The Inner Bean

My personal cemetery is under way! As of this afternoon I have 5 homemade tombstones in the front yard, and I’m pretty proud of them. I did take some photos, but haven’t had a chance to upload them yet.

My only disappointment is that the styrofoam insulation we bought was a little on the thin side. The tutorial I watched showed this amazing, thick styrofoam insulation that would be the perfect thickness for carving into if you wanted to get creative with your tombstones. For example, I had some ideas for doing relief etching that would add awesome depth, especially once painted. The paint tends to eat into the styrofoam, causing it to look more like stone. The pieces I got weren’t very thick at all, maybe a third or even just half the thickness of the pieces in the tutorial that got me inspired.

Nevertheless, I made due and am very proud of the outcome despite the thinness. I still have enough left over to do between six and eight more tombstones. It’ll be a fun project to get Devon into, especially now that I know what to expect from the materials. So, tomorrow we will probably spend the afternoon working on adding to our cemetery. We’ve been laughingly discussing which ex-boyfriends names we should add to the lawn, just for fun…

Once we have them all in place, I’ll take more pictures and get them cropped and loaded in. Overall, it’s been a fun project. I’m glad I tried it out and can’t wait to play around with the thicker grade styrofoam insulation.

One of the cool things about working for Mahalo is that as a guide I get exposed to a lot of really neat things on the internet. Recently I’ve been part of the Halloween project, getting our pages ready for Halloween, as well as adding awesome new Halloween pages. One page I worked on inspired me to get crafty with my own Samhain decorating: Halloween Tombstones

While I was scouring the net for awesome links on the best places to buy them, I also came across a few tutorials with patterns, as well as a great instructional video. So, while visiting the hardware store this afternoon I picked up some foam insulation pieces, a can of spray paint and I’m ready to start my own persona cemetery. We have a great front yard, so I’m really excited to get started on this.

I will definitely post the photos from my endeavor, so be on the lookout, and if you’re looking to get crafty yourself this Halloween, check the links on the above page. Like I said, there are some really cool do-it-yourself and craft tutorials.

Now, before you get all excited, this blog has nothing to do with music, though it will briefly discuss the 1980’s.

I have always been fascinated by language. As a child I even had a friend that I made up a secret language with so that only we would know what our communications meant. In school I excelled in English, grammar, spelling and literature because words and communication made me feel warm and tingly.

While this may sound harsh, I couldn’t stand it when people couldn’t communicate effectively, and often fought with my own father, who developed a learning disability as a small boy thanks to an undetected hearing problem. He had never learned how to pronounce certain words or spell them properly, and while most teenagers were arguing with their dad about why they should be allowed to have the car keys, I was arguing with mine over how to pronounce battery or spell spaghetti. Fortunately, I’ve overcome some of that ridiculous snobbishness in my old age, however there is a part of me that feels as though it’s dying inside every time I realize that the Valley Girl of the 80’s has come back to bite us in our collective asses.

Yes, as a teen, I too mocked the Valley Girl. “Gross me out” and “Gag me with a spoon” were two of my favorite sayings, and I was very good at that whole “ending every statement in a question” accent. In college I even wrote a Valley Girl interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress” from The Canterbury Tales to amuse my favorite faculty members.

It was there, in college, that I realized just how far the English language had sunk into a sea of “like totallys” and “OMG Whatevers.” While taking a British Literature survey I sat next to a young woman we’ll call Emma. Emma was in her senior semester, about ready to begin student teaching. She was going to be teaching English to high school students after graduation. As we began to discuss William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” I was horror stricken when this future teacher began to analyze “The Little Boy Lost.”

WARNING: The following is not a joke. It is a horrid and bleak portrait of the “Like Whatever Generation” and the influence they will pass on to our children:

Dr. M: Emma, what do you think the speaker in “Little Boy Lost” is saying?

Emma: Well, like Blake, right, I think that like he was trying to say that like man had gotten lost a little. Like now man is in the dark and stuff, wandering around all like confused and messed up. Like he calls out to God, but like God doesn’t answer, so like he realizes that he’s like all alone, and he like starts to cry.

At he time, a classmate of mine who was also over twenty-five, turned to me and held his hands up and mouthed the word “TEN.” In that short passage she manged to use the word “like” ten times. Like, why? And to make matters even more bizarre, she seemed to have no conviction in her explantion because every inflection ended with a question. “Blake, right? He like meant this? right?”

WRONG!

And this girl graduated. She went on to get a job teaching at a nearby high school, spreading her like influence to like as many teens as she like could.

Language evolves to meet man’s needs, I realize this. It just blows my mind how far backward it seems to have fallen at this time. As a writer I worry that one day I will walk into my local borders and pick up a book. I’ll open the pages and the first sentence will read:

LOLZ, it wuz drk and strmy @ nite, but like no1 wuz skaret. Vampirez rulez, like LOLZ.

Here is an example of the days when being stupid was funny:

See, that was funny… but it isn’t so funny when I go to the grocery store and ask Jeff Spicoli where I can find the cream of tartar. “Like what? Dude, no way. Cream of tartar…whatever.”Can we save the English language, or must we sit back and watch it wither into dust.

I’m sure that sounds incredibly pretentious, and maybe it is, but even the books have gotten worse. It seems like all they publish now is garbage geared to appeal to people who can’t sit still for more than four minutes. Maybe that’s what it is, but I miss the good old days, when children were taught proper grammar but thwarted it just for fun.

I had never thought about this before, but in instances of immaculate conception, what if the subject was hermaphroditic?  While some may find this notion offensive, this would be nature perfecting itself, and making for humankind to reproduce without mating.

Now before anyone jumps and says it isn’t possible, I just spent the last hour reading articles that suggest that about 99% of hermaphrodites do not develop both gender organs fully enough for them to function, but what if that other 1 percent was perfect?

It might explain an “immaculate conception,” though again, before anyone throws a brick at me because I’m not a Christian, and you think I’m poking fun, I don’t think that would make immaculate conception any less miraculous. Hermaphroditic self-impregnation in the animal kingdom is rare, but it has happened, so why not among humans?

I’m no big bad scientist, but it is an interesting thought.  Food for your brain to chew on.