A Foolish Figure

I was looking for something back in my archives... and I found this story I wrote in eleventh grade.  I'm not sure if it's more hilarious or disturbing (or some combination of both). 

It amuses me to think that I was the same age as some of my students when I wrote this.  I wonder if any one of them has ever written anything so... weird...




"Oh, he's so cute!" Leonora said, pushing her glasses up her nose.  She turned back with her friend to squint through beady eyes at Michael walking down the hall with his buddies.  She was not the only one staring at the teenagers with their spiky hair, earrings, and tattoos.  Every female in the hallway groaned in exasperation as he walked up to one cute little senior. 

"You comin' out with me tonight, babe?  Dude, we could, like, see a movie, eat popcorn.  It would be cool if you could come.  I mean, if you couldn't, it wouldn't break my heart or anything, but you know how it is.  My real girlfriend's sick tonight, and I need, like, someone.  You're already the third on my list, so I'm getting pretty desperate."

The girl tittered, and murmured her acceptance.

Leonora turned back to her locker.  She fumed.  "I know that my Grade Point Average is astronomically higher than hers.  She has not even the ability to speak in complete sentences.  However, I take comfort in knowing I love him, unlike all the rest of the rabble in this center for secondary education.  He will come to that conviction it in time, whether they do or not.  Amor vincit."

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"What?  What did you say?"

"I said, Mr. Randolph, that if you don't raise your GPA by one point within this week, you won't be playing on the team this year.

"But...but the girls all love watching me play.  What will I do if I can't play football?  And if I get a good grade in school I'll be known as Michael the Nerd.  I don't think I could take it."

"Firstly, Mr. Randolph, an F+ is not a good grade.  Secondly, it seems that you have been given a choice of two evils.  Become a 'nerd' or don't play."

"Stupid school rules!"  Michael stormed his way down the hallway.  "I'll be as unpopular as that geek, Leono... DUDE!  What an idea!"  Michael sprinted to the locker hall. 

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Do not swoon!  Whatever you do Leonora, act as if you are not flustered.  "Of course I would be delighted to go out to dinner with you tonight Michael.  May I call you 'Mikey?'"

"Ahem, well, I guess that would be cool," he choked.  But he regained his suave composure.  "I guess anything a cute chick like you says is fine with me."

Leonora's head was spinning.  "You may call me Lenny, if you so desire.  Do you have any more classes today?  I have finished.  If you are done we could leave now."

As they walked toward the exit, many heads turned, not to see Michael strutting out, but to see with whom he was walking.  Leonora's elation did not allow her to understand the stares.  She stuck her chin out and tossed her head, much to the amusement of Michael's friend Dan, who caught a private wink from Michael, missed by almost everyone else.

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"Oh, Mikey, I have had an enchanting night.  I do not think homework will be as fun anymore."  Michael was grimacing in the dark as Leonora snuggled up to him on the bench where they were sitting. 

"Are you gonna work on your paper tonight.?"

"The one about cheating?  I have almost completed it.  I merely have to reread it and satisfy myself that it is perfect."

"Mine's done too."  I sure hope she falls for this one.  "What did you say?"

"I said that cheating is probably the worst offense one could commit.  To steal is terrible, but to steal thoughts - it is an abomination!  A thought is the only thing one can truly call one's own.  If it is no longer personal, what good is it?"

Does she always talk like this?  I need a dictionary.  Michael stealthily copied her words onto a little piece of paper that he was carrying in his pocket.  "Wow, we must really think alike.  I gotta take you home, but we can talk about this as we go."  Leonora clung to him, but as the star of his school play, he could handle the situation.  He would get the information he needed.

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"Class, I have graded your essays, and I am pleased to tell you that the average score was very low.  I've never failed so many people in my whole career.  As usual there were the obstinate few who delight in marring my perfect victories and scoring A's.  Leonora got a 97.  She has a detention for not writing her middle name on the page.  However, there was one especially crushing disappointment.  Michael Randolph got a 98."  The whole English class gasped.  "I was horrified to find such beautiful sentences as 'A thought is the only thing one can truly call one's own.'  I hope never to be so disappointed again.  To teach Michael a lesson, I will give him a detention for...umm...well, he doesn't have a detention.  Just see that you don't do it again, young man."

He cheated off me!  I cannot believe my senses.  He scored higher than I did on an essay.  Well, if he wants to do that it is fine with me, but he's going to do what I want in the meantime.

She smiled as romantically as possible, when Michael sheepishly turned his head to her.  As soon as the bell rang she came up to him.  "What will we do together today?" she squealed. 

"Well, Lenny, I have plans."

"But I cancelled my plans for today, just so I could go out with you.  I was hoping to have a visit with our English Teacher."
Michael started.  He looked closely at her.  "I guess you could come watch my football game.  Then we could get ice cream or something."

"Just we two?"

"Yup, just us."

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"Could you make sure we sit next to each other for the test, babe?"

"Mikey, we always sit together for tests."

"Yeah, I know, but this is different, the driving test isn't a school thing.  Dude! what if they make us sit in alphabetical order?"

"Do you really think there is anyone in this town taking the test now who comes between Randolph and Randon?"

"Wow, you're so smart.  I wouldn't have thought of it in a million years.  I didn't know anyone could be so...um...pretty and so smart at the same time."  I can't lie like that for much longer. 

"I know I am a the incarnation of a dream."  Lenny smiled one of those sickly smiles at him as they sat to take the test.  Multiple choice was always very easy, so it didn't take long. 

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"I wonder if there are many girls who are the valedictorian in their class, whose boyfriends are the salutatorian?"

"I don't know, but I think it's great."

"When we walked down the aisle together, it made me think of marriage."

"Oh"  Michael turned white.  "I thought you were going to college."

"I have reconsidered, and I think that I want to get married."

"Did someone ask you already?"

"No, but I think will hear a proposal very soon."

"From who?"

Leonora just looked deep into his eyes (she hoped).  She turned away.  "I heard the other day, that a young person cheated on his driver's test, and when they found out, he lost his car and his license, he had to pay a heavy fine, and he went to jail for fifty years.  Michael's hand was shaking as he picked up hers.

"Leonora, will you marry me?"

"Yes."

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"Man, what made you do it dude?"

"Oh Dan, when I said 'I do' I almost puked!  I'm still counting on waking up and finding out it didn't happen.

"But Mike, why'd you do it in the first place.  I know you cheated off her, but you're done with school.  You could've dumped her."

"But I don't want to go to jail for fifty years."

"Huh?"

"I cheated on the drivers' test.  I could go to jail for fifty years."

"Who told you that?"

"HER, duh."

"Man, she was lying to you." 

Michael looked furious.  "I'm gonna kill her!"

"Who's laughing now Mike?" Dan joked.

"Just shut up!"

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"Watch the roads, hubby.  I do not want our honeymoon to begin with an accident.  That sleet looks pretty bad."

Michael did not answer.  He just pushed harder on the accelerator.

Suddenly the car skidded out of control. Michael tried to slam on the brakes, but he couldn't stop it.  "Turn the other way, turn the wheel.  Michel don't you remember."  Leonora was screaming in his ear.  "Turn the wheel the way you're skidding.  The driver's book..."  She gave one last scream as they went hurtling into a toll plaza.

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"The police have investigated the accident.  It appears that due to inclement weather, the driver lost control of the car.  The blame lied, ahem, laid, sorry, lay, entirely on the shoulders of the persons driving the car."

Dan went up to the police after the short statement.  "Do you have any more information at all." 

"Well, we do have one interesting artichoke, I mean artifact, I mean..."

"What do you have?"

"A picture.  They crashed into an EZ-Pass lane.  It snapped some Frodos, sorry, photos, and you can see the couple's faces."

Dan looked.  Michael did not even seem scared - just angry, very angry, and also disgusted with the ugly creature clinging to him and screaming. 

"You are very lucky, not many friends get to see a picture of their friend's last moments.  I hope it makes you hoppy, er, happy."

Suddenly Dan burst out laughing.  "It does, dude, it really does."

I became very excited about writing fiction around the beginning of 2001.  I wrote this work of historical fiction in January also not-for-school.  It was intended for a writing competition, so the length was limited.  Still, I somehow managed to squeeze quite a few of my favorite things into the story:  Classical cultures, Pompeii, tragedy, self-sacrifice, and carefully researched names. 

( Slave, but Free )

I'm just going to finish out 2000 in one swell foop, because I looked at the stories that I had written in the first half of 8th grade and they were all...weird.  Really weird.  The first two are titled "character sketches."  I have the vaguest memory of them, but I don't really know what it was all about.

The names are really funny to me.  Actually, all the names in my old stories.  I loved names.  Even now I have a very long list of the names that I will name my children, provided whoever I marry likes them (the names, not the children) and I actually want to bear...fifteen children.

Yeah.  SO not happening.

Anyway, I really love names, but I used to like really strange ones. All I can say is I really labored over those names.  :-)

So, here we have Character Sketch number one.  I suspect it to be based on a fable.

( The Horses )

Have you ever written anything so blatantly personal--as in not autobiographical, but might as well be--because you were thinking about it, and you really wanted your mom to read it, so she knew what you were thinking about, but you simultaneously didn't because you didn't want her to know what you were thinking?

I have!  And this is that story.  It was written for school, and I was pretty sure Mrs. K, my teacher (at that time she was Miss W.) would show it to my mom, thereby saving me the embarassment of bringing it to my mom, or forcing myself to bring it to my mom.

Also, going blind is my worst fear.  Well, my second worst fear, after being surrounded by spiders.  Eek!

( All Things Work Together For Good )

Is there any indication in the original series of approximately how many people work in the science labs?  I know there are about 400 people on the ship as a whole, but that is the only number I can come up with.

It appears that around the time that Y2K never happened, I was a very morbid little girl.  Yes, indeed.  Perhaps I was far too taken with Eomer? (See title of post.)  While that is an intriquing possibility, I am inclined to dismiss it.  See, in January 2000 I had only read LotR (and only five or six times at that point), I had not seen the Peter Jackson movie, for the very valid reason that they had not been made yet.  I had seen the animated movies.  But the animated movies did not have the utterly gorgeous Karl Urban in them.  Oh yes, he is utterly gorgeous. If it weren't for him, there would be very little reason to watch Star Trek XI.  True Story.  Anyway.  Because I had only read the books, I did not know what an amazing and beautiful character Eomer was, so I was only really obsessed with Sam Gamgee, and a little bit with Faramir (David Wenham.  *sigh* ...  but I loved Faramir long before David Wenham was born.  Well, long before I had even heard that David Wenham was born.  Two very different time frames, come to think of it.)  

But I digress.

Back to me being morbid.  We had to rewrite an Aesop's fable for a class, and then we had (I think...if anyone is actually reading this, and can identify a source for the second story, I'd like to hear it, because I may be misremembering) to come up with our own moral and write our own story for it.  To see proof that I was morbid, read below.

(Just to prove that you can always find someone worse than you, I should point out that I, at least, did not draw diagrams of interestingly evil torture chambers during indoor recess like most of the boys in my class.)




( Of Nests and Night )

What you are about to read constitutes the high point of my literary career.  It's true.  My seventh grade English teacher was the daughter of the kindergarten teacher (small Christian school=lots of people are related.)  My teacher liked this story and showed it to her mom.  Her mom liked it so much that she read it to the kindergarteners. 

I cannot tell you how much that went to my head...

Well, I can tell you:  It went so much to my head, that I thought it would win a national story competition.  The competition was to write a story about the first thanksgiving.  That's why we had to write the story at all.

I was young and innocent then.  I didn't realize just how politically incorrect it was.  It didn't stand a chance.  *sigh*

I did get to feel a little bit famous for a day or so, though.  I even fantasized about it being turned into a play that would be put on in the Thanksgiving Day program.  Needless to say, that never happened.  Hey, a girl can dream!

I should note that the title was my mom's idea.  I have never seen the TV show that it alludes to. 

( Truth or Consequences )

I didn't get into romantic (as in boy meets girl.  I never have gotten into Romantic as in Wordsworth and co.) literature until...dunno...probably some time in middle school.  I guess I still prefer friendship stories to romances as a general rule, but I have moved beyond the late nineteenth/early twentieth century boys' adventure novel stage.  When I was in seventh grade it was still going strong.  I read Stevenson, and Kipling, and Henty, and Alger, and all those guys voraciously.  And it really showed in my first attempt at fiction. Many of the other girls I knew told harrowing tales in which poor girls were abducted and made into slaves, etc.  I would not stoop to even writing about girls.  Hmph.

My family is very good friends--we may as well be relatives--with a family a few states away, and we often go to visit them in the summer.  There are three girls in that family and two (including myself) in mine.  As you can imagine, five girls do not get much sleep at night if they are together.  I am the eldest of this little company, so our week-long pajama party entertainment was often up to me.  The summer before seventh grade (so, when I was eleven) I told this harrowing tale over several nights, to such great acclaim that I went on to write it out in its current form:  (It's good to be the oldest!  Age has always been associated with wisdom, and to the 13 and under crowd, a year counts for an awful lot.)
 

 

 

( Tommy Holmes, Cabin Boy )

As my sister said when she reread it, it is sad that we can never recapture the joy of the actual telling.  But it's still a good memory, so I actually had a lot of fun rereading that story.  I don't think I've looked at it since eighth grade at the very latest!  I hope someone else gets a kick out of it as well.  :-) 

Hello all! 
 

This is me now: 

 

(A better view of this incredibly accurate comic:  http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=124)

Thirteen years ago, I was a little girl with delusions of grandeur.  I believed I would one day become a famous author, like my heroes, Charles Dickens, Homer, Jules Verne, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Horatio Alger, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and...well...I could go on for an awfully long time. 

Doesn't that make me sound jaded?  

Well, I'm not really!  :-)  I absolutely love being a PhD student, a teacher of college age students for the first time in my life, a proud dog owner, (Yes, that absurd quadruped is indeed mine.) a proud owner of slightly less absurd chinchillas (and you know it's bad when the rodents are less absurd than the canine), and a re-inspired writer of fiction--fan-fiction, to be exact, but as I do not expect ever to be a published writer of fiction anymore, I am willing to embrace it. 

So, back to the me-thirteen-years-ago.  About thirteen years ago, I made my first foray into creative writing.  I had a red, Stockwell office products, one subject, wide ruled Notebook.   The cover claims 8" X 10.5" and 70 sheets to itself.  I am willing to allow the inches, but there cannot be more than twenty-five pages in it. 

For your general amusement, I will reproduce the writing on the cover as closely as possible, given the fact that it is handwritten and that I am not going to share my name here:

 

Literature  S------- B--------- 
[editor's note--this may explain the page shortage.  little sisters are convenient scapegoats]

K----------'s 
Poems

The Poem's
[editor's note---GAH!  10 year old me was very confused about apostrophes...obviously]
of a
Girl

by
K---------
E------
B---------

Inside the front cover of this wonderful notebook was 1. My address...including THE COUNTRY.  Because, you never know when your wide ruled notebook may be stolen away and smuggled over the border.  DUH!  And then the following inscription:

All the Poems in this
Book were written
by the K------- mentioned
above

Yeah.  It really does say that.  I have no excuse. 

And we're just getting to the good part.  Oh yes indeed!

The poems in this illustrious tome are as follows:

Galadriel

My rabbit's named Galadriel
She used to live in field and dell

In the woods she'd bounce and leap
And in the underbrush she'd creep [editor's note:  it has never been established that Galadriel ever enjoyed this primitive naturalistic existence.  There is some evidence that the fuzzy lop was actually born in captivity...but you never know.  I think I saw a few fuzzy lops running around wild yesterday...]

Once as in the grass she lay
I found her and she's mine today.

[editor's note:  the following was added in pencil two years later:]
She died and was laid in the grave
She, who we in mem'ry do save
[*snif*]

Estella

Her curls are flaxen  [editor's note:  Estella had pitch black hair]
Her eyes are blue
She stands at height
Of one foot two

She wears her dress
Without a trace
Of wrinkles in
Its shining grace

She stands regally
Like a queen
She is neither too fat
Or too lean  [editor's note:  there is an (N)  in parentheses before the "Or" but it is clearly a late interpolation]

She is my beauteous
Porcelain doll as she
Stands upon her
Dressy knoll  [editor's note:  don't ask...]

Creation

In our week there are seven days
I'll tell you why it's so
It took God seven days to make
The world that now we know

[editor's note:  ten years ago me was apparently allergic to punctuation]

On the first day God made the dark
And severed it from light
These first two things that God did make
Were much like day and night

On the second day God made the waters
And moved them from the sky
The water would be used to drink
And air for birds to fly

On the third day God told the sea
To separate for land
He told the earth to bring forth grass
And every flow'ring plant

On the fourth day God made the sun for day
And the moon to rule the night
He set the stars up in the sky
To help the moon make light

On the fifth day God made the fish
And all the birds that fly
He put the fish into the sea
And birds into the sky

On the sixth day God made the beasts
And all the creeping things
He then made man to rule them all
Even the ones with wings

On the seventh day since all was done
God used this day to rest
He said "It all is good but man
In my Image is best"


Grown

Sometimes I think about
What i'll be like when I'm grown up
I'll be real good, I'll never pout
I'll act like a lady, not a pup
And then I'll think about a job
I'll do something great
And not be married to just any Dick, Harry, or Bob 
But, as I contemplate I think I'd rather live in peace and quied [editor's note--I don't think that 'd" was intentional...but you never can tell with these things]
And my fate would be to do nothing greater than keeping my kids from starting a riot 
But anyway  I'm still quite liddle 
So I'll wait till the day 
When I can answer this riddle

[Possibly the most scary thing about reading this old notebook:  My handwriting still looks EXACTLY THE SAME.  Life is hard...]

Yes, folks.  I did write those ridiculous things before I was thirteen.  I promise that if you read my livejournal anymore you will not be subjected to anything qute so...whatever that stuff is!  Though a few works will come close. 

But that brings me to this livejournal, and the whole point of this post.  I have a blog--"In Western Lands"--in which I ramble about randomness from time to time, and in which I'm planning to begin rambling on about the books I read (nothing as formal as book reviews) which anyone can read.  I have a personal blog about my life, but, no offence to you lovely livejournalers, I prefer to keep my whereabouts a little teeny bit private.  At least, I want to know the acutal legal name of a person before I give away my name and school and home address and favorite discontinued ice cream flavor.  :-)  I did not want my livejournal to be either one of those things, so I have decided to make it the home to my creative writing from the beginning until today.  And, since I have kept everything I've written since "The Poem's of a Girl"  [GAK!--for form AND content!] I have decided to post a work every day or so, whenever I feel like laughing at myself, going in chronological order.  

So, tune in next time for...

"Tommy Holmes, Cabin Boy" a rollicking adventure on the high seas, or a pastiche of Kidnapped and Treasure Island, depending on your perspective.   (But we'll be nice to 12 year old me [I have things dated from this story on], since it was my first attempt at fiction.)


Ooh!  I just remembered two older works:  When I was six or seven I composed the following two songs

Squirrels:  "Squirrels run up and down the tree.  Chatter, Chatter, Chatter.  Squeak! Squeak! Squeak! All.  Day.  Long"  
                    C        D    E    F      G-F E-D C         C            C          C           f/G        f/G          f/G       G     E        C

Bunnies:  "Bunnies,  Bunnies on their way.  Bunnies, Bunnies in the hay.  I just like them any way."
               C    E       E     C    D    B     C         E    G     G     E    F  D    E     C  D   E       D     C B  C

When I played and sang these masterpieces for my piano teacher, she noted that they had no key signature.  And I never composed again.  Well...until counterpoint class my senior year as an undergraduate...but that hardly counts.  Way to stifle budding genius, Mrs. B-------!  My ridiculous fluffball is disgusted with you.  [well...maybe he's disgusted with me for brushing him and fluffing him up like that...but there is no way to prove it]