2005-12-21 - 5:46 p.m.
While I was at my parents� house for the annual Hanukkah party (yeah, yeah, it was early � actual Hanukkah starts on Christmas this year; kind of inconvenient) Nya found this written in my handwriting on a piece of paper tucked into a book. She thought it was hilarious. It raises a whole world of questions. I obviously wrote it when I was a kid, but it�s not at all clear exactly when.
Possibly it was an assignment to use certain vocabulary words in sentences. But just what hard words was I trying to include? �Refrigerator�? The paragraph has little check marks in green pen at certain points, as if a teacher were making sure I�d included the right words, but the checks don�t seem to be above any particularly �difficult� vocabulary.
Furthermore there is no commentary on how what I wrote is just, well, bizarre. Was this par for the course for me at the time? Did the teacher just shrug off another weird assignment by Geoff? Or was this considered normal and unremarkable from all kids my age? Do all 8- (or 10- or 12- or whatever age I was) year olds go around writing such things and their teachers just roll with it?
I also don�t recall any such vocab assignments after 4th grade or so. But the book this was in was �Hamlet�, probably a copy from my eleventh grade English class (we studied T.S. Eliot�s �The Waste Land� and its sources all year; probably the best class I took until Brown). Did I find this at 16 from much earlier and think it was cool enough to save in a book?
What should I make of this? And is it old Elvis or young Elvis here?
�[check] Mrs. O�Reily sat in her kitchen. [check] She was dying of a rare tropical disease and she was not happy about it. [check] As she stared at her refrigerator, a vision of Elvis appeared to her. [check] She was in awe. [check] Elvis opened the fridge and grabbed a jelly donut.�
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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