October 26, 2002
playing teacher
Listening
to: a flamenco guitar CD Georgia lent me
Reading: Victor Hugo - Hunchback of Notre
Dame
Lo and behold, a miracle! I actually wake up at (cue drumroll)... 8
am!
At 8:30 I expected my mother's driver's
daughter (her name is Ellyn) to arrive and I would put my teaching skills to the test. For
some reason I was absolutely... what's the word, psyched. I don't even really like
children, but I was looking forward to this anyway.
We spent a long time together (four hours). That’s a lot longer than my usual
tolerance level with kids under the age of 10 (an hour and a half, tops). In the first
hour she was shy and didn't speak much, she warmed to me gradually but spent the last hour
cooped up in the kitchen with Kakak because Soren stopped by and she was unexplainably
scared of him.
Since she was too afraid to come upstairs and join us, Soren and I played with the colouring book. I gave the little girl in the picture a stunning hair colour, black with turquoise and pink streaks, along with one blue eye and one green. He gave a bunny in the picture a green nose and purple fur. We then decided that was enough to give the black and white picture enough amounts of cool.
While we did that I switched to the Opus
classical radio channel and this amazing piece played, it was pretty long and he and I
agreed it sounded like something straight out of a few role-playing game movie sequences,
it could have been the score for a Final Fantasy game. We worked with it and it became
brilliant.
There was plenty of leaping in the green fields in the beginning, with little fluttering
notes for butterflies and then somehow it worked into a ballroom scene, and we heard the
clumsy falter of the protagonist and at which particular moment everyone else in the room
would (all too typically) shy away in the shadows watching the two characters dancing
around, conquering the ballroom. It was so perfect. There was even a sudden shift to the
minor which indicated a bad guy watching them from the second floor pillar. Probably
signalling to his cronies positioned all around the first and second floor. There was also
a ship scene, and a moment where another ship pulled out and it was the pirates, and they
crashed on a beach and had a terrific duel.
It went on and on and on. We were walking around the living room and my bedroom just doing things like reading books and playing chess, engaging in idle conversation and suddenly one of us would interject with a radical mood shift, describing a passing moment in the piece that just brought series of images to life and the both of us would weave individual RPG scenes in our head. I wish I had more brain food moments like that.
Ellyn went home. I packed some beginners books like Goldilocks & The Three Bears and Billy Goats Gruff hoping she would go home and perfect her pronunciation. I honestly doubt she’d want to come back, seeing as how Soren just completely scared her off the second floor. I wonder if I want her to come back. I wonder after all my hard work whether anything went into her head today.
Afterwards at the Lake Club Library, I proceeded to engage in a meaningless hour of brainless food, found in magazines like Glamour. I honestly don’t know why I still pick them up instead of sifting through the library collection looking for diamonds in the rough. It’s not like I’m going to note the makeup procedures and spend hours at home perfecting them. Or hell, take anything in those kind of magazines seriously. I can’t even begin to count the number of headlines and articles repeated over and over again (probably the most common having something to do with sex positions or what men want in bed). But really, I guess it’s a fun piece of excess, and a break from The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Rilke’s poetry. There is that girly girl side in me after all, the kind that giggles at those fashion Dos and Don’ts shots of normal people in the streets and considers remembering this issue’s sets of What Men Want But Won’t Tell You But They Told Us You Know So We Will Publish It Bigtime lists.
I looked up and there’s a surprise. My dad is reading a Hello! magazine with great interest, and I don’t know what to think.