Saturday, April 12, 2008

Retrospective

I scrounged up some old things I wrote back in high school. A couple of them seemed decent enough to put up here, so here they are. :)

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Eulogy for my second hamster; also an assignment for English (6-22-02)

Sean

"He's dead!"

At first, I couldn't believe my ears. My mother was holding Sean up by the scruff of his neck. His little body was limp, unmoving. I hoped that he would move, even just twitch - anything to prove that my mother was wrong.

He remained still as a tiny statue.

Sean was my second hamster. He was a normal-sized one, larger than my first hamster Clint, who was a teddy-bear hamster. His fur was yellow with a hint of orange; not quite gold, more of a bright orange. It was long and fuzzy, although during the latter part of his life it had started to thin out, a sign of old age. Despite the "bald" spot on his back, I still enjoyed stroking him when I came home from school. He never seemed to mind.

My mother had placed him outside the cage to keep him from the other hamster, Ken. She said that he was still soft and warm; he had probably just died. I didn't want to see him lying there, stiff, his eyes closed. I was crying before I could stop myself. I knew that he was already old - hamsters have lifespans of around one to three years, and he had just celebrated his first "birthday" a few days before that - but his death was still a shock, for I hadn't thought that he would go so soon. I wanted to stroke his soft fur one last time, but I couldn't make myself do it. He seemed so different, when his life had already ebbed away from his body.

An hour or so had passed before I could strike up enough courage to hold him. At that time rigor mortis had already set in, and he was hard as a rock. So different from the usually soft and warm Sean whom I always stroked in the evenings after school. The difference startled me so much that I almost dropped him when I placed him back on the table. The touch of death had changed him, morphed him into an unmoving, unfeeling chunk of hardened flesh. After that I no longer looked at him until my father had taken him, placed him inside a little plastic bag and disposed of him outside. Sean was no more.

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Something I wrote in class when I was really bored; pardon the existentialism ^^; (1-23-03)

Student's Mantra

Sit down in class and perk your ears,
Listen to vacuous words floating in mid-air,
just missing their targets by half a thought.
Get pen and paper and write them down,
Fold a day's worth of information and put it in your pocket.
Stare at the exam paper sitting quietly beneath your nose,
Read over and over again instructions typed by weary fingers.
Wrack your brain for answers long forgotten
To questions whose importance remains dubious and unrecognized.
Work. Toil endlessly without fail, needlessly.
Devour countless books, ingest all information.
Use it to pass tests and get your diploma.
Go to college, sacrifice all pleasure and experience.
Get your degree and acquire a high-paying job,
Indulge in your career, in its mundane pointlessness.
Be slave to your family, slaving for money
The true backbone of your existence.
Face problems whose solutions you didn't find in class.
Receive burdens your forefathers handed down to you.
Aspire to become the most learned, the most lettered
Corpse in your graveyard.

[In retrospect, this poem is awfully bitter. Goodness, what was I so riled about? XP ahahaha]

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

This hamster has ceased to be.

Wasn't high school great? Its funny I found this because just yesterday I posted a story that I had written in high school. I want to read something more current from you.

Emir Rio Abueva said...

LOL
What can I say? It was nice.
How about posting something older than this. Maybe something you wrote during preschool! :D
LOL
;p

Rich said...

... :|
Speechless... (in awe)
Anyway, what exactly is rigor mortis??

LJ said...

@rich >> speechless k dyan?! :D

@tina >> mahilig ka pala sa hamsters :D
bitter nga yung pangalawa, pero it does happen in life

Anonymous said...

I just wanted to thank you for visiting my blog. I think the term stream of consciousness is a little misleading, but yes, William Faulkner was known for it. A technique for reading it? I dunno. When its done with skill, I think there's nothing more powerful than writing in the first person. I guess maybe becoming more familiar with the style would help? Have you ever read "The Catcher in the Rye"? This is probably the entry work into first person. It isn't too technically demanding a book, so its a good one to get your feet wet. Most people who read it end up liking it too, so I guess my question is, if you have read it, did you like it?

As far as being alternative, why, I'm sure you're already more alternative and cool/artful than I am. I sing to my dog.

Sucharita Sarkar said...

Hi, thanx for visiting my blog and adding your memory. Please do drop in with more memories.
I liked the hamster story a lot. Death of a pet/person is really like an emotional threshold we cross as we move from childhood to adulthood, isn't it?
I also liked the poem full of student-angst and esp. the list of small things that made me smile.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

You are a very intelligent individual, do you know that?

Now would you post something new already???

It's a new day, a new age! said...

i had a hamster named cowpi-chan and she was the smartest ball of fatness ever. She knew how to get down san francisco stairwells in her ball (which is not easy to do). she lived for five years too because i was obsessed with her health. she still died with a tumor though, i had to put her down. i buried her at the beach and have yet to fully recover from her death. so your hamster story i totally relate to. are you filipina?

Aleta said...

Hamsters and High Schools, oh how you brought back memories. Not that I had one as a pet. No, mine was regarding a science project. The first one, my teacher wanted me to give caffeine pills to the hamsters to see if they would be more active. I thought about it and told him that I didn't want to give a harmful drug to an animal. The project ended up being how music affects hamsters. Surprisingly, it won first place. I think it was all in the presentation.

Thanks for sharing your memories and bringing up ones of my own. And thank you for posting to my site. I hope you return.

Paul Bernard Baker said...

I enjoyed the hamster post. Clear, concise. Liked the changing attitude from one of sadness about the death if the hamster to one of horro at the thing gone hard and, well, dead.
Never had one myself. Poor me.