This will be the third blog I've started. The other two sort of ran out of gas. One turned into more of a marathon training diary which sort of imploded when I didn't finish the training or the marathon. Oops. The second was a joint blog with my sister who I think is one of the funniest writers ever. The feeling might be mutual because we mostly just looked forward to reading what the other posted. Which didn't really get much done in the way of posting. But hey, third times a charm, right?

In 7th grade creative writing class I really came into my own as a self-styled Literary Ham. I would actually read my journal entries aloud to the class and laugh so hard I couldn't get through them. Did I mention I was delusional in 7th grade?

As evidenced by this, an entry in my big final class project - The Poetry Notebook:

RED

A fire truck is red or someone's hair on their head
The blanket on my bed, the horse I fed was red
If you don't like red you should be dead
Because lots of things in this world are red, red, red!

Obviously, I was heavy into poetry that rhymed. And getting "F's".

Actually, I think I passed this class with flying colors. 'Red' being simply filler for the Main Event - 'My Favorite Things':

Drippy old noses and half-bald little kittens,
Rotting black kettles and yellow plaid mittens
My head is a target for what pigeons bring,
These are a few of my favorite things.
Mushy bananas and wet sticky noodles,
Crab legs and lobster and butter sauce doodles,
Ant hills filled with tiny fly wings
These are a few of my favorite things.
Girls with sunburn and bumpy bruised rashes,
I wake up with crust on my nose and eyelashes,
Your hair reminds me of knots and string,
These are a few of my favorite things.
When the pig squeals, when the ape swings,
I simply think of my favorite things,
And then I feel worse.

This is all deftly illustrated by an actual banana peel I glued under the poem which is still 100% intact on the construction paper. Albeit brown and stiff as a board. I remember thinking this was a divine masterpiece when I was 12. I agonized over this poem, tweaking it here, another tweak there. I don't know if I came up with 'butter sauce doodles' straight out of the gate, probably not. I probably tried poodles first. I remember loving The Sound of Music around this time and thought there no better homage than to remake "Favorite Things" with gross-out humor. I can't explain any of it. But I'm going to connect the dots here and guess this is the reason why I never had a date in high school.