The Six Word Memoir

After the trip and the plague (which has settled down to a nagging cough, particularly when I laugh), I'm catching up on e-mails, grading, and - of course - blogs. And I found I'd been tagged for exactly the sort of meme I love by Dr. Crazy and by Adjunct Whore. Apologies if I've missed other references - I'm still catching up.

I think I may have mentioned that one of my favorite conversational fallbacks is to listen for odd phrases that somehow - usually in an off-handed or back-handed way - say something about the person who said them and suggest that whatever the phrase was should be their autobiography title (one of my favorites of all time was "Dirty, Sticky, and Loving on Me" for my dear friend Trixie). And I know I've at least referenced the haiku summer with T. and N. where we sent each other haiku post cards about our days over the course of the summer.

I also made a group of students who complained about the length of an assignment write it as a haiku instead. And maybe it explains why I like this and this so much.

So a meme that asks me to do something similar - in this case, write a six word memoir - sounds like loads of fun (and a nice way to take a break from the mountain of student e-mails I've been avoiding in favor of March Madness).

Here are the guidelines (I won't call them rules since I'm going to break one of them):

1. Write your own six word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4 Tag five more blogs with links
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

So, without further adieu, here's my attempt(s) at a six word memoir (because, honestly, this is too much fun to do just one).:

Looking backwards, he stumbled into it.

or (if I want to be literary), I'll borrow (and butcher) a quote I love by Naguib Mahfouz:

Under watchful stars, he set sail.

or

Watching closely, the joke was revealing.

Now for the part where I violate the meme guidelines. I'm not going to tag anyone, but I do hope a lot of you will do it. And if you don't have a blog, feel free to take a stab at it in the comments here.