Poetry Jam

I wonder what a poetry jam would taste like. I had a sickeningly sweet yet bitter orange marmalade once, so I bet it would taste like that. You know, all the bitter dark poetry clashing with all the sweet love sonnets, like the ones Shakespeare wrote to a boy. Some boy.

Anyway, you might have noticed that I've been having a slight poetry obsession. Well, tough! Because it doesn't stop here. In Social Studies I've been learning about the Spanish Inquisition, and we looked at some legal documents and letters of confession from around that time. It scared me, when I thought about all the dramatic changes our world has gone through because some document was posted up. (Examples: Martin Luther's renouncing of the Catholic Church which began Lutheranism, the Declaration of Independence, etc.) If you just look at words without taking in their meaning, they're just small and pinched and annoying black little things which logically should not be able to affect a nation or an empire or even a whole religion. But (here comes the end of the shpiel, folks) words have a great deal of power behind them, even if they maybe shouldn't. I wrote a poem about it!

"ancient lay the written word,
piled atop a fragile stack.
cracking whenever it was stirred;
swaying dancer--forward, back.
there is beauty that they lack.
when their lonesome calls are heard,
they come as warning birds,
and dressed in funeral black!"

Rather lame, yes, but it was my mood just then. I hope you either liked it or were entertained by its badness. ;)
Woohoo! TFATF!!! (Is my memory not working right, or have I actually been MISSPELLING "TFATF" for the last few posts? If so, I'm in big trouble.)
-Ahaneen

Giving 'Em the Raspberry

*Assumes Monty Python voice* I just figured that I should pass on these significant moments in my recent life so that you can all read them.

1. I was reading the dictionary--no, no, I was sitting next to my sister, who was looking up spelling words in the dictionary--and one of her words, I think, was "raspberry." Well, the first definition is of the raspberry fruit, you know, "a small seedy red object that is good and squishy," or something like that. But the second definition pertains to the "contemptuous noise" kind of raspberry. It went as follows:
"[short for raspberry tart, rhyming slang for fart] : a sound of contempt made by protruding the tongue between the lips and expelling air forcibly to produce a vibration; broadly : an expression of disapproval or contempt"
Now we must ask ourselves, which arrogant old prudes wrote the dictionary in that kind of stuffy fashion? I would write the second definition of "raspberry":
"[used only by grandfathers and occasionally among siblings] : a sound like a fart, but coming from the mouth. To my limited knowledge, is only taken seriously in Harry Potter. In all other cases, is performed by siblings or grandfathers, usually on the forearm of the juvenile victim"

2. We were driving to my aunt's house a week or so ago, and we stopped at a red light, and a car pulls up next to us, full of chatty college-age girls. Now, in OUR car, there is a toy that my sister got in a cereal box which is made to resemble Manny the Mammoth from Ice Age. We'd been joking about it for the whole car trip. I was zoning out when suddenly I saw my dad pick up the mammoth figure and display it conspicuously to the young girls in the car next to us. They all start whispering and giggling. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but in a few moments all that I was thinking was, "My dad just showed some young girls a figure of a mammoth!!!" My sister and I start laughing and shouting at my dad, who is trying to deny the fact that he just did a rather perverted thing. Then, again out of the blue, I hear my NINE-YEAR-OLD sister say to me, "Dad's a sex offender!!!"

I never realized how much I put into the poor girl's head. I might damage her brain enough that she'll turn out like me, God forbid. Resolution: next time she asks me, "What is a prostitute?" I will keep my fat mouth shut.

TFATF!!!!
-Ahaneen