the wrath of pet rocks

I keep writing diary entries via pen and paper, but for various reasons they haven't made it online. This is exactly what happened around this time last year. I kept thinking that I'd have so much more content with which to beef up my diary once school began, but now that it has the proverbial cows of content are nowhere to be found.

The highlight of last Friday was hearing Ms. Lund, my history teacher, say that Larry King could probably burn ants with his Coke bottle glasses. After school that day, Pat and I met Resa and Ellen at the Mall of America, where we ate Chinese food (save for Ellen, her and her blind grasp for Arby's) and wandered the mall awaiting a phone call from Ben and Josiah, who were supposed to meet us there later on after Ben had finished his cello lessons. I ended up purchasing a chain necklace with a Sponge Bob charm on it, so I had Pat pry off the offensive little talisman for me. Nothing against Sponge bob, but -- sweet spawn of the goombas, he's lame! He's like the PeeWee Herman of the deep (no knock to PeeWee and his eagerness to flaunt his hot tamale intended).

But I digress. Once Ben and Josiah arrived, we visited a few clothes stores so Ben could pick out a hooded sweatshirt for himself. While he did so, I witnessed the impossible -- a cow-patterned thong.

Yeah.

How happy did this make me? Almost as happy as the grinning cattle depicted on the thong. However, I only had six dollars to my name, so I had to pass the offer up.

Today's been pretty run-of-the-mill. I got a milk chocolate nugget in Japanese class for succeeding in completing the activity we were assigned. It was confirmed that my band teacher has a knack for dangling pieces that are fun to play just above our grasp and then deciding not to choose them. For our upcoming concert in early October, one of the pieces we're performing is entitled "Kiddie Ballet." Any initial judgments based solely on the title are probably correct, assuming that judgment is right up there with my English teacher announcing nonchalantly that a mammoth essay revolving around a complex piece of 19th century literature was to be due the next day.

Moving right along, I feigned studying in chemistry for the exam tomorrow and finished up some health homework that I had forgot to do the previous evening. It was a news article about what our greatest accomplishment was to be in the future, and we were supposed to attach a photograph of ourselves onto it. Well, since I forgot about the assignment, one could deduce that I also forgot about the photo, so instead I drew a little self-portrait of myself running in circles. I was quite fond of it, but I ended up getting some points dinged off for it when health came around the next period.

Additional studying ensued in math. There's an exam in that class tomorrow as well.

Another paper was assigned in English, and we discussed chapters of The Scarlet Letter.

We took a comprehensive quiz in American history, and Mrs. Lund wove us a story about her trip to Europe and how she was forced to clean up "human excrement" while staying in Dijon (you guessed it, as in the mustard), France after the hotel staff accused the tour group she was chaperoning of shitting in a staircase that was also an emergency fire exit.

I took French in eighth grade, because it was either that or Spanish and only a handful of people were taking French. I soon learned why. I dropped it the next year and am now taking Japanese, and I can barely remember how to count in French.

We were always subject to these inane videos in French class, videos where a boy with his pants yanked up to his ribs randomly approached a girl and asked her what that thing was, and she would reply, "Why, it's a bicycle," and then he queried as to whether or not she had a pen, and when she responded with no, she straddled her bike and sped off.

Somehow it reminds me of the man who used to reupholster our furniture. One day my parents and I stepped into his shop, and I almost tripped over this stone the size of a cantaloupe. Once I had righted myself, I whipped my head around and stared at the rock, not quite grasping why a rock of that caliber was in a building.

"Watch out for the rock," the elderly man peppered with liver spots warned me from behind the counter. "It's my pet rock."

I think this happened a little before I realized that some people can barely keep a bonsai tree alive, let alone an animal.

The title I've chosen for this entry, "the wrath of pet rocks," it brings to mind when I learned what the word "wrath" meant. In sixth grade, we had a substitute teacher one day, and he began explaining his small list of personal rules and pet peeves. Then he becan to explain to us that doing any of the items listed would result in his wrath being executed. But I did not know what "wrath" meant, so I was extremely frightened that "wrath" meant "having a grenade in the overhead projector," or something. I don't know.

Anyway. Yeah. Someday soon I'll write another entry. I'll try not to wait two weeks before doing so this time.

That's pretty much all for today.

Goodnight.