Jecca Mehlota (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jecca_mehlota) wrote2009-02-24 11:18 am
jecca_mehlota) wrote2009-02-24 11:18 am
Also I'm tired.
One of my pictures on Day Three (of the Week in the Life meme) featured a very poorly drawn horse with the caption “Demented Horse is HERE.”
Now I will tell the story of the origins of the Demented Horse.
The demented horses were born towards the end of 1998, when I was twelve (really? Only twelve? That… wow) in seventh grade. Seventh grade is a strong contender for Worst Year Of My Life To Date, which probably explains a fair bit of the lunacy that came out of it.
In my school system, seventh grade was, they’d decided, when they’d finally introduce us to languages what are not English. They did this with EFL – Exploratory Foreign Languages. Basically you covered the very basics of French and Spanish, with some random Latin and German thrown in at the beginning of the year. Also, the teacher was … she wasn’t straight up unpleasant, I actually ended the year with at least a fair amount of respect for her, even if I didn’t particularly like her. And she had a way of teaching that often led you to the conclusion that she thought she was better than you.
(Possibly this was all the paranoia seeping in from the way most of my classmates had been treating me for the last year and a half.)
I got really lucky, actually – my only actual friend in my class group was in my EFL class.
(My school’s system was something like this: they’d have groups of teachers. Some groups were two teachers, some were four. And they’d name the groups, like, uh. Apples and Oranges. And usually all the smarter kids were in Apples while all the kids with more trouble learning were in Oranges. This wasn’t always the case, but it usually was. Anyway, if you were in Apples, you had four teachers, and you went from classroom to classroom for whatever class you were supposed to be in at the assigned time. But while you might have Science with one group of people, you could – pretty much always did – have a completely different group for your English class.
This wasn’t the case in Oranges, where there were only two teachers. You were with one or the other, none of this crazy mixing stuff.
So – and, I mean, I had two actual friends in my grade at this point. One was in Oranges, and the other was in different subjects all the time – if you were me, you were lucky if you had anyone who’d speak to you in the classroom.)
Anyway, uh.
There we were, learning Latin! Sort of! We didn’t really want to be there (and there was another girl who… thought she was popular and awesome, but was really a liar, thief, and… really annoying, and she always sat with us because we were the only people who’d put up with her), so we’d goof off a bit sometimes. Do the work problems and then, you know, stab each other with pens (PEN WARS OH YEAH I think I still have scars) or doodle stupid things on paper. At my house, I actually still have most of those doodles. They are amazing. I should find them and show them off.
So, one day while we were working on Latin – TRYING TO STAY ON TOPIC I SWEAR – we ended up with the sentence, “The horse sees the food.”
I don’t remember if we were supposed to be putting it into Latin, or translating it out of Latin. I want to say it was it out. I honestly do not know how the following ensued, just that it did. We may have been playing with conjugation or something, but one of us turned the sentence around (accidentally or on purpose, I can’t recall) into “The food sees the horse.”
Food does not have eyes!
Well, now it does.
(I wonder if I was the one to turn the sentence around, but I could have been poking fun at my friend’s mistake, as well. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW. Maybe it was intentional, hell, I don’t have the faintest…)
So now we’ve got this:
The horse sees the food.
The food sees the horse.
Since the food can see, you might assume it would be afraid of the horse, since the horse would, of course, eat it.
So, naturally, the concluding line was, “‘AAAH’ says the horse!”
Wait, why the hell is the horse screaming in terror?
SO THEN I DREW A BEAUTIFUL PICTURE TO ACCOMPANY IT.
YOU GUYS.
I WISH TO GOD I HAD A COPY OF THAT DAMN PICTURE. IT WAS AMAZING.
Unfortunately, though I had it up until twelfth grade, we (my friend and I) gave it to someone else to make a copy of it so we could both have one and… she never gave it back. So it’s… gone. THE WORLD IS A GLOOMIER PLACE FOR IT.
I’ve recreated it before (and I’ll go do it in paint or something) but absolutely nothing has ever matched the BATSHIT INSANITY of the original. (Seriously, I did a replacement once when I thought the original was lost, and then we compared all our recreations of it after I found the original again, and just… no. Nothing ever came close.)
THIS IS THE CLOSEST I CAN GET WITH MY LIMITED PAINT SKILLS and also taking into account that I apparently cannot even think of it without dissolving into helpless giggles:
That’s truly awful, isn’t it?
So the, uh, food is… a massive cross-eyed blob! (I think it was more cross-eyed in the original. Like, to the point that it looked more like one eye? Might be misremembering that, though.) And the horse is screaming in terror. YOU WOULD BE, TOO.
My friend, who was much better at drawing horses than I was even when I was actually trying, told me that’s not what a horse looks like and that’s not what food looks like, and wtf, once we stopped asphyxiating ourselves with laughter.
(There’s a better drawn horse attacking food on the page. I’m not sure if it came first or not. I know she drew that one and I drew the, uh. Slightly terrifying one, but I don’t remember who was countering what.)
(This is the source of “equus videt cibum” in my interests, if anyone had been wondering.)
We became quite attached to our poor little horse, and spawned a couple variations on the three lines (most of them still featured farm-type animals. Roosters. Farmers. Other things), and I started doodling that stupid horse all over the place.
She had a man-eating horse named Dante O’paque (long “a” not ‘o-pack’) (THERE’S A SONG TOO IT IS VERY SHORT IT GOES
Dante O’paque
The man-eating horse
Is coming to town
To eat you of course!
IT IS VERY FUN TO SING) and I know I still have a picture of stick-figure Dante O’paque standing among a million of my silly horses, with the title “Dante O’paque can’t blend in with the demented horses” which might’ve been the first time we actually used that term to describe them. (He is, like, twice as tall as they are. He is thinking, Drat.)
And from then on, packs of wild Demented Horses roamed freely over many of our papers.
Until I stopped drawing them everywhere, anyway. So through eighth grade, anyway. Then we moved onto more sane, normal topics, like the logistics of marching to bagpipes and….
And one day in Latin (which I started taking after dropping Spanish), I invented the Dementarus Cougarus.
… Okay, so our conversations and doodles never really got any saner.
Meanwhile, my ankle is still waking me up and sending me hobbling for painkillers and a bag of frozen vegetables (substitute ice pack) every morning. I can't live like this. Time for an amputation!
Now I will tell the story of the origins of the Demented Horse.
The demented horses were born towards the end of 1998, when I was twelve (really? Only twelve? That… wow) in seventh grade. Seventh grade is a strong contender for Worst Year Of My Life To Date, which probably explains a fair bit of the lunacy that came out of it.
In my school system, seventh grade was, they’d decided, when they’d finally introduce us to languages what are not English. They did this with EFL – Exploratory Foreign Languages. Basically you covered the very basics of French and Spanish, with some random Latin and German thrown in at the beginning of the year. Also, the teacher was … she wasn’t straight up unpleasant, I actually ended the year with at least a fair amount of respect for her, even if I didn’t particularly like her. And she had a way of teaching that often led you to the conclusion that she thought she was better than you.
(Possibly this was all the paranoia seeping in from the way most of my classmates had been treating me for the last year and a half.)
I got really lucky, actually – my only actual friend in my class group was in my EFL class.
(My school’s system was something like this: they’d have groups of teachers. Some groups were two teachers, some were four. And they’d name the groups, like, uh. Apples and Oranges. And usually all the smarter kids were in Apples while all the kids with more trouble learning were in Oranges. This wasn’t always the case, but it usually was. Anyway, if you were in Apples, you had four teachers, and you went from classroom to classroom for whatever class you were supposed to be in at the assigned time. But while you might have Science with one group of people, you could – pretty much always did – have a completely different group for your English class.
This wasn’t the case in Oranges, where there were only two teachers. You were with one or the other, none of this crazy mixing stuff.
So – and, I mean, I had two actual friends in my grade at this point. One was in Oranges, and the other was in different subjects all the time – if you were me, you were lucky if you had anyone who’d speak to you in the classroom.)
Anyway, uh.
There we were, learning Latin! Sort of! We didn’t really want to be there (and there was another girl who… thought she was popular and awesome, but was really a liar, thief, and… really annoying, and she always sat with us because we were the only people who’d put up with her), so we’d goof off a bit sometimes. Do the work problems and then, you know, stab each other with pens (PEN WARS OH YEAH I think I still have scars) or doodle stupid things on paper. At my house, I actually still have most of those doodles. They are amazing. I should find them and show them off.
So, one day while we were working on Latin – TRYING TO STAY ON TOPIC I SWEAR – we ended up with the sentence, “The horse sees the food.”
I don’t remember if we were supposed to be putting it into Latin, or translating it out of Latin. I want to say it was it out. I honestly do not know how the following ensued, just that it did. We may have been playing with conjugation or something, but one of us turned the sentence around (accidentally or on purpose, I can’t recall) into “The food sees the horse.”
Food does not have eyes!
Well, now it does.
(I wonder if I was the one to turn the sentence around, but I could have been poking fun at my friend’s mistake, as well. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW. Maybe it was intentional, hell, I don’t have the faintest…)
So now we’ve got this:
The horse sees the food.
The food sees the horse.
Since the food can see, you might assume it would be afraid of the horse, since the horse would, of course, eat it.
So, naturally, the concluding line was, “‘AAAH’ says the horse!”
Wait, why the hell is the horse screaming in terror?
SO THEN I DREW A BEAUTIFUL PICTURE TO ACCOMPANY IT.
YOU GUYS.
I WISH TO GOD I HAD A COPY OF THAT DAMN PICTURE. IT WAS AMAZING.
Unfortunately, though I had it up until twelfth grade, we (my friend and I) gave it to someone else to make a copy of it so we could both have one and… she never gave it back. So it’s… gone. THE WORLD IS A GLOOMIER PLACE FOR IT.
I’ve recreated it before (and I’ll go do it in paint or something) but absolutely nothing has ever matched the BATSHIT INSANITY of the original. (Seriously, I did a replacement once when I thought the original was lost, and then we compared all our recreations of it after I found the original again, and just… no. Nothing ever came close.)
THIS IS THE CLOSEST I CAN GET WITH MY LIMITED PAINT SKILLS and also taking into account that I apparently cannot even think of it without dissolving into helpless giggles:
That’s truly awful, isn’t it?
So the, uh, food is… a massive cross-eyed blob! (I think it was more cross-eyed in the original. Like, to the point that it looked more like one eye? Might be misremembering that, though.) And the horse is screaming in terror. YOU WOULD BE, TOO.
My friend, who was much better at drawing horses than I was even when I was actually trying, told me that’s not what a horse looks like and that’s not what food looks like, and wtf, once we stopped asphyxiating ourselves with laughter.
(There’s a better drawn horse attacking food on the page. I’m not sure if it came first or not. I know she drew that one and I drew the, uh. Slightly terrifying one, but I don’t remember who was countering what.)
(This is the source of “equus videt cibum” in my interests, if anyone had been wondering.)
We became quite attached to our poor little horse, and spawned a couple variations on the three lines (most of them still featured farm-type animals. Roosters. Farmers. Other things), and I started doodling that stupid horse all over the place.
She had a man-eating horse named Dante O’paque (long “a” not ‘o-pack’) (THERE’S A SONG TOO IT IS VERY SHORT IT GOES
Dante O’paque
The man-eating horse
Is coming to town
To eat you of course!
IT IS VERY FUN TO SING) and I know I still have a picture of stick-figure Dante O’paque standing among a million of my silly horses, with the title “Dante O’paque can’t blend in with the demented horses” which might’ve been the first time we actually used that term to describe them. (He is, like, twice as tall as they are. He is thinking, Drat.)
And from then on, packs of wild Demented Horses roamed freely over many of our papers.
Until I stopped drawing them everywhere, anyway. So through eighth grade, anyway. Then we moved onto more sane, normal topics, like the logistics of marching to bagpipes and….
And one day in Latin (which I started taking after dropping Spanish), I invented the Dementarus Cougarus.
… Okay, so our conversations and doodles never really got any saner.
Meanwhile, my ankle is still waking me up and sending me hobbling for painkillers and a bag of frozen vegetables (substitute ice pack) every morning. I can't live like this. Time for an amputation!
no subject
no subject
(Remember: DEMENTED HORSE LOVES YOU. Demented Horse loves everyone.)