Word.(s)

What, do you ask, could be on the agenda for my exciting life in Africa this week? High school math and studying vocabulary words? Why, that's right lucky winner, it's time for the intoxicating cram session for the GRE! 

Of course, I like me some math now and again. But believe it or not, I don't care how many miles Janet and John are away from each other in separate cars traveling at different speeds on a Tuesday in July, as they try to make it to Granny's house 160 km away. They should have carpooled and bought a map; that's my brilliant answer which ETS will unfortunately never see since it's multiple choice.

Anyway, in trying to study for the GRE but also procrastinate by writing a blog post, I decided to merge the two and create something that could be entertaining to people other than myself. The nerdy challenge on a Friday night: pick up a stack of GRE vocab cards and create a poem using all of those words. (I did cheat and left out the words: abstemious, perigee, peripatetic, and expurgate. But it's my lame game, so I can cheat if I want to.)  Jealous of my life in Malawi yet?  Yea, me neither. Not this week anyway.

(Not really) An Ode to ETS

What I write here, this doggerel at best

Is merely a peccadillo for truly I jest.

My indolence I’m trying to shed

Since the nearing GRE deadline makes me want to hide in bed.

But don’t mistake this verse for something pedantic;

Just trying to study as much as I can stand it.

These vocabulary words are evanescent I find

Their desultory meanings so unkind,

As I try to harness my itinerant mind.

An incipient place for them to remind

Me to be less diffident

As I become more confident

And thus study time feels less exigent.

Though I still feel the need to malinger,

That headline would be a winner:

"English teacher feigns flu to study words."

So I abjure that move; it's absurd.

To mitigate my stress, rather,

An exegesis of ETS (a.k.a. blather).

An intransigent company, an anathema true

I censure their practices and not just a few.

No approbations here, no words of joy;

Just me, antithetical to their ploys.

Their practice books filled with grandiloquence

Only to egomaniac money mongers does it make sense.

Their self-aggrandizing nature I impugn.

I hope my fractious comments bring them to their doom.