An awesome poem. Kinda.

I'm about to start writing the first essay of the year, which is supposed to be analyzing one of the several poems we've read in Spanish class. The essay has to be in Spanish. It doesn't help that I've got an urge to write this essay in Italian, since that's the foreign language I've been writing in most recently, and that what I want to write has something to do with spaghetti, tripe, gelato, Sofia Loren, or the Mafia. Recently we've been studying foods in class, so this means that Italian class has the same effect as that bell with Pavlov's dogs: when 12:30 comes around every day, even if I've just eaten or am not hungry, I've got the biggest, most inexplicable urge to go out and eat a huge plate of ravioli.

I'm sitting here and I've realized that I've forgotten how to read peotry and write about it. 11th-12th grades we read enough poetry to make my heart beat slightly quicker at the mention of slant rhyme, and have me swoon at the sight of pentameters. Why? Because I actually knew what that stuff was supposed to mean in the context of the poem. Now, this is the dialogue that goes on in my head when I read a poem:

"blah blah blah...love....blah blah blah...pain (yawn)...blah blah blah...blahblahblahblahblah"

(Except all those "blahblahblahs" are in Spanish, and there's a bit of a sad tango song playing in the background.)

WHAT HAPPENED? Granted, I've never sat down and read or recited poetry for fun. That's just something that's never appealed to me. And the only reason I think that I read poetry patiently and attentively in high school was because I went through that whole phase of watching parts of West Side Story every day for 2 years or so. It was only natural that I should have heart palpitations at the very mention of...oh shoot...what's his name? That one poet who wrote that one thing about a candle or a wick or something? William something?

But now, being rudely torn away from West Side Story and having had to sit through a painful 2 hour session of American in Paris being ridiculed by a small portion of insensitive males from the floor last year while I watched it, I think a little bit of me has died. There was a girl this past summer who told me how her boyfriend wrote her a song after their first date, and while this might have been sweet and touching under normal circumstances, all I could ask her is if she had googled the lyrics to make sure that they were actually his own verses. This might be because I've never experienced "real, romantic" love, but I've watched all of Roswell with its weird, extraterrestrial love thing going on, so I've got a pretty good idea.

I'd like to think that there's still something left somewhere deep under my VERY CALLOUSED heart (more so calloused now that my wallet's been stolen and I'm too scared to even leave my computer alone while I go to the bathroom in the library), since I still manage to think that Frank Sinatra really did mean it when he invited someone to fly him to the moon, and since, despite everything he's been through, I still love Gene Kelly in American in Paris, but I can't be sure.

In the meantime, though, a more pressing issue comes to mind:

Is this thesis ok? "This poem is pretty cool, but could be cooler."