One last ritual before high school ends...

At my high school, there really aren’t any rituals that I could say are bad or mean, because I never had to go through any of them.  The things that I would classify as rituals from my “culture” are actually really fun and pretty entertaining.  I think that one, that is pretty common in this world, would be senior pranks.

My school has prided itself on some really idiotic senior pranks that honestly should have gotten students arrested for vandalism or trespassing, but that is what made them fun.  My freshman year, the seniors spent literally hours gluing pennies to the three main staircases in the building.  It doesn't seem like a big deal, but something that we learned right off the bat is that you can’t walk up stairs when they’re like that because its like a slip-n-slide.  Junior year was an interesting set of pranks.  A bunch of the AP Chem students got the help of some of the teachers and burned the grass in front of the school to say “class of ‘09” and then set up a beer pong table in the middle of the upperclassman area, where they proceeded to play for the three busiest passing periods of the day. 

But I still think that ours takes the cake…..

The process of planning a senior prank at my high school is a pain in the ass and excruciatingly long.  With a class of 500, who all have random schedules, we had to find ways to get every interested students in on the joke.  And then, we had to get it “approved” by the principal.  Which totally defeats the purpose.  The plan was for 200 of us to camp out on the front lawn of the school, set up thousands of cups full of water in front of the three main doors, and block off the parking lot by creating a giant X with cars and blocking off the exit to keep students from getting out.  Also, we were going to fork the lawn, and write messages in chalk all over the sidewalks.  But at 4:45 in the morning, we got kicked off of school property because we were all 18 and “technically” weren't students anymore.  So then we had to improvise a new pranks… which ended up being an even bigger problem and almost kept us from getting our diplomas that night.

We planted smoke bombs in one of the cars and packed it full of seniors.  Then it suspiciously “broke down” in the middle of the entrance to the school.  We created a traffic jam that ran from our school entrance, down 104^th, and then in each direction off of Wadsworth for over twenty minutes.  We kept school from starting on time, which most of the teachers found hilarious when they drove past us holding signs that were random (and many, very inappropriate based on our school standars), and then we accidently caused two car accidents. And that’s when we topped the last three years of senior pranks… no one had actually caused damage to underclassmen before.  At that point, people started pushing the “broken” car up the hill and into the parking lot.  Then our three security guards, all of the administration, and the SLHS campus cop started chasing us down.  So we fled in every direction possible.  Everyone piled into cars and prayed that no one got caught, then headed to Countryside to meet up and plan our strategy for the rest of the day.

That day, we took a vow of silence.  Everyone had to protect their butt because if one of us went down, we were all going down, and that would take 200 people out of graduation.  It became that moment where we felt like we were in the Gator version of “Fight Club”. Only rule of Prank Night… Don’t talk about prank night. 

As far as rituals go… I have to say that this is a pretty awesome one.  None of us got embarrassed or arrested, and we were all able to graduate.  And it’s definitely one of those things where we can say our interpretation of the ritual was the best, especially since we planned in in less than 20 minutes.  

I think I took the "assignment" for this weekend a little too seriously...
When we were told to experience pain, one of my friends turned it into a joke and made me wear a paperclip as a toe ring so that it would hurt, but I got tired of that within a few minutes.
And then, on Friday night, I actually really did feel pain.  I was walking around in boots with no traction while looking for one of my friends and I slipped on a giant chunk of ice.  I then proceeded to fall onto my butt, but my hand got caught on the cement step next to me.  It actually really hurt, and my hand was swollen for the rest of the night.  And on Saturday, I woke up with cuts covering my palm of my hand, as if my body wanted to remind me even more, that  I got hurt.  The worst part is that I'm left handed and now everytime I do something, my hand continues to hurt.  Also, I'm not really happy about the fact that a lot of people saw this happen... I was extremely embarrassed and wanted to go crawl in a hole until it was forgotten.
This is the one assignment so far that I was not super willing to do, and yet, I'm writing about an actual painful experience from this weekend that fits this assignment.  I think the fates were just trying to be funny.

Hungarian Creation Myth

I did the Hungarian creation myth for my creation story.  It would be classified as the "earth diver" creation story, like the majority of the class, but I really liked it because of the little details, even though I did not add many of the little details when I was telling it to the class.  Here is the full version, which I got from "Magic Tales", http://www.magictails.com/creationlinks.html.


The seeds of the Holy Sea break out of your shell.
The eternal sea's waves are waving, and rolling.
Their waves are rocking and their foam is hissing.
There is no earth yet anywhere, but in the immeasurable heights,
Above in his golden house, sits the great heavenly father on his golden throne.

He is the old, white haired and white bearded God of eternity.
On his black robes there are thousands of sparkling stars.
Besides him sits his wife, the Great Heavenly Mother.
On her white robes (palast) there are thousands of sparkling stars.
She is the ancient material of which everything is made.
They have existed from eternity in the past and will exist for all eternity to come.

In front of them stands their beautiful golden sunbeam haired son,
The sun God Magyar. The boy asks of his father:
"When shall we create the world of the humans my dear father?"

The Eternal Sea just waves and rolls.
Its waves are rocking and its foam is hissing.
The old gray-haired heavenly father lowers his head .
He ponders the question a while and a little longer,
Then he lifts his white haired head and talks to his son.

-- My dear sweet golden haired son, let us create then
For the humans their own world, so that they, who will be
Your children shall have a place to live in.

-- How shall we create such a world, my dear father?
-- This is the manner in which we can create it:
In the depths of the waving, blue Sea of Eternity are the
Sleeping eyes (seeds), sleeping seeds [sem=eye/small seed]
The sleeping Magya's [ Mag=seed, Magyar=man].

Descend therefore to the depths of the Great Sea.
Bring up the sleeping seeds and dreaming eyes, so that
We can create a world out of them.

The son followed the direction of his father.
He turned himself into his image of a golden bird, into a golden diving duck.
Then he flew down to the expanses of the Endless Sea.

He swam for a while on top of the water,
Rocked by the waves of the sea for a while.
He then dived down into the depths of the blue,
Searching for the bottom, but unable to reach it.
Out of breath, he was forced to resurface.

He swam on top again, rocked by the waves,
He gathered his strength, for a long time.
After taking deep breaths he submerged again into the blue depths,
Diving deeper, into the darkness, slowly releasing his air
Which like vibrating pearls rose to the top and popped on the surface of the rolling sea.

However now his beak hit the bottom of the sea, into its sand.
He took some of it into his beak and like an arrow,
He shot up to the top of the water with it
From the surface of the sea bed, he brought up the
Sleeping eyes/seeds, silver white "ügyücske" [small eyes?].
The sleeping eyes awoke, the sleepy eyes opened and grew up and became living beings.


There were a lot of things that were repeated throughout the three days of storytelling.  The main ones that I picked out were tears, the body of a diety, clay, eyes, water, and the earth diver.  The tears and the body were significant to me because tears usually were involved in the creation of human beings, while the body of a diety usually was used to create the landscape of the Earth, generally after their death.  Clay was prevalent in the creation stories of tribes, where clay was used to create people.  Eyes were usually the sun or some other part of the universe.  And water was one of the few things that were usually in existence before anything else was created, which showed its importance.  And the earth diver was important for a lot of reasons, it was repeated many times in so many stories, and it was used to bring sand or other things to the surface in order to create life.