Luck of the Draw

Well, I made up for eating that Halloween candy by getting sick and losing my appetite. Yesterday was pretty awful. I had to work for two hours in the morning and then endure six hours of back-to-back classes while I was feeling really terrible. I was supposed to work this morning too but I called in sick. I do have to go all the way to school this afternoon just to be advised so I can register for my spring classes, but after that, I'm coming right back to bed. At least I made a trip to the library on Monday. I have been alternating between Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (for class), A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (no, I have not finished it yet), Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America by Morgan Spurlock (I heart him), a book of essays by Ray Bradbury (I heart him too), Western Attitudes Towards Death by Phillipe Aries, and Girls Night In, a collection of stories by chick-lit authors (come on, have to once in a while).

Yesterday was a crazy day in poetry class. We were getting back our first papers and our midterms. One of the poems we had to go over was "The Rites of Hysteria" by David Gascoyne. It's a surreal poem with all kinds of crazy images. Professor G. then gave us two tasks to complete in groups. First, we had to choose a stanza of the poem and then illustrate it. Second, we had to write our own surreal poems about life at our college. The group with the best picture would get their lowest grade (either the paper or the midterm) boosted, and so would the group with the best poem.

I did the illustration, not because I can draw but because the two girls in my group didn't seem to want to. This is the stanza I did:

The perfumed lenses whose tongues were tied up with wire
The boxes of tears and the bicycles coated with stains
Swam out of their false-bottomed nests into clouds of dismay
Where the gleams and the moth-bitten monsters the puddles of soot
And a half-strangled gibbet all cut off an archangel's wings
The flatfooted heart of a memory opened its solitary eye
Till the freak in the showcase was smothered in mucus and sweat

Yeah, I had to draw that. Can you imagine? Then the three of us wrote a poem about how hard it is to park at school. Well, our picture was chosen (along with two others, a three-way tie) and our poem was chosen, so he said he was giving us a double grade boost. I couldn't believe it. Now I'm kicking myself for having studied so hard.