1. cycling
2. eating grapefruit
3. saying "y'all" (and "mum" is slowly gravitating toward "mom")
4. buying food in bulk
In other news, we've got our first Rudolph show tonight. This show is incredibly hard work physically. It goes for less than an hour and we squeeze in about ten dance numbers. I was afraid that once we put on the reindeer suits (and helmets, and scarves) it'd be so hot and such hard work I might actually faint. But we did a dress run yesterday, and not only did I not faint, the director seemed fairly happy with it. Although one of the reindeer did slip and fall over. I think she's buying herself better shoes today.
So I shall throw my fear out the window, and say, bring it on! I am trying to train myself out of being afraid of things being too hard. So many problems I have had in my life stem from me freaking out that something might be so hard I can't do it. Things are allowed to be hard, that's ok. It's actually rewarding, and it doesn't necessarily mean I can't do the thing that is hard. It just means I can't do it easily, instinctively and without thinking. I suspect being an over-achiever at school has something to do with this. Reminds me of a quote from my favourite book: "A clever person so rarely has to think he gets out of the habit." Not that I'm saying I'm so clever I don't have to think, but it's just that when I've decided I'm good at something I sometimes get upset if I actually have to put effort into it. Which is childish, and a waste of time.
Speaking of my favourite book, I have been reading it again over the last few days to alleviate stress. It's The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name). The premise is that a genius of a single mother is raising her even-more-of-a-genius child on almost no money from a crappy typing job, and worried about him having no male role models, she plays him the movie Seven Samurai all the time. At age 11 he finally finds out who his father is, and his father is a rubbish travel writer, contemptibly stupid to both mother and child. There's a line in Seven Samurai which goes: "If we were fighting with real swords, I'd have killed you by now." And the genius child goes to meet his father, and thinks "If we were fighting with real swords, I'd have killed him: I can't say I'm his son, because it's true." But then he decides to just pick celebrities or academics who he respects and goes to tell them he's their son, because "a good samurai will parry the blow." I take that to mean that only someone who doesn't believe the lie is worthy of being his father, but I'm sure there are more subtleties to it that I'll pick up on reading it for the sixteenth or seventeenth time.
I first read it when I was fifteen, and had the same feeling you get when you first read Samuel Beckett or Tom Stoppard: "I'm pretty sure I enjoyed that, but I know I didn't understand all of it." So it's totally borne a once-a-year rereading since then. I didn't really appreciate the ending on the first or second read. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I picked up how strong the theme of suicide is, and the heartbreaking parallels between the suicidal mother and one of the chosen fathers, who kills himself about three-quarters of the way through the book ("I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks she would not consider it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank"). Only on this reading have I become intrigued about the theme of travel: the kid's biological father is a travel writer, and most of the chosen fathers come to his attention because of interesting expeditions and adventures: a musician who goes to deepest darkest Africa to study drums, a journalist who crosses all kinds of restricted borders and gets imprisoned somewhere remote, a linguist who flies on homemade silk wings over Mongolia, Tibet and China, an astronomer who lives with a tribe in the Amazon for a while and teaches one of the Amazonian kids mathematics.
If you feel like indulging me and enjoying the book with me, read the following lovely passage, which happens just after we meet Father No.2, the charismatic astronomer, who totally believed he was his son until the kid fessed up and told him the truth.
"If I hadn't said anything to Sorabji I wouldn't ever have had to waste time that way ever again. In the first place I would have gone to Winchester at the age of 12, and in the second place whenever I had a question I could have asked someone who not only knew the answer but couldn't do enough for his longlost son. ... I could have stopped wasting time and been the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Instead I was going to have to do everything myself.
"I had another look at the Kutta-Jukowski theorem. It wasn't so much that I knew for a fact that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. It's just that if you're not going to win a Nobel Prize you might as well do something else worth doing with the time, such as going up the Amazon or down the Andes. If you can't go down the Andes you might as well do something else worth doing, such as having a shot at a Nobel Prize. Whereas this was just stupid.
"I put down my book on aerodynamics.
"Sorabji looked out from the [television] screen with flashing eyes.
"I thought suddenly that it was stupid to be so sentimental.
"What we needed was not a hero to worship but money.
"If we had money we could go anywhere. Give us the money and we would be the heroes."
- The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt, p378
One day I will learn how to pronounce all the foreign words, whip out my American and English accents, and do the audiobook recording. Ah, a new career goal.
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