things that say a lot about me

In high school I had five particularly memorable teachers: three in English, one in Philosophy, and one in Accounting.

This, embarrassingly, explains a lot about me.

I got the degree in English and toyed with a minor in Philosophy for a while. And then there's this thing I like to do sometimes where I add up big numbers in my head and see how fast I can do it. I probably shouldn't have mentioned that last part. I came here to talk about the Beatles.

One of the memorable English teachers taught a bizarre little class where we discussed a lot of James Joyce, and I began my hatred for Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. (The horror.) More often than not, the already tiny class of twelve had about seven students in attendance on any given day. On one afternoon my friend and I debated all through lunch whether or not to go to the class (it was a 'Heart of Darkness' day, I'm sure of it) and ended up halfway to the bus stop before some unknown force had us running back through the school halls, ten minutes late.

We rounded the corner at a dangerous speed to find the teacher standing outside the classroom, watching us with a radiating disapproval. We panicked, then, sure, but continued on to class thinking we couldn't flee since he had seen us, and it was too late in the year to drop the class.

With an apology and outrageously hopeful spirits, we entered the classroom to find it empty save the sad piece of tumbleweed and the cricket. Upon realizing what happened, his stance at the doorway looked a lot more like the hope of a man clinging to a log in the ocean than disapproval.

The bastard still gave the lecture. We discussed Margaret Atwood's poetry, and I fell asleep halfway through with the thought: "I can't fall asleep; it's just me and one other-"

It was that kind of class.


The free-for-all style of what I'm going to call 'learning' that relied mostly on what the students wanted to do that day didn't hold in the rest of the school, obviously. I'm not sure how a class with twelve registered students even got the go-ahead from the school, but it provided a fair bit of entertainment, literature, and wild stories of mis-spent youth that ended up with said youth making it to class after all. Which I suppose makes it not that wild a story after all.

One class was held outside. We were reading Ondaatje's 'The English Patient', and the teacher assigned a project to go with the book. It was an essay: this was still an English class, for God's sake. But he assigned another project as well: a poem. We were to write a poem using lines from the book to illustrate our take on the book. Or maybe just to give us an assignment that had a lesser chance of every class member abandoning ship than an essay. Or maybe because poetry-should-be-read-outside-and-if-we-held-it-outside-it-would-be-like-we-weren't-in-school-but-we-really-were-and-maybe-the-class-would-still-get-funding-next-year?

I don't know if I still have the poem I wrote, but I remember it being lovely, much like the book itself. I feel any twenty random lines from that book would piece together something poetic sounding. It's pretty much just poetry masquerading as prose anyway.

I feel twenty specific lines pulled out of any narrative could be forced into something poetic sounding. Why, from this blog entry alone, I already have:

I came here,
too late in the year
I remember it being
wild stories
of the memorable
outrageously hopeful
sad piece of tumbleweed
(The horror.)

This is cheating, of course. Or it would have been if I’d left out the tumbleweed. It’s making something XY to represent XZ. I liked the idea of something beautiful as a way to represent part of another something beautiful. It works with ‘The English Patient’, and I think it would also work nicely with Beatles lyrics.

Thought I was lying earlier, didn’t you?

As someone who subscribes to the philosophy that someone’s favourite Beatles song says a lot about him or her (so long as the person in question also subscribes to this belief – and I can’t be more specific than that), I am willing to put out such a poem from my top five favourite Beatles songs. In no particular order, they are: Let it Be, Blackbird, All You Need is Love, Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields Forever.


Shine Until Tomorrow

Let me take you down
In the dead of night
No one will hear
No one comes near

When the night is cloudy
When there's nobody there
Let it be
Learn to see

You were only waiting for this moment
Know when it's a dream
You can learn how to be you in time
There is still a light that shines

~