Rainflash

Leopard shining through milk,
Spittle on the windowsill.
Tearing pink tissue,
Slipping softly forward
With kettle corn thoughts.
A dripping faucet.
Liquid sunshine falling
gently,
Cotton soaking in the light
And dripping gray
Upon shingled umbrellas.
Muddy waters,
Pooled pavement,
Sinking ships,
A glass mirror.
Remembering.

Leopard shining through milk,
Spittle on the windowsill.
Gathering the light.
A blackening carousel,
Crunching against
Clashing mountains.
Gloom on the outside,
But warm by the fire.
Soon started,
Soon over,
A string on my finger,
A moment.


Original "found poem" haiku:

Rain Leopard shines through milk
Spittle on the windowsill
Tearing pink tissues

Creative Writing; A Shift in Site

I'm a writer, but I tend to dislike everything I write. Is that normal? Guess it doesn't matter. My parents and teachers tend to shower my work with cascades of compliments (dislike), my friends tend to grunt and play video games (like). Hmm.

Anyway, at a teacher's suggestion, I started keeping a wiki of my works, for some sort of organized file I could look back on later. However, the recent changes in pbwiki.com have made it difficult to keep my wiki working. The main reason I even started that wiki was so people would read it. And, well, nobody read it, so that was kinda useless. Sure, nobody reads this blog either, but why have 2 seperate pages that nobody reads when I can have one? Easier to manage, at least. So yeah, I'm going to start infusing my writing into this blog. Hurray for making decisions!

...that's about it, I'll probably start off by adding my older works in as seperate posts, then see what happens from there.

Adventures in Lateral Thinking

Acting on an anonymous phone call, police raid a house to arrest a suspected murderer. They don't know what he looks like, but they do know that his name is John. Inside the house they find a carpenter, a lorry driver, a car mechanic, and a fireman playing cards. Without even asking his name, the police immediately arrest the fireman. How do they know they've got their man?

This is an example of a lateral thinking puzzle. Lateral thinking puzzles are solved by thinking creatively rather than thinking by analytical steps. For example, when asked which side of a chicken has more feathers, the analytical approach would be to examine each side of the chicken to decide which has more feathers. However, the lateral thinking answer would be the outside: it is technically a side, and it has more feathers than the inside (hopefully). So do you have the answer yet?

For the final English project I had originally planned on creating a short film about The Tommyknockers by Stephen King, but due to complications (no actors, script, or camera) I'm changing my book to Mind Benders: Adventures in Lateral Thinking by David J. Bodycombe, and I'll probably subject the class to dozens of mind-breaking torture puzzles like the one at the beginning of this post. I'm sure it'll be fine...considering anything would be better than presenting a non-existing movie. Harumph.

Figure it out yet? I'm not one to spoil answers, so just try to get the answer yourself. And don't cheat! Not that I can stop you, or anything.

Digital Aging

I stumbled upon this digital painting called "Last Men on Earth" by Wojciech (Voytek) Nowakowki, and I absolutely love it. He's an amazing artist, check out his website: http://www.voytek-art.com/

This particular image made me immediately think of 3 things: First was the collapse of Skyworld from Kid Icarus, the second was the collapse of Laputa from Castle in the Sky, and third was a more abstract swirl of philosophical images concerning humanity and its fate. To avoid seeming too dorkish, I'll just avoid all three of these images and talk about something completely different.

One of the English presentations someone did involved Pop Culture Jeopardy, with the generation gaps facing each other (the teacher against the whole class). Categories involved Game Shows, New York Times Best Seller List, VH1 Reality shows, the Digital Age, the 2009 Oscars, etc. Everyone in the class pretty much knew everything, except for the teacher...and me. I knew almost none of the answers, which did nothing for my self esteem. I tend not to think about how seperate I am from society, but events like these force the truth to surface. How am I supposed to relate to my peers if I don't even know what the heck a "tweeter" is? Its no wonder I have so few friends...

Well, what are my options?

1) Spend years in intensive study on every potential pop culture reference someone may make. Impossible! This pop culture thing is so rapidly evolving that if you don't already know everything up to this moment in time there's no way you'll ever be able to keep up! This must be why girls are always gossiping and texting - to keep up with current popular events so they don't lose all their friends. Sigh.

2) Fake it - make up pop culture references and hope they pertain. "Did you hear Brittney has flat feet? Seriously, she's like a duck!" Nevermind, that's a terrible idea.

3) Give up on ever understanding culture, and potentially ever having peer-group friends. Possible...very possible. Who needs these lazy, arrogant, backstabbing people as friends? Though I may be 18, I have the digital-age abilities of a 70 year old, and therefore should remain in that social group. Ah, who am I kidding...I do need these backstabbing friends! Its so weird that no matter how cruel teenagers can be to each other, I still feel a need to belong. I mean, I've seen people laughing it up and being totally friendly with someone, and the instant they turn their backs they say the nastiest things about each other. Like no matter how hard you try, there will always be something to damage your reputation, but you have to keep trying so you get a good reputation...It doesn't make any sense! We're all just tearing each other down to build ourselves up, but we don't seem to realize if everyone is busy destroying, nothing can possibly be constructed!

BAH! I give up! I'll just become a hermit who hates everyone.

Creature ConGraduations

My original plan for this blog was to post something every day, just as a break from real life. However, I haven't posted in a couple days because my sister graduated on Saturday (hurray!) and I was doing chores all Sunday (ugh), so I figured I'd drop a message down while I'm on a school computer "doing work". My graduation is coming up soon too...its oddly depressing. Oh well.

...well, I can't really think of any interesting stories to tell right now. I'm a little overwhelmed from the weekend's happenings and exhausted from reading all night. Right now I'm on John Saul: Creature. Its pretty cool so far. I really relate to Mark Tanner, a nature-loving kid who is pretty much shunned because he doesn't like sports. Saul's style is good too, and keeps the reader's attention with the action and changing point of view. I can't really draw a solid conclusion on it, having only read 88 pages out of 377, but so far I would suggest this read.

I never really liked football...

Posters...kinda.

I'm a member of LitMag (our school's literary magazine). Not just a member, but the student editor! Ooohh, ahhh...although I don't really do anything more than I have for the past 3 years as a member. However, I did get to make some awesome posters advertising the best school club ever! That being LitMag, in case it wasn't clear. Anyway, we put these crazy posters around the building and nobody seems to notice, although I did hear one girl say "That squirrel spider thing was weird, who would make that?" It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

A couple days later, one of my teachers pulls me aside after class and asks me if everything is okay. I ask why, and they say that they saw my posters and thought I might be under some sort of emotional distress. What?!? They're not like cries for help or anything, they're just weird posters I made to get attention! I ended up seeing my school counselor about it. Again. I end up seeing her a lot for random reasons.

So, there wasn't really a point to this post, I was just bored. The end!

Doors, windows, and maniac squirrels

People in my school seem to have a real problem with opening doors. Its amazing to show up in the morning and watch 3,000 kids attempt to pile through one open door when there are 3 other closed ones right next to it. Same thing in between classes too, it takes like 2 minutes to walk down one hallway because there's only one door open at the end of it. How hard can it be to open a door, people? Whatever, I can't get started on this or I'll end up ranting about how much the human race sucks. I do that too much...

So I was sitting in Journalism class and had a flashback! Those are always fun. Note: Journalism is divided into 3 1/2 hour segments, the middle one being our lunch period. Just one example of how the schedule in our school doesn't make any sense. Anyway...

This one time everyone left Journalism for lunch and our teacher decided to leave the windows open in the room. You see, the weather was really nice, and the smell of moldy crackers in the room was not. Hopefully something wonderfully magical would happen and the smell would dissipate by the time we got back. And everyone knows wonderfully magical things don't happen when windows are closed. Duh.

So after lunch ended, I made my usual mad dash back to the Journalism room (on the opposite end of the school from the cafeteria) and managed to get back at about the same time as the teacher. He opens the door, we walk in, and this one girl that was with us starts screaming for seemingly no reason. "What's wrong?" asks the teacher in a slight panic, and the girl screams: "A SQUIRREL IS EATING MY BOOKBAG!" And sure enough, there was a squirrel sitting on her desk, nonchalantly chewing her bag straps off.

Now, I don't remember exactly what happened next, but I do remember that the result involved 5 desks, 2 bookshelves and 1 student collapsing, along with the destruction of once-perfectly functioning curtains. As more students slowly filed into the room, everyone kept saying the same thing ("What the ****?") followed by referrals for the use of poor language in class. Ahh, that was a fun 4 minutes of my life.

The moral of this story? Open doors, not windows! Or maybe the moral is just that squirrels are hilarious. Either way works, I guess.

On Dinosaurs and Pokemon: a short entry

Today I read a friend's status on facebook discussing how cavemen killed dinosaurs with bows and arrows. Now, I don't mean to be picky, but the latest living dinosaur was 65 million BC, and the earliest living humanoid was 7 million BC. Therefore, he is WRONG. Not to mention bows and arrows were used by Native Americans, not cavemen. Plus, I highly doubt these ferocious predators would lose to a bunch of monkies who can't even tie their own nonexistant shoes. I mean, come on, even if you tried to pass that statement off as creativity you'd fail. Cavemen even standing a chance against dinosaurs is complete fantasy. Pirates, on the other hand...

Anyway, I recently started a new file on Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team for GBA. I love this game! Its so much fun, although most people seem to think its just an abomination. These people, however, probably never even played through it twice. Pssh, what losers. Sure, the dialogue is a bit infantile, and the plot leaves a lot to be desired, but for a game designed for 10-year-olds it rocks on a general basis. Its like Legend of Zelda with Pokemon! Or maybe not so much. The point is that this is my 5th play through, and this time my all-star team is a Meowth and a Squirtle (which means I'll probably be mutilated on the forest levels). Although I just started, I already know Squirtle will be my favorite partner out of all 5 play throughs. He's just so damn cool!The only way he could be cooler is if he had a pair of sweet shades.

^ so cool ^

I wish I had a brigade of turtles who fought fires and wore cool shades like them there guys. Then I'd be the coolest kid in town! Or maybe just the coolest kid in my house. My house with 1 kid in it...nevermind, I don't wish that at all. (YES I DO!)

So, uhh...zee you necks dime!

Ethology

I absolutely adore animals, although I only have 2 pets myself, a gerbil and a cat. Salisbury Steak and Sprite Stenzel, respectively, although they are not named after food. Sprite was a stray we picked up while moving to our new house (when I was 5 or so), named for her elusive nature: a sprite being either 1) a small or elusive supernatural being, or 2) a large, dim, red flash that appears above active thunderstorms in conjunction with lightning. She was aptly named for eluding the disasters that befell every other cat in the Stenzel household. The last of her kind...

Salisbury Steak is another story. I had to purchase a subject to experiment on for an AP Biology ethology project. Ethology, as you may or may not know, is the scientific study of behavior in (living) organisms. Every year at our school the AP & IB Biology students have a major ethology project in late May / early June, as sort of a last hurrah after the major bio exam. In order to perform their experiments, they need some sort of living organism (obviously) that the school doesn't provide (obviously) and that they have to take care of once the experiment is done (obviously). They also have to keep their "subjects" in the school's science lab until the experiments are done, which I consider rather unfair to the poor li'l critters. But I digress.

Anyway, I decided to BS my project because I was lazy and had senioritis (going on 3 years). So I purchased a box of Dixie paper cups and decided to record what a hamster did with them. Probably the worst project in school history, with no set time frame or control groups or anything. What will a hamster do with cups? Ooh, how exciting! I dragged my parents out to Petsmart (the Pet Smart Pets Mart) and moseyed on over to the 'small rodent' cage to pick out some random hamster.

And there he was. Not a hamster, but a tiny little gerbil staring up at me with his puny paws up against the glass. "Take me home?" his big watery eyes begged, and I was helpless to refuse. Within mere seconds I was the owner of a baby bundle of panic and mayhem. But how was I to know his evil ways? He was just so adorable! So I took the little guy home, set him up in a fish tank (not full of water, I'm not that insane), and set on the impossible task of naming him.

Skip the migraines, trashed notebooks, and 8 days, I ended up picking Salisbury: the city 13 kilometers south of Stonehenge. Or the capitol of Zimbabwe. Either way worked, really. I bring him to class, excited and proud to have picked out such an exotic name. My friend Jeff asks what his name is. "Salisbury!" I declare proudly.

"Oh, you mean like the steak?"

And suddenly my whole world crumbled. Everyone I showed Sal off to asked the same thing, over and over. And no matter how much I denied it, there was no shaking that extra "Steak" from his name. So now I had a gerbil not named after a mystical and mysterious construction of giant stones, or the exotic capitol of a far off land, but a common food item. Crap.

My only option was to twist the words around: 'Salisbury Steak' became 'Salisbury is not a Steak', then 'Salisbury likes to eat Steak', and my favorite, 'Salisbury would totally win in a fight against Steak'. Finally a name set: 'Salisbury, not like the Steak'. Despite this small victory over his oppressors, 'not like the' slowly diminished away until just 'Salisbury Steak' was left. And, well, it stuck.

So there you have it: the story of how my gerbil got his name. The actual ethology project is a whole other (incredibly long and painful) story altogether...maybe that will be related later on.

Mubber's Day

I don't remember when or where this happened, but a while back some kid wished me a Happy Mubber's Day. When I inquired as to what a 'mubber' was, he merely replied "Why, one who mubs, of course." I gave him a quizzical glance, so he added: "Well, you're the mubbiest person I know!"

This confused me, to say the least. Was this 'mub' a verb or an adjective? It couldn't be similar to 'bread' or 'pickle' (you can have a pickle/piece of bread or you can pickle/bread something) since 'mub' was used as a verb and an adjective instead of a verb and a noun. It also couldn't work similarly to 'smile' (smiling or to smile). It could have worked if instead he had said something such as "you're the most mubbing person I know", but the "mubbiest"? No way, Josie.

Maybe 'mub' worked in congruence with 'wet' (the wettest or to wet) but it didn't seem to work out well, considering that being the wettest involves being wet instead of wetting others. However, since 'wet' seems to be the closest living relative to 'mub', I'm forced to go with that conclusion. Maybe this individual was actually wishing himself a Happy Mubber's Day, and I was an unfortunate victim of a mubbing.

Or maybe 'mub' is just 'bum' backwards.

One-Man Movie Marathon

Once again I found myself stuck home alone on a Saturday with nothing to do. In the spirit of adventure, I broke out the movie bin and picked up a few at random. So my Saturday schedule went sort of like this:

Woke up
Ate breakfast
Watched Lilo & Stitch
Watched Castle in the Sky
Ate lunch
Watched Edward Scissorhands
Watched The Fox and the Hound
Ate dinner
Haunt the internet until now

I must admit, though 3 of them were geared towards children, it was a pretty awesome selection of films. You can't go wrong with Hayao Miyazaki, and the Disney sandwich was a nice touch. Edward Scissorhands is one of my all-time favorite movies as well. Last year I watched it every day for a month beacause it was so good...and I would have kept going, but my parents weren't too happy that I was "passing up homework for entertainment" or some junk like that. I think they were just jealous that I could recite every line by heart.

Although one-man movie marathons usually turn out pretty well in my case, it would be nice to actually hang out with friends on weekends once in a while. Not that I'm whining or anything, since I did get to hang with friends yesterday. We played Super Smash Bros. Brawl for about 3 hours. Like we always do. Maybe we need a new group activity, like Mario Kart, or maybe Mario Party. What a humorous comment that was.

Alright, that's it, I guess.

Am not...

A new frontier...kinda

Well, its a blog. And I started it. And that's about it. We'll see how it turns out...