My education: a little background
Before I get too far into my 10-Year Idea Reunion, I’d like to provide a little background on my education. Despite my self-referential, tongue-in-cheek, smartass poetry and stories, I did in fact receive a quite advanced education leading up to the creative writing class I took my senior year of high school.
In addition to having read The Iliad, The Odyssey, most of Plato’s The Republic, and several other scholarly works by my sophomore year of high school, we delved into advanced literary criticism at the beginning of my senior year of A.P. English Literature. Here is one particular excerpt from my notes from my first semester of my senior year that stood out to me:
Be sure to pay attention to the “Good day in Dimmesdale’s life” section
Highlights (Italics added):
- Chillingworth starts to talk about sex, beats himself into an orgasm
- Both Chillingworth and Dimmesdale exist in an S&M relationship
- Beat yourself to get released from the beating
Frankly, I remember virtually nothing from A Scarlet Letter (who does?!), but it certainly was important that we talked in class about people beating themselves into an orgasm. Was that seriously part of the book? I somehow doubt it, but we sure interpreted it that way!
My classmates and I were handling very adult material by the time we were 15 (I took these particular notes when I was 17), so it’s not like the nonsensical scribbling in my idea notebook are indicative of my educational background; on the contrary, they are indicative of someone who had chosen to neglect to utilize that educational background, instead focusing on the pursuit of irreverence and… wow, this sentence has a lot of vocabulary words in it, maybe I should just keep extending it in an attempt to exacerbate the illusion of SHOOT I CAN’T THINK OF ANY MORE BIG WORDS, IT APPEARS THAT ALL GOOD THINGS MUST INDEED COME TO AN END.
**UPDATE: In an extremely bizarre turn of events, it was just brought to my attention that The Onion posted a satirical piece about The Scarlet Letter only two days ago. I guess great minds think alike! And so, apparently, do The Onion and I.
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This blog entry is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!
Futuristic poem of the future
My first poem of my creative writing class! This should be exciting. Let’s see what I came up with ten years ago today:
Futuristic poem is futuristic
Transcript:
Watching the grey cat crap,
I pick you up and jump over it,
Taking you across the creek to enjoy
The liquid in the plastic cup awaiting us
In the futuristic house
In the futuristic world
In our futuristic lives
…..of the future.
A few things:
- What. The hell. Is this.
- I legitimately never drank alcohol in high school, so I’m assuming the plastic cup contains Mountain Dew. In fact, I am positive this absolutely has to be the case.
- This “poem” is the kind of thing that makes me wonder where thoughts come from. And somehow, I don’t even care that I ended that sentence with a preposition.
I don’t have any record of what assignment spawned this obviously brilliant poem, so I won’t be writing a “modern-day version” of the assignment this time. Let’s hope things stay this ridiculous in the future!
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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!
How I’m like my shoe
My first creative writing assignment: write about how I am similar to my shoe. Okay, easy enough, right? Here’s what I came up with ten years ago today:
This is how I’m like my shoe. How are you like your shoe?
Transcript:
“I’m like my shoe because we’re both afraid of spiders, tripping, and werewolves. My shoe is very old and thus could become a BED TIME SNACK for spiders, and I’m REALLY scared of spiders, and of bugs in general. Also, I hate tripping on things or accidentally kicking hard objects and ending up in pain. Also, werewolves are really freaky and violent and fight like girls. FOR NO REASON.”
A few things:
- I don’t know how old shoes can become a “BED TIME SNACK” (why was that in all caps??) for spiders, but that line still makes me laugh.
- I’m still really afraid of bugs, but centipedes scare me much, much more than spiders ever have. Boxelder bugs also scare me out of my mind.
- To clarify: werewolves fight like girls because they kick and bite and scratch, which boys generally don’t do. Sorry, ladies, but you can’t call science sexist.
I don’t have much more to say, so now comes the hard part: I will try to describe how I’m like my shoe today. I wish I had attempted this before reading my original response from ten years ago, but I can’t do anything about that now. So here is my 2013 explanation of how I’m like my shoe:
I’m like my shoe because we’re both comfortable, we both age well, and we both have spring in our step. My New Balance shoes are comfortable, and the word “Cody” literally means “cushion,” which is what I feel like the soles of my feet are stepping on while I walk. We both age well, probably because my shoes avoid the rain and I avoid the sun. I also like to walk with a little bit of swagger, which my shoes also do as they spring my feet back up with that classic cushioning. This is the part where I’d love New Balance to pay me large sums of money for my ringing endorsement. Although to be completely honest, I haven’t purchased a pair of shoes other than New Balance shoes since my sophomore year of college, which was nearly ten years ago. They’re just, like, the best shoe brand ever. I think I got off topic, but let’s face it: blog posts that stay completely on topic can become a BED TIME SNACK for spiders.
…some things never change.
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This blog entry is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!
A letter to my creative writing teacher
On the first day of my last semester of high school, our creative writing class was tasked with writing a letter to our teacher – who also happened to be my sophomore English teacher – outlining our expectations of the class. Here is that letter, complete with the teacher’s notes, followed by a transcript with her comments in bold:
A letter to my creative writing teacher (formerly my sophomore English teacher) on my first day of my final semester of high school.
Dear Teacher:
Well since the English curriculum in school generally hasn’t involved any creative, fictional, non-objective, or otherwise fun writing whatsoever, and I RUN a role-playing game on message boards online which involves constant original fantasy writing, I hoped to gain some semblance of an idea of how to write and/or whether or not I’m even any good at writing fiction at all. Also, are you really going to read this? [Yes, Cody I’m reading this.] I bet you are. I’m going to give you a really hard time if you don’t, though. Actually, that would just make me a difficult student [Who you?], and I don’t want to be particularly difficult this semester. This class is gonna rock – and I can buy coffee and creme [sic] and hot chocolate mix for you too [Well, I thought I’d institute the “Elvis Slush fund”], since I did in Speech class last semester anyway. Food RULES. So does this class. No, seriously. [Well, I hope you have a good semester. I’m glad you’re in the class. Where’s Gohan been?]
Sincerely,
Cody Gough
A few things:
- I didn’t really start drinking coffee until partway through college, so I have no idea where the “coffee and creme” reference originated, nor do I have any recollection of an “Elvis Slush fund.” I guess you forget some random small details after 10 years!
- In contrast to the Elvis reference, I actually do understand the Gohan reference, but I will explain that long story in a future post.
- This is actually the second time I’d asked my teacher in my class notes whether she was actually reading them; my first time doing this was as a student in her English class my sophomore year of high school. To put that in context, though, I really wasn’t being a jerk, because I actually quite liked her classes, and pretty much everything I did (and still do) is at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Believe me, I’ve inspired a lot of eye-rolling from my teachers over the years.
- Instead of ending the last sentence with a period, I nearly ended it with a smiley face emoticon. As a direct result, I am now wallowing in self-loathing.
This letter pretty much sets the tone for my 10-year Idea Reunion. At the time I wrote this, I had written a lot, but had no idea whether the writing was any “good,” I got along with my teacher well enough to be allowed a certain level of irreverence, and I was excited about the idea of finding new creative ways to express myself.
I hate shameless self-plugs, but if you’re interested in following my journey through this class, then please follow me via WordPress! It’s going to be a long – and hopefully very entertaining – journey.
My 10-Year Idea Reunion
The time is nigh.
It’s like my own personal Bible… of IDEAS
I took a creative writing class during my last semester of high school in 2003, and I still have the “idea notebook” I created while enrolled in that class. Our first day of class was January 21, 2003. Guess what day is coming up soon?
That’s right: January 21, 2013.
Over the next several months, I will be reproducing the contents of my “idea notebook” in their ENTIRETY on this site. All of my poems, stories, notes, and more will be here…exactly 10 years after I wrote them.
I want to be clear up-front that the humor contained in these posts will not come from the sheer awfulness of any of it. Quite the contrary: I consider myself to be a pretty funny teenager, and from what I’ve seen flipping through the pages of my tome of brilliance, I was a pretty funny teenager 10 years ago, too. I didn’t – and still don’t – take myself too seriously, so everything you read will have more than a slight dose of irreverence.
And I won’t just be regurgitating old content; after all, where’s the challenge in that? Instead, in addition to writing commentary on my old treasures, I will also re-do some of my old assignments and compare them to what I wrote 10 years ago. We’ll all find out together how much I’ve changed in the last decade.
Stay tuned. This is going to be fun.
Explaining song lyrics you never understood
In this podcast, I admit to the world that the first CDs I ever bought were video game soundtracks. Oh, me.
“Out of Context Quotes” on WGN Radio
Here’s a little production I did for WGN Radio to cap off another year at “the voice of Chicago.” Enjoy!
Best Pickup Line Ever
In the summer of 2006, I played saxophone and clarinet in the pit orchestra at Starlight Theater in Rockford for “State Fair,” a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about the Iowa State Fair (originally adapted from a book by Phil Stong, a Drake University graduate – go bulldogs!).
Anyway, a lot of the dialogue was a bit, um… well, cheesy. Apparently at one point, one of the characters awkwardly says “Can I buy you a corn dog or something?” I was not satisfied with that bit of dialogue, however, so I revised it for him:
“Can I give you a corn doggin’ or something?”
-Best pickup line ever
So… that’s a thing that happened.
Cody Gough (dot net) 