Trust no-one... except the man you marry.

I have arrived at the ballet hall today to find it populated by mad religious people putting teenagers through a tedious bout of trust exercises.

Things like pairing them up (one seeing, one with eyes-closed and hands groping) so that one can yell impatiently at the other “Just go FORWARD already! Alright! So there’s a step there! So what! Just go FORWARD” while the blind victim giggles and spins themself in disbelieving circles saying profound things like “You’re totally going to walk me into a FENCE! Oh my gahhhd, this is so SCARY! I like, can’t see ANYTHING and you’re totally going to KILL me!”

Unfortunately, they’re probably not. I witnessed all the seeing-eye-teens (not to be confused with the thinking-brain-teens) being told “Do not take them ANYWHERE near the road. Just don’t go near the road. Take them (broadly gesticulating arm) THAT way.”
So much of the real mystery (and therefore, trust to be gained) has been excised.
With a sledgehammer. 

Real trust games for teenagers in this day and age should include real things. Like holding out a funny-smelling cigarette and asking “Would I REALLY give you drugs to smoke?” Of course, the desired (trusting) response would depend entirely on the calibre of your friend. Or holding the car door open while saying “Of COURSE I’m alright to drive. I only had one beer, and it was light, and it was HOURS ago.”

The real point of all this is that the people who play these trust games are usually the ones who WON’T drink and drive, or spike their friend’s drink, or set them up with a spliff instead of a clove cigarette. The kids who will – maybe they were never kids long enough to enjoy these games in the first place.

Hmm. I’m a bit worried about myself now. Still, given that I agonise over the nature of my influence on the kids I work with on an almost daily basis, I’m probably safe. Safe-ish. More likely that trust games just give me unpleasant flashbacks to being the new (immensely unpopular) kid in year 7.

I’m so not a team player.

P.S. I love my husband. It's a testimony to his easygoing nature that at ten pm on Friday night I present him with a plastic skeleton (well, skull and two hands) which moves up and down beneath a ghostly veil while suspended from a black tube... and say "Hey! Can you get the sound on this to STOP working?"* The unnerving groans that accompany this are not desired for our purposes** (ballet concert) so I have been presented with this monstrosity and asked "Can Michael disable the sound? So it still goes up and down, just doesn't make any sound?"

*I just realised his instant compliance could be linked to my scariness, which increases exponentially and proportionately to days remaining until concert. Shut up, the lot of you who are nodding out there. I can see you and I know where you all live. Yeah. 


**Because our senior students do plenty of moaning and groaning and DON'T require a motion sensor to get started. If you're reading this, good luck refuting that. Really. You'll need it.

So anyway, I dump this in his lap (right on top of the beloved lappy) and remove myself from the room.

Remember, ten pm on Friday night.

He fiddles, goes and gets a screwdriver, and after about fifteen repetitive moaning descants (by which time I'm ready to set the thing on fire) there is no more. Just a gentle whirring, as the skull bobs up and down and spins gently. And my lovely, clever husband picks up his laptop and parks his skinny butt back on the couch. I wish I had that kind of insane equilibrium.

Thunder and lightning, very very frightening...pug!

It's stormy weather above our place; really and truly right above us. Hearing strong winds, I panicked and ran out onto our porch to prune the gorgeous yellow rose standard beside our steps. The other one blew over while we were away one weekend and I didn't want to lose this one too. Got absolutely soaked and decided to abandon my frenzied pruning efforts when I realised I was directly below some massive (daylight quality) flashes of lightning holding metal pruning shears. Hm. Yes, they have handles, but is that something I really feel like testing tonight? No. 


Hilariously, the same pug which was skittering across the floorboards barking in a panicky fashion not ten minutes ago has now passed out in her bed, sweetly oblivious to the world and subsequent rumblings of thunder in the heavens above. The rain is pattering on our roof but there are warnings of hail up to 2cm in diameter; no doubt there'll be human interest stories of families with their roofs blown off and clutching golf-sized hail preserved in the freezer for our intrepid reporters over at the HeraldSun.

Dammit. Spoke too soon. She's squeaking again.
Hubs is lecturing me just a little on the pool of cards we saw in tonight's Magic draft. Then apologising for speaking so much while I'm attempting to type coherent sentences. Then pointing out that he had in fact done said apologising. Ok, it's a mobius loop, enough already.

I now have three sore toes.
I carved a chunk out of my right foot's second toe when I put a large plastic tub on - well, I thought it was the floor. It wasn't. So my left biggie is sore, by right biggie is throbbing, and I may die from the blood loss incurred from my second toe. That I probably won't is an irrelevance and shall not be mentioned in the interests of garnering sympathy. And it's ridiculously humid.

Hm. Is there anything else I can currently think of to complain about? Oh yeah, it's Halloween tomorrow. Which, in Australia, doesn't mean a great deal. When all your friends are arty people it means a little more. I suspect dressing up may be in the air. This is totally my own fault for bemoaning the lack of frocking up in my life. Universe, if you are listening, this is not what I meant.

Hooray!

For today I recovered my sparkly. Literally, not so much metaphorically. I am still sick, snuffling about in my slippers (I have VERY cute peter alexander slippers; black and red, pale pink with little silver Eiffel towers, lavender... I think that's it) and jeans and tops (oh,the boring! THE BORING!!!!) blowing the most INCREDIBLE amounts of crap out of my sinuses. See, you all wanted to know that, right?

Right now I can't decide whether I'm being assaulted by or enjoying the sounds of Ben Folds acapella (glee-club style). It's a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain. I think it's good. My current inability to cheerfully belt out random lyrics is probably hindering my enjoyment JUST a little. Everything sounds like I'm underwater (and I REALLY don't like swimming). My idea of swimming: lying in the water in such a way that I can still read. I have a small paddling pool in my backyard (well, currently out of commission) for just this purpose. In summer I get one half and the pug gets the other. It's comic.

Currently rereading Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters; a very thoughtful anniversary gift from Hubs. I don't read so much as devour, so my impressions of the book were more a continual "OHHH!" and so forth than clever thoughts about the relevance of themes/characters to our modern obsessions. Haven't read it? Get thee to Amazon or Fishpond or the bookdepository and buy a copy. Or come round to my house and ask very nicely. I may lend you mine. 

I now realise (of course!) I've been grappling with my own invisible monsters a little lately.

Worrying about running out of motivation tricks and ideas, worrying about running out of energy. The fatigue this term is stupid! I have a little malicious voice at the back of my skull who says See, this is the glandular coming back to bite you. The doctor said... and most of my mania comes from proving that little voice wrong. Damn wrong. For three years I panicked and clutched my glands every time I got a sore throat.

Worrying about a certain pale pink (AND shiny leotard) I'll be pouring myself into in just a couple of weeks. The last time I wore that leotard it scored me a "Now, you just need to be a bit more careful about what you're eating..." and pathetically, five years on I haven't forgotten. I think I presently weigh two kilos more than I did then, but my body seems to HATE me, no matter what I feed it.
Whatever.

What a whinge! I totally deserve stubbing-toes karma tomorrow. Then I'll be reminded to be grateful for all the things that ARE going my way. I haven't, for example, contracted leprosy, causing my fingers to fall off, which would be TOTALLY disastrous. Then my toes would doubtless bid me farewell and I'd be really, properly immobilised, which means I'd get INCREDIBLY fat from sitting about and blogging all day. Ah, nope. No fingers to type with. Damn. Ah! Voice-recognition software. Sweet. So as long as I was laryngitis-free and had minions to turn pages, cook meals, feed them to me, etc, it would all be fine.

If I just focus on my own monsters and quit fighting everyone else's I may stand a chance.  Yes.
Osteopath, naturopath, and a serious deep tissue massage. I have a week of husband-geekin'-out-in-good-ole-Texas to sort myself out and move forward. Sleeping now would be a good place to start. Sleep's the best defence against spontaneous flesh-eating leprosy, right?

Thank you, my lovely commenters...

For you have all cheered me up no end.

Especially the indivisible & indistinguishable one, who has made me shed a few late night tears by leaving SEVENTY PERCENT COCOA FAIRTRADE ORGANIC HEAVEN on my doorstep.
And a card. A LOVELY card, which made me smile even before I opened it because that design has history, man!

The card will last much, much longer than the chocolate, but she really is the bomb. I get to steal her little boy every Thursday and channel some type of Mommy vibe. GIRLFRIENDS who give you chocolate, people. (And their firstborn on a weekly basis!) There's the REAL sisterhood. A guy who give you chocolate? Yeah. That's nice and all. Considerate, even. But when your girlfriend looks you in the eye and says "This is for YOU" that's real love.

Actually, this is me being flippant about something a lot more important than chocolate (which keeps taking me six goes to type), but I can't go getting all mushy and teary now, for I am a BIKER CHICK!
Granted, it was more an "on the back of the bike holding onto the BIKER" chick experience, but oh baby, how I want a motorbike. I'd probably be awful at soloing it, can't really imagine hurtling down to the peninsula with fire-engine-red fiberglass case containing violin on back... hang on... I kind  of can.
Probably not so great with a baby seat though. Or a trailer, which  would need for towing about all my teaching violin/ballet stuff. It was a nice dream though.

And herein ends my post for today. It's been a lovely day. Visited the Toy Library, enjoyed lunch with suzukisinger (yes, she of indivisble fame!), taught kids, they all set nice goals, went to dancing and got my tango on, had my little BIKER CHICK excursion, danced with my lovely hubs (and some other people. Dearly beloved, some of them. Hang on, I only danced with the dearly beloved ones tonight. That's extra nice.) Had a few 'breathing dancing' moments.

Um, this is a little odd. it's about 1am and the pug is sitting on the decking outside grinding away at a bone. And I do mean grinding. It reminds me of that scary story about the couple in the car who hear on the radio that there's a serial killer on the loose.

Then their car breaks down and the guy says he'll walk to get help (GENIUS!!!) and while he's gone the chick hears this scratching sound on the roof alternating with a weird thumping... and then police turn up and it eventuates that the killer grabbed her boyf, decapitated him, and has been alternately scratching his way through the roof of the car and thumping the guys head against the duco... (as one does when one has nothing better to do on a Saturday night, being freshly jailbroken and all) AND he was only a millimetre from busting through the roof!!!

I'm sure there are far better versions of this story, but my point is this: Lucy (pug)  is reminding me of the serial killer. I need to let her in before we seriously freak out the neighbors. Or I have really bad dreams. Hang on, I have chocolate! No bad dreams for me, just sugary goodness!