wow

Alright, wow. It's been way too long. I'm sorry, loyal followers of mine! I just started work at Esprit last Thursday, so I've been either too busy or too tired to post anything. I feel terrible. I need to keep in mind that I still need to update everything about my previous weekend with Meri, because there's a lot of good reading material in that. That I can do tonight because I have no work and I'm not too tired. For now, however, I have a few good stories from the past few days. Read on!

Last night, I went out with Pavel Roudenko to get some food and beer at a corner shop on Lexington and 93rd, one block from Synod. As we go into the shop we hear some screaming outside... I totally ignored it, as I'm used to the late-night shenanigans of New York City, but Pavel's still new here and actually noticed it. So we walk out of the store and all of a sudden there's an ambulance and three cop cars outside. A pretty woman walks by with her dog and starts talking to us and the other little shop owners, who at this point have come outside as well to observe. Turns out this woman was the person who dialed the cops... She said she saw and heard a naked guy outside screaming from her apartment while she was getting ready to walk the dog. She said he clearly seemed either unwell or on something crazy like crack. So we're standing there and I walk over a little closer to check it out, and this guy, who is now clothed, is sitting on the curb with his hands cuffed behind his back while the cops are talking. Most of them are laughing. This is when it gets awesome. The guy rolls off the curb, turns onto his side, and starts attempting to kick the plainclothes officer from the ground. He lightly swipes the cop's knee and one of them starts lightly smacking him to get him to stop. It was great stuff to watch, just him slowly letting loose a feeble kick while he's attempting some ninja ground-swipe attack.

At this point more cops show up, in an NYPD van! A good 4 of them get out, the driver is laughing, as he clearly had heard what was going on over the radio. He starts talking to us, we're laughing that they need so many for one crazy, whacked-out guy, I guess they had nothing better to do at 11:30 PM on a Wednesday, but there really was no point of these guys showing up. After they show up, the EMTs put the crackhead on a gurney and start wheeling him to the ambulance, all the while he's kicking and screaming something indistinguishable, but along the lines of "I'll kill you! Let me go! What the fuck!" They put him in the back of the truck and drive away, and the cops lingered and kept talking and laughing. All that for one naked druggie. How is it I always happen to experience things like this? Just another day in the life...


One more quick story before I have to go to class...
You may have seen my status update yesterday about my argument with my poetry professor in class. Well here's the full story. She's an accomplished playwright and poet by the name of PJ Gibson, and she is a very good professor, but she's kind of quirky (For those who want a little background on her, here is a list of her plays, and here is a quick summary on her professional career). Anyway, she spent the better part of this semester making sure we knew how to do exact-end rhyme. As someone who's been writing poetry/lyrics (mostly lyrics) since I was 15, writing it comes relatively easy and natural to me. And I am great at rhyming. I am infatuated with the lyrical ability of artists such as Eminem (as I mention all the time), Shawn Harris (The Matches) and Stephan Jenkins (Third Eye Blind). Before this class, I found it repulsive to read or write poetry that didn't rhyme. I think it's a lot more beautiful when you can get the point across while making it flow rhythmically and making it rhyme. I've since learned that you can, in fact, have great poetry that is free verse, but I still think nothing compares to a true rhyming ability.

That said, lyrical rhyming is very different from exact-end rhyme. With exact-end rhyme, as the name suggests, there cannot be poetic license... It has to be a perfect rhyme. You can't rhyme, for example, "months" with "once," as I've often done and seen because the ending sounds are not exactly the same. So, the type of poem we were doing last week was a villanelle, which has two repeating lines and the other lines must have exact-end rhyming (the most famous villanelle is "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas). She asked yesterday if anyone wanted to open a poem on the computer so we could read and edit it as a class. I thought my poem was awesome and volunteered. Basically, we went through it, and she didn't want to change anything 'cause she said it was very well done (which is a HUGE step, because she's very critical)... but the one thing she said was wrong was that the word "fussed" did not rhyme with the other words it was supposed to rhyme with (lust, trust, must, etc...). I was like, "umm, why?" and she said because it ends with "ed" it's pronounced "Fuss-duh." At this point I, of course, got angry because fussed CLEARLY rhymes with all the other "-ust" words, because that's how it's supposed to be pronounced. She said no, it was because of my bad pronunciation, and as an example said that she's from Pittsburgh and people from Pittsburgh pronounce "water" as "war-ter," but that does not make it the correct way. I said that's ridiculous because it's not a change in dialect, it's the normal way the word is meant to be pronounced by the rules of the English language, and if any word ends in the soft "s" sound and is then put into the past tense via the "ed" ending, it is pronounced "ust," with a soft "t" sound, not a hard "d." She then became frustrated, as I always argue poetry points with her and she usually proves me wrong, but in this case I thought it was such a ridiculous point she was making that I was not backing down...

She asked a student to take out the rhyming dictionary we were supposed to buy for the class (which I, of course, did not buy because I'm smart and have my very own rhyming dictionary in my head), and asked the kid to look up the rhymes for "-ust." The way the dictionary works is that it gives certain ending sounds numbers and lists every word in that rhyme sound. Well "-ust" was number 443 or something in the rhyme dictionary, and it gave a list of all the words and then in parentheses it said "(also 307 +ed)." So if you go to rhyme number 307 it says "uss" and lists words such as fuss, cuss, bus, etc. So clearly what the dictionary was saying is that besides all the "ust" words, any "uss" word in the past tense also rhymed with "ust." The professor, however, being a little quirky, didn't understand that that was what it meant. She thought that the "+ed" part meant that you add the ed to words like trust, and then "trusted" would rhyme with "lusted." At this point one girl who sits next to me in class goes "professor, I hate to ever agree with Peter, but I have to say that he's right in this situation."

When the profesor STILL didn't understand that she was wrong, however, she went to dictionary.com to use the pronunciation guide that it has... needless to say, she didn't know that it only pronounces the root word, and not the past tense word, so that was a dead-end, as it only pronounced "fuss." (I'm sorry this rant is going so long, but as annoying as it may be to read this, it was infinitely more annoying in class, so you're kind of experiencing what I was experiencing). FINALLY, we asked her to go on a rhyming dictionary online, where when you type in any word it gives all the exact rhymes it has. I directed her to rhymezone.com, and we typed in "fussed" and finally, when it shows all the words ending in "ust" she accepted that I was right and she was wrong.... So there we have it. I don't know how she was being so not-understanding in that situation when it was so clear, and I wasn't just arguing for the hell of it like I often do... I was legitimately upset. But I won!

Thanks for sticking with me even though I let you down for a whole week with no posts! As a reward for your patience, you get to read the now-infamous poem that was the cause of this poetry class controversy! Peace!


Golden

You shine so golden when you lust.
Your lying tongue can taste so foul –
But gold was never meant to rust.

I am immune to all your trust,
You’re a disease inside my bowel.
You shine so golden when you lust.

So go on and do the things you must,
I spot a shimmer in your scowl.
But gold was never meant to rust.

And so you sit there in the dust,
Horny and wet – without a towel.
You shine so golden when you lust.

Inside his bed you sometimes fussed,
And like a dog let loose your howl
But gold was never meant to rust.

Oh, there’s your face, your hands, your bust.
At night you are just like an owl…
You shine so golden when you lust
But gold was never meant to rust…