Now Something Totally Different

My last post inspired me to go rooting through the documents that contain my poems going back to sophomore and junior year of high school. Some were good (mostly the later ones), some mediocre (throughout) and some really, truly awful (thankfully, mostly the early ones!). I was looking specifically for all the ones I'd ever written about my dad (there are lots and lots of those), but along the way I was much more entertained by some of the humorous poems I'd written, like the Christmas ballads for Fitz junior year, as well as the one I wrote for Mr. Luddy, the physics teacher, in the same year.

Now, Mr. Luddy was a dear, but I had neither the aptitude nor the interest in physics, and certainly not of the AP variety. When the AP exam came around, I tried to weasel out of it, but my mom said if I stayed home with anything less than a deadly illness, I owed her the $85 exam fee. I didn't even have a job at that point, so I went in and took the exam. Actually, "took" is kind of overstating it. I pretty much threw in the towel half-way through, accepted the score of 1 I knew I would be getting (I did), and spent the rest of the time playing MASH in the testing booklet and creating an intricate doodle of Greg's name. Fine, except one day in class a few weeks later when Mr. Luddy gave the test booklets back, mine fell open to the back cover and revealed what I'd spent my time doing. Awkward. At some point after that, he asked something about if people had had a lot of extra time at the end, and as I looked at him sheepishly he said "Besides Michelle, of course." Ouch! Luckily, Mr. Luddy was a really nice guy and didn't hate me for it (and I mysteriously still managed an A- in the class), but I felt compelled to offer him something to prove I wasn't just a total jackass who had wasted his time in the class. Thus, at the end of the year I gave him the following poem:

Anti-Physics

I live in a different world,

In a place where there are no more abstractions,

where x and y no longer control the universe.

Here components enjoy each other’s presence,

and do not feel the need to resolve.

Gravity goes unseen;

Negatives mean bad things,

and friction is trouble between friends.

Here, “buoyancy goes hand in hand with girlancy”.

Pendulums are only in Poe’s imagination.

Footballs make touchdowns,

not parabolas.

Relativity is reserved for holidays,

weddings, and funerals,

and the only spectrum you’ll ever see

is a rainbow.

Elements are forgotten, save for those in jewelry.

Here Alphas, Betas, and Gammas are fraternities,

not particles,

and the earth revolves around our own front door.

The only attractive forces are between friends

and lovers.

Here vacuums exist to scare dogs;

Space is reserved for astronauts

and aliens,

and time moves one second at a time

all the time.

Here the laws of physics still apply

--I just don’t need to know about it.

This is my world;

welcome to reality.

OK, now looking back, that last stanza was kind of unnecessarily brush-off-ish of physics. Maybe I just couldn't find another way to end the damned thing, who knows? In its original non-blogger form it was also weirdly indented all over the place, but I was 16, and in half my poems I thought I was the reincarnation of e.e. cummings, so it could have been way worse.

I'm happy to say that Mr. Luddy (today Dr. Luddy, fulfilling every absent-minded professor stereotype) was thrilled by the poem, and even talked of trying to get it published in one of the physics journals. That never happened, of course, but I was still glad that I was able to give him something, if not a decent grade on the AP exam!

ETA: Also, the "buoyancy goes hand in hand with girlancy" thing was a classic Mr. Luddy joke. Yeah, there were lots like that.