Everyone else is doing it

Kari's blog features her results from bluepyramid.com's famous internet quizes. (Does Quizzes have two Zs?) I'm a copy cat. At least I'm not like Danielle, who found out she's like the Webster's Dictionary. A dictionary. Not even the OED, but the sucky generic American one. Poor girl.

You're The Sound and the Fury!

by William Faulkner

Strong-willed but deeply confused, you are trying to come to grips
with a major crisis in your life. You can see many different perspectives on the issue, but you're mostly overwhelmed with despair at what you've lost. People often have a hard time understanding you, but they have some vague sense that you must be brilliant anyway. Ultimately, you signify nothing.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I Signify Nothing. Yeah, that's about right.

You're an Octopus!

Thoughtful and reflective, you always appear to have tilted your
head slightly to one side. You like stretching out your languorous body wherever
you can, but not everything is always relaxed. You wear your emotions on your
sleeve and have a terrible poker face. And when you feel most threatened, you start
writing things down furiously. If there's a sucker born every minute, there's one
of you born roughly every day.


Take the Animal Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I do tilt my head to one side, but I'm going for the "inquisitive puppy" look, not the "blubbery octopus" look.

You're Connecticut!

You have a great deal to do with whales and, when an observer squints,
even look a little like one. Even though you don't play hockey anymore, you've got an
icy personality and prefer social climbing to most other activities. If you live in a
small town, you're absurdly wealthy, and if you live in a big city, you're probably
stuck in a dead-end factory job. For some reason, you call cities "fords".
GM can't be pleased about that.


Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

A whale? I thought I was an octopus? Social climbing? Only up the ivory towers....

Know thyself: Go to tickle.com

"Reading Moll Flanders": The Semester from Hell Ends!

Long an Amy and Kari euphemism for taking a nap, "Reading Moll Flanders" has acutally become a real activity. With, like, action.
Even literature I hate has its moments. And I don't "hate" Moll Flanders the way I cringe at some of the Romantics. It's just not a fun read; the dialogue is not marked by quotation marks, the plot is moralistic, and even the exciting action packed moments are written in the same, 17th century prose style. "She watered the Plants with Awesome grace and Fluency" and "He then, with his Stile of Manners befitting a Gentleman of the highest class, Ignited a Nuclear Warhead, of which there were many in the Parish. Cries were heard throughout the Great City until Dawn approacheth as God had wont to do" are placed in the same sentence phrasing, with the same asides one might imagine in Ladies Home Journal.
But, that being said, there are some lovely phrases which spark my Imagination (damn you Coleridge) into bad poetry, as I am bred unto. Or something like that. So here's Amylea the Great's "Thoughts upon rereading Moll Flanders during Kwanzaa"
Canto 1 (because every poet needs to write something in cantos at some point): The Fall of Rhetoric
Give the lye to all those Arguments
of women,
cabbages, and diamond rings
Let seeping trees weep all fall into the clay
russet as early day break
and let winter lightening
bend the frozen sap.
Give the lye to all those Persuasions
downstream where bodies make bodies clean
Infinite cantatum, Solarum rex est
Unto the fires commit my words

Canto 2: Re-union
Bare loss was not so much
a matter of my attention
as was the loss of his Person
whom I loved to distraction,
to a wild, airy way of Discourse
that has no signification in it.
Come, do not strive to stand up
on your own two fleshy legs
Let my cold hands do the walking
for us both across the sand:
There are no more bridges to cross,
no more houses or fields to burn
No Stands to leap from as the earth turns
from the sun.

Canto 3: Inflamed

Where Love's the case,
The Doctor's an Ass.

He asked me to sing them a Song
At which I scoffed and said my singing Days were over
But I continued on, melancholy, silent, dull and retired
finding myself a snare at my hands.
In the flood lighting, singing one quarter
off the pitch, one quarter in the mud,
I speak as backward as he does
with that unhearable growl gagging
him before his offense reaches me.

He represented these dangers in
the motions of his outward seeking hands
and heightened my imagination
with elves and wands and kings
and I followed his eyes
seeing myself with no Friend
left loose to the world
a mere cast off Whore
Out of that Town
alone with the Maddest, Gayest thing alive
whose snarls stop just in his throat
to the point of burning his tongue.

No Doctor could illusion me well
No Priest entice me from that hell.