My Birth in Poem Form

Going to sleep last night, I was feeling rather quirky and wrote a poem on several Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner post its (I knew that free pad would come in handy!). If you know the following things about me you can infer my skills with words:

• Aside from one or two papers in high school in college (including my thesis!), I never got more than a B+ on a paper in my life.
• My combined SAT score out of 1600 equaled my combined GRE score out of 1600 (just including Math + Verbal).  After 4 years of engineering school, I increased my math by 170 points.  Laws of inverse proportionality tell us that my verbal must have gone down that much.
• In studying for the GRE’s, I learned most of my vocabulary by looking up words from m-w.com.  I clearly didn’t use the “sound” options to see how the words were pronounced, and believed that “esoteric” was pronounced to rhyme with exotic, not “ess-oh-tare-ic” which is the right way.
• The fall semester of my 2nd year of graduate school I had to write 4 x 20+ page papers.  I felt it was imperative to go to every professor’s office hours to let them know that writing wasn’t my forte.  I think I got B’s on all of those papers.

I hope these littel tidbits make you laugh, but if they didn’t, here is a poem that sure will.  In 4th grade, I attended a hebrew day school in Yardley, PA.  Half the day was spent speaking hebrew, studying torah, and doing other jewish things; the other half was spent studying normal subjects, like math, science, history and english.  For one of my religious assignments I had to write a poem or create some artwork expressing why I was thankful for Gd.

This assignment was at the end of the year, and I remember being down at the Jersey Shore with my family, and my Dad helping me with the assignment.  My father, of course, is also an engineer, and you can judge his ability with words as well.

So here it is, My Birth in Poem Form.

Roses are red
Ladders have rungs
I almost died
From a hole in my lung

I had a hole in my lung
When I was born
And when I breathed
I sounded like a horn

They hooked me up
To tubes in the wall
As my dad paced
Up and Down the hall

Eight Days
All was well
Now a happy end
To tell:

ME!

As I recited this for some coworkers last week, I was amazed that I still remembered it (not really, I recite it often). I thought it was a good time to write the poem down, to be stored in internet history forever.

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