Scratch

We're supposed to respond to this prompt.


“Salad Bar” Writing Diagnostic

“Life is a one-trip salad bar!” blurted an old wise hermit who’s spent the majority of his life atop a desolate mountain which takes three months for a potential visitor to climb. Only then, did the innocent hiker begin to doubt the usefulness of how he’d spent his last summer. But did he truly grasp what the hermit told him? Obviously, he couldn’t have spent the summer any more productively. Could he have? How could he have spent the last three months any better than slowly realizing that he maybe shouldn’t have spent three months realizing that he shouldn’t have wasted the last three months of his life realizing this? Was the only message that the hermit was trying to convey that time shouldn’t be wasted, because there aren’t second chances; or was there something else encoded in his philosophical mantra? How could one not trust a man who has spent years alone on the top of a mountain pondering the intricacies of life, and now uncontrollably mutters the phrase, “Life is a one-trip salad bar!”, over and over again? Could he just be hungry?

It turns out that the hermit was hungry (he tried to eat the hiker when his back was turned), and what he meant to say was, “In my life, I’ve only eaten at a one-trip salad bar, and I haven’t had a chance to eat anywhere else since, so watch out!” However, he had spent most of the time after his exodus from society working on philosophical insight as well as some interesting mathematics. His great discovery happened one day when he accidentally scheduled philosophy at the same time as calculus. He failed to realize this scheduling mishap, and proceeded to work on both subjects at the same time. Shortly after giving up on finding an analogy to life, he successfully graphed with a stick in some snow the Folium of Descartes. That’s when he came up with the answer to his prior inquiry. “Life isn’t a line! It’s a parametric equation!” he shouted, scaring the last few goats on the mountain off a cliff.
   
The more he thought about it, the more he agreed with his prior assessment of life. Unlike in a one-trip salad bar or a line, the highest point (smoked salmon or bacon) is not always at the end. In fact, with all the curves and loops, the apex of a parametric equation could be at any point. Another similarity between parametric equations and life is that they could both head in the same direction for a long time, then suddenly loop around or go off into a new direction. This would never happen in a more linear one-trip salad bar, because if somebody wants more carrots, but they’re already to the croutons, going back would only make others grumpy and would likely turn into an infamous salad-bar brawl.

The hermit was happy with his the realization he had made, but he had a yearning to make one final connection to solidify his idea. After days upon days of thinking, he gave up. He decided to go back to his old schedule and repeat it again and again until he finally invented or discovered something new. After weeks of repeating his same schedule, he realized that repetition was in fact the final connection. Often, life repeats in cycles. The same events might repeat day after day, week after week, or even year after year. Parametric equations also often repeat through cycles (due to the oscillation of the trigonometric functions), whether they’re a circle, ellipse, or something much more complicated like a Lissajous curve.

Finally satisfied with his analogy, the hermit goes to bed in preparation to live out the rest of his life— err… parametric equation! The next day he wakes up to find a hiker sitting beside him. He tries to forewarn the hiker that he hasn’t eaten in 17 years, but all that comes out of his mouth is a mangled mesh of disjointed phrases (maybe he should’ve added “speech” to his daily schedule) including “Life is a one-trip salad bar!” After he almost eats the hiker, he manages to tell him about his groundbreaking philosophy about life. Feeling enlightened and a bit confused, the hiker begins his descent of the mountain. As the hiker is deciding to live the rest of his life in a completely different manner regarding the principle of parametric pathways, he forgets to make a foothold before removing his axe from the ice and plummets to his death.

What do y'all think?