A connection

Spaghetti was walking down the cobblestone road late one evening, watching the sky turn from blue, to navy, to rich velvet black. He was contemplating something of a great deal of importance. Why, he wondered, was he unable to find his secret document? He had left in plain view just the other evening when he went for a similar walk at a similar hour. He had come back, had blown out his candle and picked up the rest of his papers to put away. The next morning, his secret document was nowhere to be found. He couldn’t have imagined the maid coming in and removing it, although it was in her custom to clean late at night while he was out on his regular evening walk. She said it was because it was the only time she could count on not disturbing him when she needed to do the cleaning. The valet, too, who usually turned down his sheets just before he arrived home (which they could always be sure of knowing the exact moment since he tended to whistle rather loudly as he was strolling up the path to his house), couldn’t possibly have removed the paper. It wasn’t as though there was anything all that important contained within it. And surely neither one of them would have put it away. They must have seen that it was out for a reason. He never did anything, if it wasn’t deliberate. So what could have become of it? An ordinarily pleasant walk was ruined by this unsolvable mystery and so he turned to go home early, his mind too disturbed for his customary whistling. He approached the house and opened the door, proceeding straight to his room. He heard voices whispering from behind the door, but didn’t think anything of it, until he opened it and saw the maid and the valet standing quite close, clasping hands. They jumped away from each other and looked sheepishly at the floor.

“It seems you two have been carrying on an amour in my study while I’ve been gone,” he said calmly. And then, with all the verve and enthusiasm of a man suddenly thrust into awareness of the solution to a problem that has troubled him greatly, he uttered a single, slightly terrifying “Aha!” and rushed to his desk. “I have discovered the culprit!” he cried after a moment of shuffling through his papers. “Look at the angle of the candle!” he continued. “In the dark, after blowing it out, there is no way I could have known over what it was dripping.” He held up his secret document, which was stuck to another page by a familiar-looking yellow substance.

“Beeswax!” he declared triumphantly. Chuckling to himself, he cleaned up his papers, and then blew out his candle before turning in. The maid and the valet disappeared. When he couldn’t find them the next morning, reports from his other servants came back to him that they had eloped and run off together earlier that morning. But Spaghetti never misplaced another page. For the rest of his life, he was convinced that the two events were somehow related, and there was no persuading him otherwise.

Overheard in sunglasses

Overheard on the playground from an eleven-year-old kid to his posse of friends:

You’re not going anywhere near my sister again. She’s too good for you.

Made me smile

It’s strange going to pick my little brother up from school now. I recognize about half of the kids pouring out of the school doors, and that’s saying something. I had a couple of the kids give the almost-hi – you know, where you take a breath and half-raise your arm, before your self-consciousness takes over the greeting instinct. Once the self-consciousness kicks in, you’re suddenly very concerned about accidentally greeting someone you don’t know, and so you drop your hand or do the wave-psych-I’m-just fixing-my-hair thing, and the intake of air for the verbal greeting dispels with nary a sound passing your lips. In the kids’ defense, I was wearing bug-eye sunglasses (the ones that practically hide half of your face… the $8 variety…), so their unsure responses are justified.

But I am confident that, hopefully, after a few more weeks, they will recognize me so that we can avoid the awkward almost-hi. With or without sunglasses .

Teaching: Day Three

Kids are ingenious! At lunch recess, I walked past a group of boys, who were each kicking off one of their shoes into a pile in the centre. Then one boy got on his hands and knees, eyes closed, and started randomly throwing the shoes to either side.

“Okay,” I said walking up to them, “I have to ask, what’s with the shoes?”

“We’re making teams,” several of them piped up, and then turned back to the more important task of finding their own shoes.

None of this eenie-meenie-miny-mo stuff from when I was a kid, or nominating captains and having them each pick someone, no more of this fear of being picked last for team sports. They now use shoes. I thought it was very clever.

Today was a very different experience. I spent a lot more time working one-on-one with kids, and doing out-of-classroom tasks, such as photocopying and preparing for later lessons. It was still good, but I cannot boast knowing the names of more than a third of today’s class (whereas I learned everyone’s names on Wednesday). Wednesday’s class was a fun group of kids. Today when I strolled into their classroom during lunch hour before they went outside for recess, there was a chorus of “Hi Miss Tara!”s around the room, and an eruption of chatter towards me. It was cute. (And yes, they call me Miss Tara…)

I was also struck by the compassion some kids have. It was pizza lunch today and in another class I walked into, some of the kids were chirping at one boy to not throw out his slice of pizza. He began defending himself saying that he was finished and that he wasn’t hungry, and then being confronted more forthrightly, he began sobbing, saying that he didn’t like it. I managed to get from him that he was supposed to get a cheese pizza; the slice he was holding was pepperoni.

“Did you try taking the pepperoni off?” I said. “Why don’t you try that and see if that works.”

“I already tried it,” he sobbed. “And I don’t like it…”

The pizza was being distributed by a couple of older boys, and one of them, clearly affected by the younger boy’s distress, said, “Here [student's name], I’ll go and see if they have any more and I’ll get you a slice of cheese pizza.”

Within moments, he had returned, and the younger boy, no longer under threat of having to eat pepperoni-tainted pizza, sniffled quietly and enjoyed his pizza.

Teaching: Day Two

Scene: The playground at lunch recess

Characters: Myself (teacher’s assistant and lunch monitor), Girl A, Girl B

Girl A and B skip up towards myself

Girl A: Teacher, can we walk with you?

Me: Sure! What are your names?

(They tell me)

Me: What grade are you in?

Girl A: Grade one

Me: What kinds of things are you learning right now?

Girl B: We’re learning about money.

Me: Like counting it and stuff?

Girl A: Yea… (pause) Do you have a son?

Me: (in that mock surprise voice that is true surprise, but trying to pass itself off as teasing) A son? No! Do I look old enough to have a son?

I’ve been asked the question before, but the usual silly giggles as the asker realizes that, no, in fact, I do not look old enough to have a son, do not come; instead they look at me with wide, honest eyes and say,

“Yes.”

“I do?”

And then my internal voice kicks in: You’re twenty-two, hun.

“Oh.”

I look old enough to have kids… huh. That’s a weird thought to get used to.

Kevin and Carla (and dance withdrawal)

As I have established on Twitter, I am going through dance withdrawal. Well, I’m going through lots of other withdrawal (friends, cooking, piano, walks, middle-of-the-night going for pizza/Timmie’s/etc), but I’m going to talk about the dance withdrawal, because I can post cool videos!

Also, dance withdrawal is easier to write about than, say, friend withdrawal.

Anyway, so it has been at least two, probably closer to three weeks since I’ve danced. And, though there is an event this coming Friday, I don’t have access to a vehicle. Oh well.

In all honesty, there really is no point to this post except to put up videos. Because I think they’re cool.

Stuff Christians Like

I stumbled across this blog a couple of weeks ago. It’s a take off of the popular blog Stuff White People Like, which is a satirical description of white culture, addressing all sorts of topics. Stuff Christians Like maintains that same level of satire, but there are also many posts that cover deeper issues and contain very profound thoughts. Just recently, the author wrote a post about temptation, that I would definitely recommend.

Another aspect of the site that I enjoy and (to be perfectly honest) am astounded by is the similarity of experiences. He is writing from Georgia, and here I am way up north in Canada experiencing the same things, like awkwardness in prayer groups, dreading the ‘double sermon‘, and consuming an inordinate amount of goldfish crackers.

I confess, when I stumbled across the site, I started at the beginning and read through it. As I read, I bookmarked some posts that I thought made some excellent points. He deals with hard topics, like porn, but also talks about behaviours that we tend to adopt when we’ve been Christians for a long time, behaviours that perhaps we need to think about changing, like patronizing new Christians and ‘throwing the G card‘. I would definitely recommend browsing through this blog. There are a lot of other posts that I read and had the “oh” reaction to (as in, “oh, I’d never thought about that before”). And I like the concept. This isn’t a pile of things the Church (and Christians) do really well or really poorly, it is a list of things that Christians and the Church just do, and I think that by pointing them out the way the author does, we are invited to actually think through what we do and think about what we need to change. And I think that’s important.

Preschool paintings

For those interested, this is how I drew as a child (as in, not very well ).

We’ve been spring cleaning for the past several days, and today we spent the afternoon going through boxes of schoolwork from my brother Josh (now 20) and myself (now 22). The photostream I linked to is a collection of my favourite finds from our sorting.

Bitter/Sweet

I’ve been reading Isaiah for the past several nights. A few weeks ago, I found some verses from Isaiah that I had planned on sending to a friend in my drafts folder. It was from almost a year ago (why did I have drafts from that long ago?). I sent the draft, but since then, I haven’t been able to get Isaiah out of my head. It came up again last weekend at a friend’s house, and so I decided to start reading. I’ve never read the book all they way through, just chapters/verses here and there, so this is a bit of an adventure for me. I did find a very interesting verse in my reading this morning. It’s from Isaiah, chapter five, verse twenty:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

It isn’t a terribly cheerful sentiment. Basically if you’re doing something bad, but calling it good, well, that’s not good. It is self-deceit, essentially, but that isn’t what I noticed.

In sermons that I’ve heard, and various metaphors I’ve read, evil has always been equated with darkness, and good has always been equated with light. It is old news, and an image that, for me anyway, has lost its potency by familiarity. But this next part… bitter and sweet. I have never heard that comparison before. Evil is being likened to what is bitter, and good is being likened to what is sweet. I think that when we only focus on the light/dark analogy, we miss out on another aspect of what good is. The sweet/bitter analogy adds new depth to our idea of what good and evil are. Good is not a two-dimensional object, easily defined by one concept. I like that added level, and I like that, even though I’ve been a believer most of my life, I’ve never heard this concept. I like making new discoveries, especially in God’s Word.