Ask not...

I'm currently sitting at Panera, looking for pictures of famous speechmakers. I'm planning on putting them on one of my bulletin boards this year. As I started thinking about this plan of mine, I was brainstorming with my mom. We were trying to think of famous speeches. We thought of FDR and JFK and MLK. As we discussed this, I said, "Ya know, it would be really nice if we could come up with at least one good speech maker who didn't cheat on his wife." We laughed about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I started analyzing it. I mean, look at Bill Clinton--totally sleazy, but extremely persuasive. When he gave his famous National Prayer Breakfast speech, even I wanted to believe he was truly sorry. I wonder if there is a connection. Are good speakers more likely to also be unfaithful? Or is it just a random coincidence. Or is it that by the time you get to a place to make a famous speech you have lost enough of yourself that you can justify cheating? Who knows? We did think of one guy that we thought might have been a bit more...whatever--Lincoln. The other sad fact was that after 2 days of thinking and talking about this, I couldn't think of a single famous speech made by a female. I think that says something about "equality." There must have been women who could have made incredible speeches, but they were never visible enough to become an integral part of history. Maybe those kinds of speeches were made, it's just that no one documented them or put them in a history book.

The Label Peeler

I wrote this poem a while ago, but sitting around with my friends Nick and Crae and talking about writing made me think I should actually put some of my writing "out there." So here ya go:


The Label Peeler

She sits uprightly
in her safely-stylish jeans,
wearing a sweater in the shade of blue
that best brings out her eyes
with tidy diamonds clinging closely to her ears.

Her beige pea coat and matching scarf
are placed neatly on the back of the chair.
She sits with legs crossed,
ankles wrapped,
and hands clinging tightly to her bottle.

She nods at all the right points in the conversation,
politely laughing when needed.

As she drinks her cider beer in short sips,
her fingers wander over the label.
Only close observers recognize
this slight slip-up in the otherwise
perfectly-portrayed image.

Within minutes the label will be on the table,
and the bottle will be as bare as her frustration.