Ode To a Hare

(and, by its existence, an ode to my childhood companion, Brian Jacques’ Redwall series.)

 originally composed July 12, 2007.

Oh, a perilous beast’s the hare, they say;

Not many can match one in a fight any day.

But the one single time when the scrappin’s called off

Is when a hare sees the board laid out with scoff!

There’s none as can match a hare’s lust for food,

Repast a hare once; forever keep his gratitude!

Many have tried, but their efforts proved vain;

None can outscoff a hare when the feast comes again!

A bloomin’ hare could live through a ten-season march,

But a single missed meal’d leave him right parched!

Many a leveret’s been scolded “Grubswiper!”

But lackaday, sah, food’s what keeps ‘em all hyper!

Aye, quick to go adventurin’ is every young hare,

But what brings ‘em back home is the smell o’ the fare!

If y’think to win a victualin’ race with a hare—tchah!

Then y’ll be sadly mistaken:  lackaday wot, sah!

Aye, there be few beasts that can match a hare’s paw,

But to match a hare’s stomach is a feat beyond all!

‘Ey, the meals o’ the day:  two breakfasts plus lunch,

And of course a great feastin’ dinner to munch,

With many a score of snacks in between—

A malnourished hare is infrequently seen!

Pasties, pies, flans, custards, and tarts,

Go down to a hare’s bottomless parts.

There’s many a beast that’d die, if they may,

Rather than feed a blinkin’ hare for a day!

When a bally hare starts a-feasting, sirrah, wot wot,

His jaw may run faster than his flippin’ scut!

When a hare grabs his tucker, he’ll really get going,

And never will October Ale cease flowing.

     Oh, the hare, a perilous beast he may be:

     At his face I’d swoon as an enemy,

     But I’d faint quicker when I see a hare

     Catchin’ sight o’ my luncheon fare!

Many beasts love their books, their swords or their brood,

But a hare’s ardor is reserved for his food!

Aye, a hare’s a hare—while beakers plenty of mint tea he’ll quaff

You can bet his mind’s on his blinkin’ flippin’ bloomin’, bally good scoff!

(Apologies for the odd combination of rhyme and inconsistent meter.)

O geekdom, how would you survive without the internet?

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2dBqr0/savethewords.org/

Why do we watch TV shows and read books where we spend the whole time desperately wanting to beat the main characters senseless for their idiocy?

Jane Austen was good at catharsis.  She could make a reader miserably frustrated and sad and upset, and still achieve poetic justice in the end.  She could infuriate a reader, drag out the suspense, throw in agonizing twists, but it would all come out right in the end.  There were a little strings of sweetly packaged happy endings that justified all the pain it took to get there.  It might have been a little deus ex machina, but it worked.  Jane Austen wrote romance like childbirth.  (Is that a weird analogy for someone who's never experienced it to use?  It seemed apt, from what I've heard.)  [ Normal mundanity —> "Wow! Really?" Excitement —> Lots of discomfort —> happiness embodied. ]

There's this one Australian TV show, of which I have seen about twenty random episodes, which does not do catharsis well.  The frustration and suspense and frustration and agony and frustration and denial and frustration feminist idiocy just goes on and on and on...and then, two seconds after one thing is resolved, something else comes up.  'Tis unbelievably infuriating.  These characters have inhuman communication problems.  Is it humanly possible to take potentially miserably circumstances and throw every possible wrench into them to cause as much emotional wrack and ruin as one could possibly milk out of the mess, to the degree these people do?  Is there no end to what these people do to themselves?  If I were them, I would have burned something down, and keeled over and died, or at the very least punched someone in the face.  (Goodness knows there's more than a few people there who could use it.)  But it's to the point where everytime something starts going well—every time it starts playing the nice fluty Shire music—I cringe, because I can't help but be afraid that twenty minutes later it will start playing some horrific pop ballad that closes the curtains on yet another broken heart.  These people are such stuffers.  They're really awful at communication.  They're not even good at passive-aggressiveness!  There is a halfway decent catharsis every eleven or twelve episodes (all the ones I don’t see, eh).

Of course, it probably isn't all that inhuman.  I am sure there are probably hundreds of people out there who are horrific at sorting out conflict (although I'm still hard-pressed to believe anyone has as much conflict in their livers as these Australian farmers.  I mean, so much goes wrong it would be comical if it weren't so bleeding infuriating.) and who stuff all their anger and never talk and just take everybody else's word for every little thing and just wallow in misunderstandings.  And maybe I'll grow up into that kind of a world.  But one can dream, right?  One can hope for the perfect Austen romance instead of the crazy bad-desicion-nonexistent-communication black hole relationships of fictional Australian people.  A girl can dream...

And carry a big stick, too, just in case.

On caramel apple dip and almonds, and other things that don't really go together.

For lunch at school, today I brought an apple (I have no idea what kind it was because I pilfered it from the stash at the Iglesia last Sunday), several spoonfuls of caramel apple dip, and a bagful of raw almonds (because salted/roasted almonds taste like chicken. I am so not joking). (I left my peach yogurt at home, darn.) I ate the apple with the dip and about half my almonds, and then I had several fingerfuls of caramel left that I wanted to eat but couldn't, because I had no apple and I didn't want to eat it with my fingers (basically, because I was too lazy to put all my stuff away so I could go to the cafeteria and get a spoon). So...I dipped the rest of my almonds in it.

'Twas only a vaguely interesting food. The caramel pretty much overpowers the almond for about three seconds until you've sucked the caramel off, by which point the almond tastes really bland, and the stickiness of the caramel really gets the almond stuck in your molars. I wouldn't particularly recommend the experience, unless a handful of raw almonds is the only medium by which you can safely consume the remainders of your delicious caramel dip.

My ability at math is often somewhat limited. I either can't make heads or tails of math, or I don't retain it very well (except systems of equations. I don't know why, but that is forever branded into my left brain.) I have managed to work out that

almonds + caramel = vaguely untasty

math + Kiersten = dangerous chemical explosion

...It's interesting that I hate math and love English, since I hate math for the rules but am a staunch defender of the grammatical codex. Of course, I hate math's rules for the logic and everyone knows English utterly lacks logic, at least by comparison with every other language on the planet.

“English is a language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.” ~ Oscar Wilde

I was thinking about empty time. What does one do when one has nothing to do? Or when one's brain is convinced it has something to do, but there are no actual thoughts floating about in one's brain? When one would write about anything just to write? When one would mix moonshine with daylight and name it poetry? What does one do with the conflicting all-consuming entities of a writer's heart and writer's block? With pictures and no words, with words and no people? With nighttime and no sleepiness?

With a blog post all written and no internet until I get home tonight?

Reenactment No.1

Encounter with Eccentric Talkative Person #237:  Jamaican dude in a striped sweater that made me think of chocolate.  (It was ivory-and brown-striped, and it made me think of the half-white chocolate striped Hershey's Hugs.)

The Gull Road Wal-Mart Metro Transit bus stop.

It was too cold to stand outside next to the old ladies who were smoking, so I wandered into the little glass partition and seated myself on the black metal bench (which was beyond icy; I was glad I had a long coat). 

He was hunched over his phone, but he was hanging up as I got there.  

For the purposes of this blog reenactment, I will refer to him as The Over-Friendly Jamaican Guy (OFJG).

He had a pretty thick accent (which was flipping sweet, but also means you need to use your imagination and insert me saying "Sorry, what?" after 85% of his sentences).

OFJG:  Allo!

Me:  Hi. 

OFJG:  Ah you a student? (points at my bag)

Me: Yeah, at KVCC.

OFJG:  Me too!  What you major in?

Me:  I don't have a major yet.  I'm thinking I'll probably go into English.

OFJG:  Oh!  I do nossing.

Me:  Nothing?

OFJG:  (laughs) No, nossing, not nossing!

Me:  (befuddled look)

OFJG:  Nossing!  (finally pulls out his phone and types "nursing".)

Me:  (slightly embarrassed) Oh! Nursing.  Cool.

OFJG: (nods, points at old ladies smoking outside.)  Do you smoke?

Me: (wide-eyed) No.

OFJG: You drink?

Me:  (awkward laugh) Oh, no!

OFJG:  Ah you mahrried?

Me:  Er, no.

OFJG:  (shocked)  Oh, you not mahrried?!  Why not?!

Me:  I don't think I'm old enough yet, I guess. 

OFJG:  Oh?  This yoa first year in college?  You live with your parents?

Me:  (nod)

OFJG:  When you plan on getting mahrried?  You want to graduate first and den get mahrried?

Me:  Um, probably.

OFJG:  You go for master's degree, den?  Long time?

Me:  i don't know yet.  It depends on what I decide to major in.

OFJG: (knowing nod)  Ah.  You have a boyfriend?

Me:  No, not yet.

OFJG: (again, shocked) What?  Why not?

Me:  Um...I've never been asked, I guess.

OFJG: Oh!  Why you never been asked?  You don't know?

Me:  No, not really.

OFJG: (shakes head in despair)  You don't know.  Ah.  What's yoa name? 

Me:  Kiersten.

OFJG:  Koastah?

Me:  KEER-sten.

OFJG:  Oh! Oh!  KEA-stin.  Nice name.

Me:  Thank you.  What's yours?

OFJG:  My name is Abie.  "A" for "opera", and "B" for baseball.  Easy to remember, yah?

Me:  (totally confused by "A" is for "opera")  Yup, easy to remember!

(long, quasi-awkward pause)

Me:  (spotting the bus pulling in across the parking lot)  Oh!  Are you taking the bus?

OFJG:  Yes, of course I take da bus!  Do you have a phone?

(I politely declined to give him my number, and then his phone rang, and our conversation was halted.)

I passed him in the hallway at school later, and he was like, "HEY, MON!"  but I didn't see him afterwards.

It was a highly entertaining and quite unforgettable  encounter, and I have very much enjoyed regaling it all day. I wish you were here so I could do it in person for you.

There is no spoon.

I don't really know what I'm doing.

For all the philosophy of the universe cannot fit into one small, female, right-sided 18-year-old brain.  After all, girls never carry a map in their heads, because they actually have something inside them (like lots of family film references).  Sometimes my mind is incapable of housing even a single golden drop of philosophy.  Thus, I sit down and want to impart some moving, deep, insightful nugget of sageness to the Internetverse, and I have nothing to say but that I have nothing to say.

This is one of those mornings where I wish I were someone else.  Must be that perfectionism kicking in (except that you never saw that post, because I wrote it three times and never posted it.  It just wasn't right...)  Now matter how deep and creative I can get, I only have to peek around the corner to see so many people who are better at it than I, more well-rounded than I, who say everything that I wish I'd said and now cannot say, because that wouldn't be legal.  Or a very nice thing to do.

You know, I actually began this blog post with the full intention of writing about a spoon; but I can't fit enough logic between my eyes to say anything profound about a spoon (though I can make movie references about it).  Did you know New Jersey has a museum for spoons?

There's a tall old lady sitting two tables down from me at this retail coffee shop who looks just like Ian McKellen, except she's female.  It's a tad bit eerie.

It has come to my attention that November is National Blog Posting Month.  Whatever.  I don't know what you'd possibly get out of me if I actually wrote a post every single day.  It might be an interesting exercise.  Technically, I wrote three blog posts yesterday; I simply didn't post them.  So maybe I'll actually accomplish this.  If I care enough to try.

Normally I love/hate winter, but I'm excited this year to show off my amazing coat (even though it's the same coat I've owned for three years).  I wish coffee shops could take Metro transit bus cards as currency.  I wish they sold white hot chocolate in the United States.  They sell it at an airport in Zambia (Africa being, of course, the most logical place to sell hot chocolate [read with sarcasm]).

In the event of an emergency, plan ahead.

Don't ask me for help.  

All I can do is stare at spoons.  And write poetry. And make wishes.  And string words together in Victorianesque sentences that show up with far more regularity in my English essays than they do in my blog posts.  Sometimes I write sentences so long even I forget what the beginning said by the time I reach the end.  Maybe this month I will blog about authors and writing styles (or in other authors' writing styles...).  A notion that has just now intrigued me...

Am I merely writing reams of nothing?  How much of what I say is worth your time, or mine? 

Have you ever wanted to throw out some British slang, but refrain, because you aren't sure if it might be something horribly vulgar? I do that a lot.

I am so ready to be done with school.  Yes, that sounds horribly demoralized, since I'm only midway through the first semester of my freshman year, but I think I have pretty much gotten over any novelty of being a college student.  I hate research projects more than ever.  I find sleep simultaneously rapturous (I think that's self-explanatory) and a dreadful nuisance (it takes up so much time!  And just pushes all my deadlines that much closer).  Can't I just sit here and research Byzantine history on my own?  I love Byzantine history.  I'd do it, honest.  Why do I have to spend so much money to listen to somebody else who's already done the research?

Sometimes I wonder what I have to offer in words.  All my days pretty much sounds the same to me.  School, procrastination, meltdown, bus rides, getting lost.  I'm so moody I don't even have good and bad days; I have good and bad periods which consist of three or four hours.  Or minutes.  In the metaphorical version of my Magic Mary Poppins Bag of Everything, I have a few dozen anecdotes of encounters with crazy people, funny people, nice people, "interesting" people, and flat-out "what-the-heck-are-you-DOING-on-the-same-planet-as-me?" people.  But how interesting would those little vignettes be if you weren't there (or if I'm not there is person to reenact it for you?  That's half the fun).  I think I'll be a mime for Halloween.

Whoever decided not to put a jump button into the player controls for Legend of Zelda games needs to have their brains rearranged.  Or at least the glitches in their games.  Kudos to my little brothers for putting up with my hollering fits at the television because my shapeshifted character can't climb up onto a single crate to cross the dragon/bird/thing infested bridge.  Or because I accidentally fell off a rooftop and died.  Sixteen times in a row.  it really might be a fun game, if it were a little more versatile in the roleplaying aspect.  (And if my game weren't the one with all the mysterious non-canon twists.  Haha.)

I miss my friends.  Some of them have changed into different people (or weren't who i thought they were to begin with), some have moved far away, one is off at college, and some I just don't see at the times when I would really like to talk to them.  I need could consider getting a Skype.  I need to My life would be easier if I would get over my fear of talking on the phone.  I need think I need to stop thinking so much.

I was an hour late to school yesterday because of a tornado warning.  I was on the bus for two hours instead of fifty minutes.  It really wasn't as exciting as everyone made it sound, though.  I just got rained on.  And had to chase after my fedora (which thankfully blew into an empty parking lot and not the traffic-infested street).  it is über windy tonight, though, which is a bit poetically adventurous — very Emily Brontë. 

(Did you see that?  I worked the trema diacritic twice into one sentence without throwing in any Elvish.)

(Did you see that?  I managed to geek out about my geekiness while simultaneously referencing another geeky fact about myself.)

“We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone.” 

         — Viggo Mortensen

Paper faces on parade!

Today...(or, rather yesterday, since I probably won't get this post up before midnight) we finally enacted the "impromptu" (Improv Kalamazoo...shh) 

Masquerade For the Modern Man and Woman.

Destination:  Westnedge Panera Bread & the Crossroads Mall.  

Mission:  Be nonchalantly amazing.  

Garb of choice:  Formal floor-length gowns & masquerade masks.  (I also nabbed a fringy scarf-shawl accessory and some flipping sweet black ruffled elbow-length gloves {which i have been dying to own for literally years.  This was the perfect excuse}.  Thank you thrift stores!)  I wanted to homemake my mask, which EVERYONE else did, but I didn't have time.  However, I'm quite happy with the one I found.  Feathers abounded.

Attendees:  6 lovely ladies (unfortunately a lot of people wound up unable to come.  It was likely too short notice for the busy collegiates and their jobs.  Mmph).  And...our undercover camerapeople were in a car accident (!) en route, which we didn't discover until afterwards.  (From firsthand Facebook reports, everyone seems mostly fine.)  Also, two of Emily's HPA friends showed up last-minute, dressed, respectively, 1.in a (homemade! Amazing!) Elizabeth Swann style gown, and 2. as The Phantom of the Opera.  'Twas veritably pretty cool, but I didn't get the chance to actually talk to them.

Stop numero uno:  Panera Bread.  

This was all right.  We didn't get too much attention here.  (Unfortunately, we picked the same weekend to do this as Portage Northern's homecoming, so everyone who did stop us was either like, "Dance tonight?  *wink, wink*" or "Oh, you're the homecoming court for Portage Northern!"  We responded with as much proper impromptuness as possible— "No, sorry.  we're just out looking for our princes.  Getting a bite to eat before going to the ball."  (This garnered both some skeptical/wary glances and some laughs and good luck wishes.)  A few employees did tell us we looked lovely, and two little girls passing by the window on the way in just pressed up against it and gaped in awe.  (So adorable.)  However, after our Unofficial Board Meeting In Which we Attempted To Brainstorm For Future Improv Plans But Instead Succeeded Mainly In Merely Reiterating Ideas Which Had Already Been Posted On Our Facebook Site, we decided to relocate to Crossroads Mall.

Stop number two: 

...was much more entertaining.  We split up into three groups and wandered, penniless princesses all, through the verse.  We got a lot more strange looks (you could literally see people whispering, "what the heck?") and queries about our dance of origin. By this time we had managed to relate our story with less stuttering and "Isn't-it-obvious-I'm-making-this-up-on-the-spot?" deer-in-the-headlights look, and it was actually quite fun.  Beth told one lady, "Oh, we're on a mission from King Robert to seek out our true loves! (Slow going.)"  She thought we were hilarious.  The clerk in a CD store we stopped in was even more nonchalant than we were.  (It was the same dude who sold me and Mom the new Daughtry album and the new Skilelt album last year!  Random observation.)  He was just like, "Oh, by the way, we have a whole 'nother box of stuff on sale in the back if you want to look."

We found this awesome store (the name of which I don't remember, sadly, but i'd know it if I saw it) that sold katanas and potted bamboo plants and kimonos and glass dragon statuettes and Oriental tea sets and other much awesomeness that I will go back to investigate if I ever make it back to that mall with money in hand (I had approximately 36¢ on me, all in pennies).  The katanas are unfortunately quite expensive, but who wouldn't want a bamboo plant??  Especially a curlicued one?  In a really awesome vase?  For under $10?  

I had safety-pinned part of the slit in the back of my dress, and it came apart in jcPenney's.  A slighty-older-lady employee ran us down to tell me (with great worry and furtiveness) that I would "be in a lot of hurt in a few minutes" if I didn't fix it.  Haha.  It was kind of embarrassing.  Especially when Beth whispered (loudly), "Quick!  Let's all gather round Kiersten while Cassie fixes it so nobody sees."  Haha...

But—overall—the night was quite a fabulous time, and will definitely have to go in our "Official Big Book" of stuff to do (again, later, when everyone isn't at homecoming!).  If I get a copy of any pictures, I will (try to) add them to this post.

I was originally going to stock up on my sadly neglected French and pretend not to know how to speak English, but i thought that might be going a little overboard, especially as our night was already a little frazzled due to our shrunken group of people and some lack of preorganization. Je ne le regrette pas.