If only I wrote this good

I know, I know, it's totally lame to put a forwarded email on your blog just because it's 100 degrees outside and you're too hot to actually write something, but some of these were so brilliant - SO BRILLIANT - that I just had to share just so I wouldn't steal them and claim them as my own. (Thanks to Mare-Mare for this one.)

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners.

I'm only including my favorites, because I'm the boss.

- He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
- She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
- She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
- Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
- He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
- The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
- From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
- Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Pittsburgh at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
- John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
- He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
- The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

And my very, very favorite:

- The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.