Well, are you going to share it with us or not?

I am NOT sharing the over-the-top poem of a scrawny 15 year old boy who speaks English as a second language with you people so you can mock him!!! That is my prerogative!! "Flowers of peacefulness" and "birds of liberty" are involved though.

"Flowers of peacefulness" and "birds of liberty" are involved though.

Oh dear.

*Milton Berle nausea face*

My dog could write a better poem than that.

see!!!! You guys are EVIL!

Did you just figure this out?

(actually as a former scrawny 15-year-old, I'm kind of regretting not writing sappyassed poems to my high school crushes. although with my luck it would've gotten me beat up)

Well, I'm not saying it's bad, but Kahlil Gibran called - he wants his Monkey of Justice back.

Fair use, taz...fair use. :)

Anyway, I want a Monkey of Justice. I could train it to launch poo at annoying people giving press-conferences!

Story time.

One summer I was teaching high school students at a math and science program. I had two senior girls taking a probablity and statistics course from me over six weeks, with the aim of setting them up to get credit-by-exam for the course when they went to college the next year.

One of the two was a dyed-hair, pierced-all-over (this was long enough ago that that looked far wilder than it might today), seriously-just-don't-fuck-with-me type who worked hard to give the impression of resenting everyone and everything around her. I spent the whole six weeks feeling like I was just a thorn in her side and wishing I knew what to do differently.

At the end of the six weeks when it was time for goodbyes (the program was pretty tightly knit - the students and the teachers and the RA's all mostly bonded to an amazing degree), this girl came up to me and gave me a copy of Steppenwolf as a farewell. I'd never read or even mentioned the book, and at the time I didn't play at having a "wolfy" part of my personality the way I do around here, so it seemed, at first, to have come completely out of nowhere. But there was a long inscription written inside the front cover, too: not just a thank you, but an analysis of who I was and why the book was appropriate for me. In a page, it told me more about myself than I ever would have figured out on my own.

She saw through me, entirely, while sitting silently in a class on statistics.

I never knew where she went after that, or how things have turned out, but I've never read anything like that before or since.

This thread is useless without poems.

Heh. I will now share a story about my 15 year old son. He will KILL me if he ever finds out I have put this on the internets, by the way, so don't tell him.

There is a girl. An older girl. This girl likes penguins. This led to a hysterical phone call to me, his mom.
Him: "It's girls' birthday! I need a penguin! Can you get me a penguin?"
Me: "I think there's one lying about in the yard."
Him: "No! Agh! Help me!"
Me: "Okay, okay, I'll get you a penguin."
Long interval whereby we discover that you cannot, in fact, buy a penguin in downtown Asheville after 5:00. Go figure. Sister is dispatched on penguin run. Total hysteria. Penguin duly found, giftwrapped by store. Wrapped package exhibited to mother.
Me: "You realize that she is totally going to know that you like her now. That package is really nicely wrapped."
Son is horrified. Denies liking girl as anything more than a friend. Demands that package be unwrapped and rewrapped more messily. I comply.
Son: "That's awful! That looks like shit! I can't give her that!"
Mom: "Yeah, but this looks casual, see?"
Son: "Can't you make it better than that but not really good?"
Mom complies again.
Son, nearly hysterical: "That's still terrible!"
Mom: "Wrap your own damn penguin, loverboy."

And then, the crushing truth of the birthday party: this girl is a SENIOR. My son is a FRESHMAN. A cute freshman, but still. Son was very sad - there were senior boys there and penguin girl, while she adored the penguin, and, presumably, the wrapping, was more interested in the senior boys.

Son recovered. Within weeks son was looking wistful and making every opportunity to work new girl's name into totally unrelated conversations. ;-)

mygothlaundry, that is hilarious.

mgl - I wish you were my mom!

My teenage kid embarrassment story.

When my stepson was 14, 15 or thereabouts he went to a dance at his school. His dad and I were due to pick him up at 11pm and had told him to come outside where we'd be waiting in the car.

11pm came and went. 11.15. My husband went to the door, stuck his head in, came back to the car. 'Sean said he'll be five minutes'.

Five minutes turned into 10, then 15. My husband went over again. "Yeah, yeah, I'll only be a minute."

After we'd waited another 20 minutes, we'd finally had enough. We got out of the car, walked into the hall, right into the centre of the dancefloor, and started doing cringe-makingly awful, over-the-top sixties style dancing.

Sean was in the car in a nanosecond and swore he'd never speak to either of us ever again, except for us to tell him where his new school would be, as he could never, ever go back to that school again.

Heh.

Jan: That's such an awesome story. My dad and I did something similar to that when my sister's second boyfriend was picking her up for a date. Dad had just heard of Bob Marley and he was dancing around to the music in the living room. I put on my most flowy, hippie-like skirt and a peasant-style shirt/blouse/thing, and grabbed a bucket from the bathroom so I could dance with him and play my makeshift bongo drum. I was 13 and she was 16, and she was totally mortified.

She was even more mortified when I allegedly groped some of her groomsmen as her wedding (to a different guy), but I don't remember doing such a thing...

In praise of older women...