Wednesday, September 17, 2008

An Ode To My Man Harem

The past week has been something of a fascinating experience for me, of that I am certain. Oh, it would have been like all the others with the cycle of going to class, going home, causing mayhem, and sleeping if it had not been for one thing: a sinus infection. Third week of school and I get hit with something that devastates my ability to function and leaves me feeling so horrible that it is literally an effort to get my fevered bum unto the couch so my housemates knew I was still playing at living. Thankfully, though, it waited until Friday to really hit, and I was able to force myself to class because I had a much dreaded math exam that I simply could not miss. I didn't move the rest of the weekend.

So, today, a bit on the late side, I am going to type of a brief explanation of something for my creative writing class. Yes, I was too sick to even think in coherent sentences. The writing I did over the weekend is so bad that I am ashamed to claim it.

Dr. P, crazy thing that he is, decided to make life interesting; the entire class knew that one the moment he walked in carrying a stack of dictionaries that was trying its hardest to obscure his face. He then proclaimed that we were going to get into groups of five and randomly pick two words a piece from the dictionary given to our group. That seemed easy enough at first. And then he had us switch words with other groups and pass them out randomly. "Now, class, you're going to write a story off your list of 42 things I had you write for class, and you're going to use those two words you've been given," he said quite gleefully. Looking at the two strips of paper on my desk, I was horrified.

How in the world was I supposed to include "xenogenesis" and "Northamptonshire" in a story about me? Not only am I the near spitting image of my dad, but I also have a decided lack of experience when it comes to random shires in England. I was, to say the least, daunted by the task.

Well, in the end I decided to go with the prompt that simply said "man harem." A few of my classmates initialed by it, indicating that they wanted to hear the story, and I am more than willing to tell it. After all, it sounds a bit weird if you just mention a man harem. I think it probably caught their attention because it is such an odd phrase, and it seems to promise an interesting story at the very least. Personally, I think it's just a funny story that manages to capture my high school experience.

You see, my man harem was a group of guys that more or less treated me like a queen. It helps that one of them, Jon, was so obsessed with England that he was constantly going off about it, so that helps me use "Northamptonshire." I bet he said it at least once, knowing him. "Xenogenesis" presented something of a problem, but then I remember that we randomly had a discussion about how much they look like their parents (all because we were teasing Nick about looking like neither of his parents and more like one of the seminary teachers). "Illiterate"... Well, when you hang out with a group of guys who read manga and whine if you ask them to do more than that, it would seem you have quite an illiterate group. Worse, though, was the fact that they were all illiterate in the world of women. Honestly, the amount of advice I had to give them on getting girls was...sad.

Anyway, that's what I would tell in my story, and how I would use the words.

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