College Applications and The Big Crunch Scenario

I've spent the last week frantically attempting to keep my life centered upon the needle head that is high school. Life, as of late, has been mostly comprised of schoolwork, college applications, and music. Schoolwork, as it goes, is ridiculously greater than I would prefer or consider useful toward a high school level education. Music has been reduced to the occasional marching band rehearsal and a brief 20 minute session with me and a marimba each day between the end of my 3rd period and my inevitable transit to KAMSC. College applications, on the other hand, are something entirely new.

I've never actually had a sibling who has gone to college, seeing as how I am the oldest child in my nuclear family. Since the years in which both of my parents went to college, applying to a university has become things that they were once not: competitive, risky, difficult, and costly. I would go on on that subject, but I'm not exactly in a position to whine (since I do have to get into college). Long story short, I have very few resources available for knowing how exactly to apply to a college successfully, and it's stressing me out.

The school that is most worrying to me is the University of Michigan. While I would like to go there a bit more than most other schools, it is currently my priority to get my application sent there first. (behind my safety school of course) However, in addition to three fairly challenging essay/short answers, their online application is ridiculous. For example, my acceptance to any university is largely dependent on my list of extracurricular activities. Michigan only allows you to list these activities in a section that contains very vague categorizations of activities in which you participated. I participated in two ensembles that would qualify as "marching bands" for example, but one is over three years and takes up maybe nine hours a week for ten weeks; the other is only seven weeks long but is a twenty-four hour activity. How do I state this? College applications are truly horrible.

I feel that in addition to my stress over college applications (which includes the problems involved with getting one school to send transcripts to the other, and the other to package these transcripts with their own along with counselor recommendations), stress related to schoolwork (which is always prevalent in my life) could ultimately spell the end of one age of my life as soon as the month of December.

I metaphorically referred to high school as the head of a needle on which my life is precariously balanced. The reason that I feel this way is that outside factors (such as teachers, programs, etc.) influence my life by continually pouring more responsibility and more burden into it. As the weight bearing down on me increases, it becomes increasingly hard to maintain a strong pivot atop the needle and I become more likely to fall (in terms of grades especially; also socially, musically). However, if I can successfully maintain a decent balance of all the responsibility that is being added, eventually the burden becomes too great and high school will quite literally rip me apart.

This is not too far distant from the theory of the Big Crunch, which is a theory about how the universe will end. Let's assume that I am the universe. (I just realized that Universe sounds a lot like University... hopefully that's just a coincidence.) Instead of growing at the accelerated rate that every student intends to do in order to be successful, more and more stars and heavenly bodies crop up, which increases the gravitational force pulling the edges of the universe inward, back toward is origin. Eventually, with the addition of enough matter into the interior of the universe to increase the gravitational stress created on the edges, the universe will begin to accelerate inward until all the matter in the universe collapses inward on itself, leaving behind a singularity of infinite density containing all of the matter in what was once known as the universe. At that point, the universe we once knew is completely gone; any new universes created in a subsequent big bang would almost certainly have different physical properties than our own that inhibit any potential for life to exist. This can also be interpreted as "I have no hope of getting into the same Universities that I was once capable of getting into before my life imploded in on itself because of stress, leaving me to meander about the remaining year of high school aimlessly without any real purpose to it." The same idea applies to so many situations in life that the evidence of unmanageable stress causing emotional collapse is undeniable. I am truly scared of what is to become of me over the next year before college.