop it, and you, the real Brendan Fraser, are standing next to her. What do you do? In the movie version, what better actor do they pick to play you?

The Evil Count sits brooding in the upper west tower of his evil castle hatching an evil plan to collect more taxes from his lowly, good-for-nothing serfs. The Sheriff suddenly barges in, worsening the Count's already despicable mood and whetting his thirst human flesh! The Sheriff drags behind him a ragged man who has been charged with stealing one of the Countess's rich baguettes. The only thing left to sate the Count's evil appetite is THE ANAL PEAR! As the expanding metal succulent is inserted into the transgressor's bum-oli, a series of ill-fated events begin to unfold. Chronicle these events from the perspective of THE ANAL PEAR. How do you feel? Is it warm in there? Avoid using the word "promiscuous."