While trawling Facebook recently, I clicked through to a link leading me Gawker‘s Caity Weaver delivering a vicious and biting Fisking to an op-ed by high school student Suzy Lee Weiss in the Wall Street Journal in which Weiss complains about not getting into university. Here is a little extract of Weaver critiquing a little extract of Weiss:

Attention Students: ‘Just Being Yourself’ Isn’t a Skill That Should Earn You Admission to College.

The gist of Suzy’s opus: while some try-hards spent their high school career trying—hard—to build an impressive résumé so that they could get into their dream colleges, Suzy opted to take a more virtuous path; the path of just being herself and hoping for the best. It didn’t work. And that is unfair.

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It’s simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, “Just be yourself.” That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself!

Suzy’s mistake, it seems, was interpreting the advice “Just be yourself” literally. Like perhaps someone told her, “Applying to colleges? Ah, just be yourself,” and she accepted this as an instruction to pursue no activities other than being herself.

Being yourself is not a talent. If you worked two full-time jobs all the way through high school and one of them was “being yourself” and the other was “trying your best,” you actually worked zero full-time jobs. It’s important to make time for yourself, of course, but you should be making other things in addition to that. Like goals and plans and effort.

By the way, why are “killer SAT scores”—a very reasonable requirement for college admission—sandwiched between “three varsity sports” and “two moms” on that sarcastic list of things college students “ought,” but could not reasonably be expected to have? Is demanding good test scores really as ridiculous as demanding participation in nine extracurriculars?

Right, a high school student complaining that having bad grades is a bar to university admission? It almost seems too ridiculous to be true.

Well, actually it does seem too ridiculous to be true. And that’s because it is. Here is the last paragraph of Weiss’ piece – also the one paragraph that Weaver figured she wouldn’t address:

Suzy Lee Weiss: To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me – WSJ.com.

To those claiming that I am bitter – you bet I am! An underachieving selfish teenager making excuses for her own failures? That too! To those of you disgusted by this, shocked that I take for granted the wonderful gifts I have been afforded, I say shhh – “The Real Housewives” is on.

Now it would seem to me from that paragraph that Ms Weiss did, in fact, know how she came across in her article. She is very openly playing the character of an “underachieving selfish teenager making excuses for her own failures”.

So what Weaver has essentially succeeded in doing is spend 1,000-odd words explaining Weiss’ joke to anyone who didn’t get it in the first place, except without acknowledging that it was a joke (I guess maybe Weaver herself was too indignant to get it).

What Weiss has managed to do is actually quite impressive: as a high school student, she wrote an entertaining article and had it published in one of the world’s top newspapers. Yes (as Weaver points out) her family connections may have had something to do with it, but it is nevertheless an impressive achievement.

On the other hand, Weaver is using her podium on a fairly widely-read blog (not nearly in the WSJ’s league, but sure as hell bigger than Major Karnage) to bully an innocent high school girl. For shame.