By Nous

                          January 17, 2003

  -Monday-

"God," I think, "He looks exactly like that lizard creature from Alice
In Wonderland."
The person I'm referring to is in my Spanish class, and he does look
exactly like the lizard creature from Alice In Wonderland - the motion
picture. Bill, is his name.  The lizard, not the student.
The student's name, however, eludes me.  Franz?  Frank?  Fred?  No, not
Fred; that's not even close.  The point is that he's a monstrosity.  It
sounds bad to say it that way, but it sounds bad to say it anyway.
Irregularity?  Malformation?  Perversion?  Disease?
More like, 'curiosity', I suppose; he's quite a thing to look at.  He
just gets curiouser and curiouser.
His eyebrows appear to be professionally trimmed, and they're very
neat, but his hair overshadows those eyebrows - perhaps his only 
engaging physical aspect.  His hair is a jungle of curls, infecting
his head in a shiny, slicked coat (I say 'coat' because it reminds me
of a wet dog).  His head resembles a tree trunk, and his hair is like
soaked moss clinging to him.
His nose looks to me like a tiny slide.  It juts out at the top, then 
plunges down (like a toucan's beak, only not so round), and, finally, 
it curves out and straightens itself at the tip, where it's a neighbor 
to long, open nostrils.
He leans over when he walks in an urgent bungle and his voice sounds
old and strained; but his most astounding item is his mouth.  No one
has a larger mouth than Franz.  His lips stretch up to his ears where 
his lobes seem to grip the ends of his mouth like reins - this is his
perpetual grin - and he attacks you in a throng of teeth and a mass of
glinting gums.
And in the midst of this aggressive grinning, he sometimes speaks, but
in between his words he's still smiling away, beaming.
Seeing those lips actually reminded me of the time that Alice met 
Humpty-Dumpty, whose smile was so broad that his lips seemed to meet
behind his head.
"If he keeps smiling like that," I thought, parphrasing Alice, "his 
head will fall off," 
I smiled, musing on the idea of such a happy decapitation.  And self-
inflicted too.

   -Tuesday-

The library didn't have the book that I was looking for, so I returned
home.  I entered my room and eagerly dove into my newly-developed 
photographs; and, though they weren't the best ones I had taken, I
poured over them with amour propre.  It was just nice to get back my
pictures.
Then, for some reason, I remembered something that happened in my first
period class and began to laugh.  I looked down at my hand, remembering
the incident, and unconsciously rubbed it as if it were still in pain.
First period is Chemistry, and basically, I blew something up a little
bit.  Well, that sounds as if I did it, which I didn't, but I was part
of it.
Someone was shaking a test tube, complaining that it was getting too 
hot for them to hold, so they handed it to me.  It just kept getting 
hotter until the stopper at the end of the test tube popped out of 
place and flew towards my partner's head, but landing on the floor.
Some of the chemicals got on my hand and I had to wash it in one
of the terrible chemistry lab sinks.
Why was that funny?  I can't say.
But I laughed, ok?

   -Friday-

Frankie is rather intelligent, though he doesn't look it.  He actually
looks exactly like the vulture from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.
His body is thin and lumbering, moving in a slight slouch, neck craning
out over his chest with his skull perched on his neck - that gaunt 
enclosure for his large, protruding Adam's Apple.  His face is thin 
and pointy down where his mouth sits rigidly, but ready to smile.  A
beaked nose adds to his countenance an even greater bird-like
appearance, wide and long as it is, bumping up towards his ever-
searching eyes, the only truly active parts about Frankie.
Today, in the midst of completing a review for a test in Chemistry
class, a pregnant fifteen year old brought up how gravity exists only
around the moon, but not actually on its surface.  A half-asleep boy
with a shaved head who had been copying off of me said that he did not
believe that, since everything indeed had a gravitational pull.  And,
he continued, if gravity only surrounded the moon - which isn't true -
then people on the moon wouldn't even bounce, but would continue to 
fall upwards until the surrounding gravity caught them.
Frankie The Vulture agreed with the latter point of view, informing the
pregnant girl whose father had left her when she was young, that there
was no such thing as 'no gravity'.  Even humans have a gravitational
pull, he explained.  You and me, and that guy and Mr. Sigut all have a
gravitational pull.  Everything has gravity, but some has more, or that
is what I think.
"Mr. Sigut," shouted a Mexican boy who once said that the most 
important part of a girl was her breasts - and during his presentation 
for Speech class, to add even greater embarrassment - "is it true that
the moon has gravity only surrounding it, or does everything have
gravity on it?"
"Can we please do this worksheet..." He replied, facing the board as
he wrote an equation on it.
He was very much the Dormouse in this play of mine.