Tuesday, September 23, 2008

"Housewife!"

Let's start with "Beef With Broth". I don't think that anyone who would remember that incident reads this, so let me fill you in.
The location- Drama Room
The time- Sometime after supper in mid-November
Mr. Stockton has sent Kumiko to Safeway to buy babyfood. 'Why does he want baby food?' you ask. The answer is that we need a babyfood jar for one of the props for Goodnight Desdemona. Kumiko has returned with a Safeway bag. "Mr. Stockton! They were out of banana. And there wasn't any other fruit baby food either. All that was left was this." (I'll tell you know I do not remember what exact words were used, but you'll forgive me.) Kumiko is holding out a jar of brownish baby food. The label reads "Beef With Broth". Do I even need to tell you how disgusting it looked when we opened it? After many dares and some accidental spillage, I do believe that Jeremy actually ate a spoonful of the stuff. Sick. In truth, there was banana baby food, and Mr. Stockton did eat it. It's a pity he didn't try the other option.
But the reason I'm telling you this story is because today at lunch the Dining Hall served me some sort of soup that brought this incident to mind, and as soon as I though 'beef with broth' I found myself unable to eat my soup.

What to tell you next? I know! I have a classmate who also reads my blog, and she commented on what I told you all about the national anthem. She also showed me that the words are convienently located in the front of my textbooks. I don't know how exactly I ended up doing it, but I decided I would translate the national anthem using my 6 YTL dictionary. My translation was inaccurate and in some sections complete nonsense. I would share the whole thing with you, but my classmate warned me that making fun of the anthem is a point of contempt (not that I'm purposely making fun of it!) so here is my favorite line in $6 dictionary English.
"Never extinguish my country on to give out smoke most end hearth."
There you have it. I won't be including this in my job application as a translator, that's for sure.
Although my translation of the Canadian national anthem to Turkish was much easier. Less metaphors. Although I forgot to conjugate all of my verbs...

And while I'm talking about this classmate, I'll tell you more. Her name is Idil ans she sits beside me, so I always copy her notes in Grammar class and probably drove her nuts asking "What class is this?" for the first two weeks of school. Anyways, we have a mutual opinion of the school's vice principal. She is a petite ball of wrath who frequently comes into my classroom and yells at us for not wearing our hair up, for wearing jewlery, for wearing sweaters that aren't part of the uniform (my school has hoodies!), for not wearing the uniform, for being too loud, for everything it seems. I am terrified of her. And every morning when we file past all the teachers and they make sure we're acceptably dresses, I find myself scurrying past where she stands. And yet she seemed so nice on the occasions when I found myself talking to her trying to sort out my classes and my books and my uniform.

Lastly, I will again dwell on English class. I've got another example you can set on the shelf next to kicking kittens (refer to September 16th's entry). Today Mr. Wright was trying to explain the meaning of 'housebound'. After several unsuccessful attempts at defining it, he resorted to using an example. "If I shot you in both of your knees, you wouldn't be able to go anywhere, would you? You'd be stuck in your house."
We were doing compound words (with house and home) and Mr. Wright was shushing the class as they tried to match the words in the box to either house or home. When it's nearly quiet the boy behind me says "Housewife!". This was, for some reason, extremely amusing. Another amusing thing in English class was how everyone wanted to attach office to the words from Box A. Tea office, door office, computer office, fire office... I'm laughing.

-Maeghan
PS. From Goodnight Desdemona- What's Alchemy? I can't remember what comes next. I can only remember Swift Mercury and on.

5 comments:

Paul Jerry said...

Remind anyone of CAPE?

Linda said...

Wow your teacher has awesome examples. Sorry for leaving such long comments earlier.

Unknown said...

I TOTALLY REMEMBER THE BEEF WITH BROTH INCIDENT.
SICK.

Kathleen said...

I actually bought some banana baby food a while back because I imagined it would be so good. It was not.

I literally laughed out loud for about a full minute at "housebound". And then again at "Tea office, door office, computer office, fire office..." for another minute!!!

laura said...

Beef broth! I remember that too! That was so funny! And banana baby food is gross. I tried it too.

"What's alchemy? The hoax of charlatans? Or mystic quest for life itself..."

Is that what you were asking about?