If a cow ever got the chance...

Another year, another National Spelling Bee. I always watch for articles on it this time of year and feel a kind of fond bemusement about the whole thing. Spelling bees were (weirdly) the defining event of my middle school years--they remain the only thing I have ever really studied my ass off for, and I can't even tell you how many times my fellow students tormented me with, "Do you study the dictionary?" like it was an original line. (Answer: "No, but I probably should be.")

Anyway, spelling bees are weird. It's this bizarre, intense subculture populated entirely by nerds and their supportive yet slightly crazed parents and teachers. Before the state spelling bee they give you this booklet of words that "may" be on the list of words used at the bee. They're fucked-up words, not necessarily long ones, but tricky. For example, "dustblu" is exactly the color it sounds like, and it really is missing that final "e". They are words that I expect never to hear in any other context, at any other point in my life. ("Dvandva," anyone?) There's really no way to prepare unless you've seen these words in advance, because they don't follow any known spelling or pronunciation rules. I can't think of more examples right now, but there's a whole bunch if you click on that link.

There were probably two or three thousand words in this preparation booklet. If I was going to win I would need to know them all. So my parents went out and bought a dictionary--not a normal one, a dictionary with like every word in the English language. It cost a hundred bucks. Then my mom, every night when she came home from work, would sit there with this dictionary, looking up the words from the booklet, and then she would copy out the word, its pronunciation, its definition, and use it in a sentence. She filled three notebooks this way. It took a long time. And once that was done, she would quiz me on them. We'd do a hundred words a night, maybe; when we got to the end of the notebooks we'd start over.

It is very possible that I had the best parents in the world.

Anyway, Laura Bush made some taped comments for these 250 assembled spelling nerds to listen to. She said, "I am very proud of you. I hope you'll always work hard at spelling and at reading. The more you read, the better your spelling will become and the more your vocabulary will grow."

Is that not the most asinine thing ever? These nerds did not get to the national spelling bee by "working hard" at their reading comprehension and sounding things out, they got there by memorizing a list of bizarre and arbitrary words that only show up in this context. And did you like how she worked her token pet cause into her statement?

Maybe it's not just Laura Bush. The whole institution of being First Lady is really demeaning. (and yeah, I know I'm not the first person to rant about it). They have no power whatsoever. They're forced to pick a safe cause that no one could possibly be offended by, unless they're pro-illiteracy or eight-year-olds using heroin. Then they have to make idiotic "ladies' auxiliary" statements about it, and eventually all these propaganda articles appear in Newsweek about how Dubya always remembers to consult the little lady! Not about important manly things, like bombing the fuck out of Afghanistan, but he never fails to get her opinion about, say, dedicating a new library.

Good thing I was only like seven when the "Just Say No" campaign was in full swing, because if I'd been any older my peers might have tried to give me drugs! Well, I would have been armed with the power of Nancy Reagan, so I would have known what to say.

Okay, enough bragging and ranting for today. Disturbingly, this entry is actually what I sound like when I'm in a good mood. I think the rest of the day will also be fine, unless India and Pakistan decide to nuke each other or something, but let's not contemplate that.

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