Metamorphosism

Valentine's Day Limerick Contest

Time for the annual Metamorphosism Valentine's Day Limerick Contest.
Enter in the comments to this post.
Winners will be announced on 14 February, 2008.
ENTER AS OFTEN AS YOU LIKE!!! But read the rules before entering!

Rules:

1. Poems entered must be an actual limerick. We are strict about this.
   
2. Entries must have, as a theme, some aspect of human attraction, including but not limited to "love".
   
3. Extra points awarded for working in one of the following: a cooking implement, a Mongolian singer (by name, if possible), ocean denizen(s), a rubber boot
   
4. Rules subject to change without warning (changes will be posted here or in a subsequent post)

(Note: Over the years, a number of rude etc expressions have been added to the comment blacklist so if the comments refuse your entry that might be the reason. In that case, mail it to me at metamorphosist (at) gmail dot c0m and I'll set you up.)

Last year's contest here + winners announced here

How Go is played

The object of Go is to win territory.
Black always moves first. Black usually has a 5.5 point handicap for this reason.
Players have the option of skipping a turn. If neither player chooses to move, the game is over.

Black places a stone.
Black does the same.
Black carefully moves across the center line.
Black elects not to move.
Black establishes a presence in black's territory.
Black moves away from black.
Black moves to fill the empty space.
Black does not move.
Encouraged, black puts an arm over black.
Black roughly pushes black's arm away and says she is trying to sleep.
Black surrenders territory to black, moving to the edge of the playing field, a 19x19 square.
Black is not pacified, and continues complaining loudly.
Black abandons the playing field altogether, moving to the sofa with an alarm clock and a thin fleece blanket, a move called "The Shogun's Exodus".
Black wins.
Black lies awake on the sofa. The rose bush outside keeps knocking rose hips against the windowpane in the winter breeze.
Black recalls a scene in which black had asked him to trim the bush and he had wanted to leave it as is for the time being, for an excellent reason he can no longer recall.
Black tries reading a book for a while.
Black enters the game, establishing a position on black's throat and purring.
Black finally falls asleep around two AM.
Black rises at four AM, making little noise but enough to wake black.
Black drinks a lot of coffee.
Black takes pictures driving to work because the sky is so beautiful, all purple and blue clouds and stuff.
Black goes shopping on the weekend with black, who recognizes Led Zeppelin on the car stereo.
Black chuckles proudly over this capture of territory.
The next night, black manages to get four hours of sleep on the sofa.
After two showers in the sink, black still jumps onto the kitchen counter, but jumps back off when black enters the kitchen.
Black tries to see this as a small victory.
Black looks forward to moving out to a dormitory.
Black has a math story problem that stumps everyone. The math is simple but the language is unclear.
Black sits in the kitchen.
Black stares at him from the bench.
Black stares back.
Black chews her nails down to the quick. Even her toenails are down to nothing, like her father before her, her father thinks, looking upon them.
Black is expected to be good in school, and is brilliant, but also wants to make earrings, and learn to make glass beads.
Black gets interested in biblical conspiracies.
Out driving, black is told by someone of something horrendous but sworn to secrecy, so he doesn't reveal it, not even years later, but it's still fresh in his mind.
In elementary school, black misses school for months at a time when she is hospitalized for open-heart surgery, every year, until she dies in fourth grade.
In elementary school, black is asked by the teacher to tutor the frail girl with a heart defect. He also must dance with her when they learn squaredancing so he does and it is no more horrible than dancing with any other girl.
Black learns to make gunpowder from reading about it in the World Book Encyclopedia.
Black buys saltpeter at the drugstore for her son's chemical experiments, at his request, because it is not sold to children.
Black tells her son to be careful.
Looking through his father's truck for something one summer afternoon decades ago, black finds a newspaper with the following written on it in blue ballpoint pen: "I want to fuck you" followed by his father's full name. It isn't black's mother's handwriting.
Black leaves the newspaper where he found it.
Black doesn't know a goddamned thing about anything.
Black has a vacation house.
Black bought an old Caterpiller.
Black has all the Disney characters memorized and can tell you their biographies at a high speed.
Black wants to live in a treehouse.
A nice sunrise is plenty for black. Or a sunset.
Black has just about had it.
Black got his windshield replaced.
Black flosses irregularly.

Little-known facts about Julian Merrow-Smith

• Julian is a good, honest, hard-working painter who lives in the south of France.
  
• I own several of his paintings. I just bought another one.
  
• Julian has long painted awesome still lifes, portraits and landscapes, but they recently got even more awesome somehow. I'm one of those "I don't know what I like, but this is really awesome" people, but I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
  
• The picture shown here is not the one I bought, but it is one of the awesome new still lifes.
  
• Julian once gave me the shirt off his back.¹
  
• You can bid on his paintings here (same link as the lemon picture above, a new one every day.

_____________
¹Strictly speaking, it was not off his back, it was a tee-shirt from his drawer; he gave it to me when we were visiting and I was holding my wine glass stupidly and Beta turned around and bumped me and it went all over the shirt I was wearing, a grey short-sleeved job I had worn because I was not sure how formal the dinner we were having was going to be (turned out to be very informal). I still have Julian's shirt, in fact. Art collecters please note: bids on the shirt can be sent to metamorphosist@gmail.com.

Honest, this is not a cat blog

[Act I, Last night]

Gamma: What was Oma screaming about?
Mig: Mr. Evil ate her ham.
Gamma: Aha. That explains the high-pitched scream.
Mig: She hid it from him in her bag. It was wrapped in paper.
Mig: He climbed inside her bag and ran away with it, still wrapped.
Mig: We all chased him through the house. He hid under his sofa.
Mig: She couldn't move the sofa so I had to. He was still unwrapping when I got to him.
Gamma: Heh.
Mig: She wrapped her ham back up and took it with her.
Gamma: Ew.
Mig: Might want to avoid eating ham at your grandparents' for a few days.
Beta: [enter stage right] What was Oma screaming about?
Gamma: Mr. Evil ate her ham.
Beta: Heh.
Beta: That explains the siren-like scream.

[Act II, This morning]
Beta: What was all that yelling?
Mig: Eh, Mr. Evil ate your lunch.
Beta: [blink]
Mig: I made you a ham sandwich.
Beta: Wasn't it wrapped?
Mig: Sure it was. I left it on the counter.
Mig: Stupid of me.
Mig: He's getting better at unwrapping.
Mig: He left your banana.

Mr. Evil update

Very aggressive.
Drinks too much, falls asleep, pisses himself.
Ate bite out of Beta's favorite knit hat.

Cute purr when he sleeps on you.
Ate sleeve of my favorite sweater this morning.
Ate too much and barfed on sleeve of my other favorite jacket when I picked him up.
Ate Gamma's sock.
Eats clothes in laundry room.
Can now jump up onto counter in kitchen.
Found him in wok, eating leftovers.
Doesn't weigh two kilos yet, but getting closer.

Loss of faith

Gamma: When I have a boyfriend, even if he's handsome and rich, if he gives me a cheap engagement ring when he proposes, he's out.
Me: ...
Gamma: Seriously.
Me: Did you know I gave your mother a ten-cent plastic spider ring?
Gamma: ...
Me: It was Halloween.
Me: The Halloween season.
Me: And just... never mind.

I feel sorry for boys. Somewhere, there is a boy Gamma's age, interested in soccer and bicycles, unaware that his future is already planned out for him.

On the plus side, I am looking forward to the castration of Mr. Evil. Every morning, when the rest of the family are still in bed and think I'm meditating, I weigh him to see if he has passed the two kilo threshhold yet.

Yesterday evening, I found him on the kitchen table, in the wok, eating leftovers. This morning, Beta discovered he had eaten part of her favorite new hat.

I recently experienced a loss of faith, just in connection with suffering, not religion. I don't believe in suffering anymore, not my suffering, at least.

I still suffer. It just has lost its significance.

We all suffer, right? Everyone does. We may pretend we don't, or we may disguise the scale of our suffering, but we all do.

Jesus, at least I hope we all do. Wouldn't that suck, we suffer and some real asshole doesn't.

Before this recent epiphany of mine, I had not realized what a religion suffering had become for me. For a long time already, but especially last year. 2007 was painful for me, but of course pain is relative and I am aware that what I went through was slight compared to what others went through, probably with superior grace, but still. I won't miss 2007. At least, I hope I won't.

One never knows.

I had a lot of laughs, of course, too. But overall, well.

So here I sit, no faith in the significance of my suffering. I'm all, who needs this suffering shit. Nobody.

It's suprisingly paralyzing. It turns out to have been the framework of my world.

I'm all, whoa.

I'm all, take a nap. Not good for anything.

Also: I'm ready to throw out everything. Whatever that means. That was one good thing about 2007, I guess: maybe I am now in a position where I'm fed up enough with things to change something.

Already, I have an appointment to get my hair cut.

And somewhere, someone plans my future.