Trigonometry

Today, we began trigonometry. Strangely, although not surprisingly, I fell in love with it. The perfect angles, the right triangles, the beautiful sides. Strangely, I understand.

It's so simple, so straightforward, so understandable. Every triangle holds only 180 degrees. A right triangle always follows the same laws. Every set of three sides can only form one triangle. No tricks.

Words, on the other hand, words are liars. Words are emotions. And emotions are painful. With every tear shed, theres never a right answer, never a perfect thing you can say to stop the hurting. But for every equation, theres always one perfect solution.

There Used to be Honeysuckle

there used to be honeysuckle,
growing up these branches,
setting the tree afire with their golden hues.
shimmying up the robust trunks,
we were fairies,
princesses,
magic.

as the summer sun kissed our faces,
we'd bask in the chivalrous limbs,
and suck the sweet nectar
from the dainty blossoms.

there's no honeysuckle now,
and the decrepit branches,
are beaten and empty.
I do not know,
what happened,
or where
the magic
went.

Glass Cases

"Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone." -Catcher in the Rye


There are, of course, moments that should stay frozen. People who shouldn't leave. Things that shouldn't end. Caught in a perfect moment, one could hold on forever and be happy. But once one walks away, everything shatters.

My friends are leaving, off to college on their own. I've grown as well, and lost my stereotyped baby position. In fact, I've lost my position with them as a friend at all. Things change. People change.

There are certain moments that shouldn't ever end. Like at a final show, our last night all together. Happy. Smiling. Together. Forever in a glass case to hold for eternity.

subject: your emails

Your emails.
I read them.
They were clogging my inbox.
I feel guilty, as though I read something of someones that I shouldn't have.

How can it be that I was you, just years ago? You complained, you whined, as young girls often do, crying out for attention in the worst of ways. You're everything that annoys me. The words are not even mine. I don't remember them. And yet, I know them. They are the words of everyone else.

Cuz.
Lol.
Kewl.
Ur.
Like.

They're not even words. They were your attempts to fit in. To be, to sound, like everyone else. And for that, poor darling, I'll never know who you really were. Years later, I'm all I know of you. I cannot say who your real friends were. I cannot say how you dressed, what you liked, how you talked. You've left me with words. The words of everyone else.

I'm disappointed in you, poor darling. I wish I could say you were better than this. But you where just like everyone else, weren't you? Struggling to fit in. Don't bother, dear child, for I know you. It never happens. But you'll find yourself soon enough.

-You

breathing theatre

the air sits heavy, undisturbed, pregnant with a thick, sleeping energy
as the door pulls open, the air spills out, pouring and washing over the same
walking through the isles, i can feel it beginning to move around me, my fingers drifting in the ripples behind me
as i climb onstage, the air whispers to me secrets of the past, as though it still holds all the music and pain that has been thrown into it
it harbors secrets from the audience, the booth, the lights, the world above the catwalk
i breathe deeply, taking in the familiar essence in silence
the bell, the shocking shrillness pierces the surrounding deepness
running down the isles, i feel myself slipping from the drafty fingers
the door falls behind me, sealing off the world i know
and with another deep breath, i cast myself off into uncertainty

Thigh Fact

A recent Danish study shows that people with thighs less than 24 inches around face a higher risk of heart disease and premature death, even if their BMI is normal. Not only do model-skinny thighs mean less muscle mass (which means the body is less able to regulate insulin levels), but some scientists hypothesize that thigh fat acts as a "metabolic sink", flushing the blood of harmful triglycerides (which raise your risk of cardiovascular ills). -O Magazine

Obedience

"Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social like as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only man dwelling in isolation who is forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others. Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time." -Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority



And so begins Milgram's report on his experiments on our obedience to authority. Stanley Milgram, a psychology professor at Yale University, became deeply interested in the Holocaust, writing, "Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency of the manufacture of appliances. these inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders" -Obedience to Authority. And so, in order to answer his own questions, he created a series of experiments, the first of which in July of 1961.
The experiment itself consisted of an experimenter (E), the test subject, who believed he was playing the teacher (T), an actor playing the role of the learner (L), and a generator with switches, starting at 15 volts, and increasing by 15 to 450 volts, accompanied by labels, warning from "slight shock" to "DANGER: severe shock". The "experimenter" was dressed in a white lab coat, representing the authority. The study claimed to be one on memory, and the "teacher" was instructed to read word choices to the "learner". If a wrong answer was given, a shock was administered, and for each wrong answer, the voltage increased by 15. The "learner" was in a different room, but could still be heard by the "teacher". Initially, the learner answers correctly, until he begins to give increasingly incorrect answers.
At around 75 volts, the teacher begins to hear whimpers and sounds from the learner. At 150 volts, the learner begins banging on the wall and screaming for the experiment to stop. Soon after follows pleads that he has a heart condition, that he's going to die. From 300 volts onward, the learner refused to answer anymore, and what is heard can only be described as an agonized scream. Throughout this, the experimenter continues to encourage the teacher. If the teacher refused, hes ordered to continue. If he continues to refuse, the experiment is halted.
Suddenly, at 345 volts, the screams stop. In fact, all sounds from the learner stop. The teacher is only told that silence counts as a wrong answer, and he must continue to electrocute the learner.
Thankfully, the learner being an actor, the screams were prerecorded, and there were no real shocks. The teacher, however, was unaware. Even so, Milgram found that nearly 70% of the teachers obeyed, administering up to 450 volts. In another version, Milgram has the learner in the same room as the teacher, and the learner is electrocuted through touching a shock plate. When he refuses the continue, the teacher is ordered to grab his hand and physically force him to touch the plate. Even more hauntingly, 30% of the teachers still administered the full voltage.

Why is it that they followed what they thought to be authority so blindly? Later interviews revealed that they had taken the blame off of themselves, placing in on the experimenter, claiming it was his fault, that they had been forced. But when it really comes down to it, whose hand flipped the switch?

Full Streaming Dead Dream

full streaming dead dream
drop black wild eye in weed garden
leave moon flower between concrete fish
wander off for leaf harvest
whispering light shivers on ice wall
watch skin sleep on still waters
melt winter dandelion blossom
autumn thunder above
hot mushroom roof
see the purple rust

Ninth Grade Meets Poetry

"Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary." -Kahlil Gibran

She sits at the front of the room, unbelieving. The class remains silent. With a sigh, she rubs her temples and repeats herself, "None of you actually read poetry?"
"I do!" I want to scream, "I do!" I want to tear the dog eared anthology from my backpack, with pencil thoughts in the margins, sticky notes pointing to the most intriguing words, and throw it on her desk. I want to gush about Emily Dickinson, to recite and analyze "I'm nobody, who are you?". I want to, but I do not. Instead, I bite down hard, forcing myself into acting out the same blase fatigue as the rest of the class.
Without a response, she sighs again and opens the book in front of her. Her voice fills the room.

The Lanyard by Billy Collins
http://www.billy-collins.com/2005/06/the_lanyard.html

I found myself lost in the beautiful language, in the paradox of "ricocheting slowly off the blue walls" and the comparison of the gift of life to the gift of the lanyard. We were asked to analyze it, to find a meaning. After a long pause, a girl in the back row offered an answer, "It means like, we can't ever pay back our parents, you know?" A silence ensued, and when nothing else was given, it was taken.
"We can't ever pay back our parents?" That's the only meaning she found in The Lanyard? Not only is that directly stated in the poem, its described as a "worn truth"! The meaning of The Lanyard, dear reader, is not directly stated in it. No, the meaning rests in the final lines, the confusion and guilt with which he admits that at the time, he was "as sure as a boy could be/ that this useless, worthless thing [he] wove/ out of boredom would be enough to make [he and his mother] even". In frustration, I resign to saying that the Ninth Graders know not, for whatever be the meaning, it remains locked inside the words, like Frost's snowy woods or Cumming's grasshopper.