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#293 - friday's entry, a day late
08/03/02 @ 5:23 pm

Hehe. I'm not as think as you dumb I am!!! Me spel reel gude! I got an 8 out of 10 on this spelling quiz. And I hadn't even heard of 3 of the words!!! Go me!!!

Also on the "I'm not so dumb" front, the students finished being read aloud The Lottery Rose yesterday. I was amazed by this book, despite only hearing every 5th reading. My first day hearing it, I was so disturbed that this was being read to Elementary school kids. Not completely graphic, but yet not holding back, it begins with getting to know Georgie, who is beaten regularly and quite visciously (nope, I still don't know how to spell THAT one) by his mother's boyfriend.

I get the idea that this is a classic, and I was the only adult in the room who hadn't at least heard of it before. So I didn't know what to expect. When Georgie won his rosebush, I thought things might go better for him, and they didn't. When he got placed in a boys home, I thought they might go better for him, and they didn't. It takes some rough patches to fix Georgie. And by no means is he perfect even at the end. But it was a good book about love. Giving and receiving. And loving oneself.

The oddest thing was after it was over, and they were asking the kids what they thought about it and why, it smacked me so hard why the rosebush was so important. Symbolism. Shall I give away the ending? Without giving away too much, the rosebush comes to represent Georgie, as he tries to find a home for the bush, paralleling his own quest to fit into a safe place he can call his own. In the end, he does something difficult to make sure his rose ends up in the right place, showing he can put others before himself. But in so doing this, he cements his own place into a new family. It was truly a delightful ending, since I didn't get the symbolism until it was over, despite the fact that it was quite a sad ending.

Symbolism kicks ass. The Scarlett Letter may have bonked you over the head with it (as well as shoving it down your throat till it came out your ass!), but that's what made it so brilliant. Maybe I'm naive, or I was when I read it. But in the same way the the Jabberwocky will always represent the best use of onimatapeia (holy fuck, I've forgotten how to spell that!), so The Scarlett Letter will forever represent for me the best use of symbolism. Hmm... Must peruse dictionary now.

*vicious - oops

*onomatopoeia - does ANYONE know how to say this? does anyone even ever remember what it means? Apparently (oh god, where's the dictionary again???), I remembered what onomatopoeia meant, but not what the Jabberwocky was about. Er, what it represented to the English languary anyway. I think it might have been on the same page that onomatopoeia was mentioned in a high school English book, so I always associated that word with the poem. *sigh* Apparently Tennyson is the King of onomatopoeia, not Lewis Carroll. Bah! Stupid, no-good photographic memory getting me in trouble 10 years later! BAH!!!

Anyway, on my quest to prove that I was actually correct, and the first website was merely illiterate and DUMB, hence not knowing about the Jabberwocky, I tripped around the net there for a bit. And found this jem: Sounds of the World's Animals. Surely you've heard that Americans think dogs make one sound, while other parts of the world have their own variations, right? Well, this site has them all lined up for you so you can compare! Betcha didn't know that KITES make a sound! You do now!!!

Oh! I spelled apparent and illiterate correctly! Yee-haw!!!

More dictionary fun: Strawburygrl's Stumper Word of the Day:

moraine: noun 1. a ridge, mound, or irregular mass of unstratified glacial drift... 2. a deposit of such material...

Admit it: no one here knew that, right? Right. Neither did I. And now we do! Dictionaries kick ass. I want to be like Diane Court in Say Anything, and put X's next to all the words I look up. But I only ever look-up words at work lately, and I don't want to deface work property. Bah!

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