As I mentioned in my last post, I had a very busy weekend. On the tail end of everything that had been going on, Sunday night we went to see Star Trek Into Darkness. That was a drama in-and-of-itself. Initially, we'd planned to go see it on Friday night, but something came up on Friday night that I "needed" to do (there will be a post on that later), so we were going to do it Saturday. Of course, that was the plan before we pushed my daughter's sleepover party to this past weekend rather than the prior weekend, so Saturday got knocked off. That left Sunday, and my wife didn't want to do Sunday after the weekend we were having. She just didn't want to add that to the end of everything.
The suggestion, then, was that I take my oldest son to go see it and that would be that. My younger son has an ingrained opposition to Trek because of his love of Star Wars, so he had stated that he didn't want to go. My daughter wanted to go only because it was "going;" she had no real desire to see the movie. "Going" is always better than "staying" in her book. So the idea was that I would take the oldest to the afternoon matinee.
BUT there were complications. To start, he had gone off to spend the night with someone to avoid my daughter's sleepover, and he neglected to arrange for a ride home. There are two things to that: 1. We told him due to all of the stuff on during the weekend, we would not be available to transport him, so he had to arrange his own transportation. 2. My wife let him know very explicitly that she didn't want him gone all day because of his lack of planning. She wanted him home at a reasonably early hour on Sunday. Well, he failed to take care of that stuff. He called around 2:00 p.m. to let us know that he still had no ride home, a call I had been anticipating. At that point, I told him that we (he and I) were going to Star Trek... unless he didn't make it home, in which case, he would miss out. I figured that would put a fire under his butt. [It did. he dragged himself in the door somewhere around 3:30 (although, technically, he's missed the showtime I'd planned on).] The other complication was that I was just dead tired after all of the girls left and had needed a nap (which I barely got), so I hadn't been ready, yet, for the 3ish showtime, anyway.
Here's where it gets interesting:
So my oldest son walked in the door just as I was getting ready to leave to pick up my younger son from the work party he was at for the musical he's in at school (see why we weren't available to drive the oldest anywhere? Besides, if he wanted to, he could take some steps in getting his driver's license, but he's balking at that). My wife said to me as I was walking out that door, "You should see if he wants to go with y'all."
My response: "But he said he does not want to go."
"Just ask him anyway."
So I did. His response (once I picked him up (covered in paint (including a hand print on the leg of his pants from a girl (which would embarrass him to no end if he knew I was printing this))): "Sure, I have nothing better to do."
Okay, so, now, it was just us guys going to the movie. When it was just the older boy and me, my daughter had decided to stay home because she was have a water balloon fight in the park (this after all the water activities at the end-of-season league party); however, when she found out, upon coming in to refill the water pump, that both boys were going, she immediately changed her mind about the movie. Now, this was a problem. Not that she wanted to go but because now everyone was going but my wife who is the only one in our household that really identifies as a Trek fan. So I had to talk her into it, which wasn't as hard as all that after all; I just said, "Look, everyone else is going, but you're the one that really wants to see this, so you should just come, too." So she did. And she was glad of it.
As for the movie... well, let's start at the title.
What's the deal with meaningless titles? They annoy me. The title has no more to do with the movie than it could have to many movies. Like The Empire Strikes Back could have been called Into Darkness, and it would have held more meaning to the actual movie than this one. I get that it sounds cool, but, seriously, the title (of anything) ought to relate to the thing that's being titled in more than some vague way.
Past that, though, the movie was pretty awesome. Abrams knows how to bring the action and keep you tense and on the edge of your seat. And, hey, there was no red matter, this time, so double plus good. Without giving anything away, I loved best the role reversal of Spock and Kirk. That was pretty awesome.
I have only two negatives (other than the title) at this point:
1. I do not want to see "old Spock" pop up in every movie as their tiny "god in a box." I get that the fans love seeing Nimoy (I do; I get it), but, from a story perspective, it's gonna get old if they always contact him when they're in trouble.
2. As much as I love Simon Pegg and love Simon Pegg as Scotty, he is the one character that doesn't quite feel right. he has moments where he feels like Scotty but, most of the time, the character seems off target. I don't blame this on Pegg, as he has no control over the writers having him do things that are not "Scottyish."
Speaking of the characters, I still love Karl Urban the most. Man, he could be DeForest Kelley. I swear, I can't tell the difference; he's just like watching the original Bones at work. And they gave him the line! Well, not the line but a the line: "I'm a doctor not a..." It was awesome.
Zachary Quinto comes in a close second to Urban on pulling off the channeling of the original character. Of course, he has had the privilege of actually working with Nimoy, so he wouldn't have an excuse to not be able to pull it off.
And, well, then there's Benedict Cumberbatch who was a perfect match to the rest of the cast. Mostly, it's the voice. But he seems to be able to play any kind of role he wants to play (see War Horse and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to understand what I mean by that).
And that's really about all I can say about the movie without giving stuff away, and I don't want to do that. As someone who is not really a Star Trek fan, I loved the movie. I do know that there are Trek fans out there that don't like what Abrams is doing, but, really, I'm not quite sure I get that, because he's really captured the heart of the original series with how closely they've managed to get the characters to their originals. It's actually enough that it makes me want to go back and watch those old episodes, and how much more successful can you be than that?
Tribble!
Showing posts with label sleepover. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sleepover. Show all posts
Monday, May 20, 2013
Sunday, May 19, 2013
"...one of -those- weekends."
Softball update as we approach the end of the season:
They did lose the game I thought they'd lose (which makes us 9-4, at the moment), but the coach of the other team (the undefeated team, I should add) said we were their toughest competition all season (both times we played them).
And here's a new one I heard at Saturday's game (spoken by the opposing coach to one of his batters as she was getting struck out):
"I can't come and swing it for you."
So, yeah, Saturday started bright and early with a softball game. Prior to the softball game was gassing the car and retrieving coffee. After the softball game was the end-of-season party even though the season isn't quite over yet. Evidently, you can't actually have the end-of-season party after the season ends because no one will show up, because, you know, the season is over. [Let me clarify, this was the end-of-season party for just my daughter's team (yes, there's a reason I'm clarifying).]
Then it was rush home and get the final cleaning in on the house before my daughter's 10th birthday slumber party. [Are you seeing a theme here, yet?] It was a small one this year, because we inadvertently planned the party for the same night as a school fundraiser which involved going to an A's game. [See, not being a baseball fan, I had completely dismissed the fundraiser in my mind so didn't realize we were planning my daughter's party for the same time slot.] She lost several of her friends to the game, so, on the one hand, I felt bad for my daughter (and for her friends that were upset that they were going to miss the party), but, on the other hand, it was kind of "yeah! we'll only have nine girls!" (instead of 15). Still, nine girls make a lot of noise. [Seriously, the girls never stop talking and I can't hear any one of them over the constant chatter, and there's always at least one of them trying to talk to me. Parties for my son (the younger one) are never like that.]
And one of them climbed a tree and got "stuck" and, then, went home because I didn't cause a drama over the situation. Basically, I told her she could stay in the tree or I could go get her parents (she actually lives next door, so that was an option (and also why she could just go home)), but she didn't like those options, so she came down (I watched her climb back out of the tree) and, upon arriving back at our house, announced that she had decided she would go home to sleep, which was fine with me. And, while I was dealing with TreeGirl, two of the other girls chased my cat down the street. When I say street, I mean, they chased the cat down the middle of the street to almost a block away. This was after I had told one of the two, specifically, to leave the cat alone, because he wouldn't come to her anyway. And he didn't, so they chased him. Then I had to go fetch him back which was also a bit of a chase, because he was freaked out by all the girls to begin with and, then, by being chased by two of them.
And the night just got better and better as they achieved a kind of synthetic agreement to not sleep. They've never done this before. At previous sleepovers my daughter has had, by the end of the movie, most of them have been asleep. That happens when you start the movie around 10:00 p.m. But not this time. No, at the end of the movie, they were all still awake. So I had to put in another movie. I do plan ahead, though, so I already had one set out. However, I wasn't able to make it through the second movie. The girls had mostly calmed down (after another incident of going off and doing what she was told not to do by the girl that had been told not to go after the cat), and my eyes were melting out of my skull, so I went to bed. I want to say that was around 1:30 a.m., but I'm not really sure.
And I say I went to bed, because I never really went to sleep. There was talking and some amount of moving around and such once I went off to go to bed, which elevated when I heard The Goonies being over. I just waited it out hoping they'd go to sleep, and, eventually, I nodded off sometime after 3:00 a.m., which I know because I got up to go to the bathroom just prior to the nodding and checked the time while I was up. It was short lived. At around 4:00 a.m., I was awakened by one of the girls doing her best Lionel Richie impression, by which I mean that she was dancing on the ceiling. Or something. Maybe galloping through the house on her ghost steed. I'm not sure if she was alone in the cavorting that was going on or if she was the only one brave enough to respond to my shout down the hall that no one was supposed to be up:
"But I'm not sleepy!"
"I don't care. Be in your spot."
"Someone took my spot!"
"I don't care! Find a place to be!"
"But I can't find my blanket!"
"Go to sleep!"
And she did. I know because, 20 minutes later, the cat started scratching on the door that he needed to go out. I've learned that scratching on the door means, "I have to go potty!" Also, he was probably just trying to get away from the girls and only came out at that moment because he figured it was the first time all night that it was safe for him to do so. "Finally! They're all asleep! I can escape!"
But here's the thing with that. The cat has recently switched his eating schedule to eating in the morning before he goes outside from eating in the evening when he comes in. And, normally, I wouldn't let him out so early (so wouldn't be up feeding him so early), but I felt bad for him, because the girls just would not leave him alone when he had been trying to go to sleep after the whole being chased down the block incident. Every time he laid down, someone would put her hands on him, and he'd have to move. It was like a compulsion with them; it didn't matter that I kept saying "leave the cat alone." I mean, he would have been happy to lay down next to one or two of them (which he tried to do) if they would have just quit trying to pet him.
So, anyway, the cat wanted out, and I figured I should feed him, first, so I got up, turned on the lights in the kitchen (basically 10 feet away from where all the girls were sleeping), and banged around to feed the cat. The girls were completely zonked out and didn't stir at all, including the one that had just said to me, "But I'm not sleepy!" After the cat ate, I walked over all of the girls, as did the cat, so that I could let him out. I halfway expected never to see him again. I'm not sure I would have ever come back if I had been the cat. I'd have been all, "Meesa outta here!"
The funny thing with that is that when the girls did get up, about half of them tried to claim that they had never been asleep, including Miss "But I'm Not Sleepy!" One of them tried to claim that she had only been pretending to sleep, but none of them remembered me being in the kitchen or turning on the lights or letting the cat out. heh
I gave up on sleep at that point. Or I tried to. It was only an hour or so before I was supposed to get up and start working on breakfast, and, by the time I was finished with the cat, I was awake. Or so I thought. At any rate, I sat down at my computer to work, but I couldn't focus enough to do that, so I mostly just stared at the screen until I decided I'd go do some more work in the garage because that required standing and some movement. I managed that until sometime after 6, when I thought I'd try to get in a 20 minute nap before the alarm went off at 7, my new time for starting on breakfast since all the girls were still asleep. So I laid back down in bed and had just dozed off... when my daughter's alarm clock went off. 6:30 a.m. I sighed and got back up. [Oh, and there was some stuff with the dog in there after the stuff with the cat, and it was the dog that kept me from going back to sleep after the cat went out (because she had to go see if the cat had left any food, and wouldn't stop bothering me until I took her to see that it was gone).]
Then there was the morning drama, which I won't really go into except to say that it's hard to cook when you have to round up a gaggle of girls and yell at them for the misbehavior. It got the day off to a great start, let me tell you.
Eventually, though, all of the girls did leave, including my daughter, because she had to go to her end-of-season league party. Which, again, had to happen before the season actually ended. The boys had gone off to other places so as not to be home during the sleepover (a wise decision), and they weren't home, yet, so I thought, finally!, I could get some sleep, but that pretty much wasn't to be, because the dog decided to spend the afternoon barking at stuff.
There's more stuff to include, but that stuff will come in other posts, because, really, this one is long enough, and I haven't even gotten to the BIG thing, yet, which is that in between all of this I finished getting all of the last things accomplished for Charter Shorts, Too, and that is now available!
This is the collection of short stories from my creative writing class for this year, and there is some really good stuff in there. Some I was surprised by. There are more students represented this year, since I had some many more, so that's nice. Still, I wish I had more stories from them for it. Maybe, next year, with the changes I'm hoping to get for the program, the book will be longer and won't need anything from me to fill it out. Still, there is only one from me this, year, so that's good. I hope some of you will pick it up and support these kids and the work they're doing.
They did lose the game I thought they'd lose (which makes us 9-4, at the moment), but the coach of the other team (the undefeated team, I should add) said we were their toughest competition all season (both times we played them).
And here's a new one I heard at Saturday's game (spoken by the opposing coach to one of his batters as she was getting struck out):
"I can't come and swing it for you."
So, yeah, Saturday started bright and early with a softball game. Prior to the softball game was gassing the car and retrieving coffee. After the softball game was the end-of-season party even though the season isn't quite over yet. Evidently, you can't actually have the end-of-season party after the season ends because no one will show up, because, you know, the season is over. [Let me clarify, this was the end-of-season party for just my daughter's team (yes, there's a reason I'm clarifying).]
Then it was rush home and get the final cleaning in on the house before my daughter's 10th birthday slumber party. [Are you seeing a theme here, yet?] It was a small one this year, because we inadvertently planned the party for the same night as a school fundraiser which involved going to an A's game. [See, not being a baseball fan, I had completely dismissed the fundraiser in my mind so didn't realize we were planning my daughter's party for the same time slot.] She lost several of her friends to the game, so, on the one hand, I felt bad for my daughter (and for her friends that were upset that they were going to miss the party), but, on the other hand, it was kind of "yeah! we'll only have nine girls!" (instead of 15). Still, nine girls make a lot of noise. [Seriously, the girls never stop talking and I can't hear any one of them over the constant chatter, and there's always at least one of them trying to talk to me. Parties for my son (the younger one) are never like that.]
And one of them climbed a tree and got "stuck" and, then, went home because I didn't cause a drama over the situation. Basically, I told her she could stay in the tree or I could go get her parents (she actually lives next door, so that was an option (and also why she could just go home)), but she didn't like those options, so she came down (I watched her climb back out of the tree) and, upon arriving back at our house, announced that she had decided she would go home to sleep, which was fine with me. And, while I was dealing with TreeGirl, two of the other girls chased my cat down the street. When I say street, I mean, they chased the cat down the middle of the street to almost a block away. This was after I had told one of the two, specifically, to leave the cat alone, because he wouldn't come to her anyway. And he didn't, so they chased him. Then I had to go fetch him back which was also a bit of a chase, because he was freaked out by all the girls to begin with and, then, by being chased by two of them.
And the night just got better and better as they achieved a kind of synthetic agreement to not sleep. They've never done this before. At previous sleepovers my daughter has had, by the end of the movie, most of them have been asleep. That happens when you start the movie around 10:00 p.m. But not this time. No, at the end of the movie, they were all still awake. So I had to put in another movie. I do plan ahead, though, so I already had one set out. However, I wasn't able to make it through the second movie. The girls had mostly calmed down (after another incident of going off and doing what she was told not to do by the girl that had been told not to go after the cat), and my eyes were melting out of my skull, so I went to bed. I want to say that was around 1:30 a.m., but I'm not really sure.
And I say I went to bed, because I never really went to sleep. There was talking and some amount of moving around and such once I went off to go to bed, which elevated when I heard The Goonies being over. I just waited it out hoping they'd go to sleep, and, eventually, I nodded off sometime after 3:00 a.m., which I know because I got up to go to the bathroom just prior to the nodding and checked the time while I was up. It was short lived. At around 4:00 a.m., I was awakened by one of the girls doing her best Lionel Richie impression, by which I mean that she was dancing on the ceiling. Or something. Maybe galloping through the house on her ghost steed. I'm not sure if she was alone in the cavorting that was going on or if she was the only one brave enough to respond to my shout down the hall that no one was supposed to be up:
"But I'm not sleepy!"
"I don't care. Be in your spot."
"Someone took my spot!"
"I don't care! Find a place to be!"
"But I can't find my blanket!"
"Go to sleep!"
And she did. I know because, 20 minutes later, the cat started scratching on the door that he needed to go out. I've learned that scratching on the door means, "I have to go potty!" Also, he was probably just trying to get away from the girls and only came out at that moment because he figured it was the first time all night that it was safe for him to do so. "Finally! They're all asleep! I can escape!"
But here's the thing with that. The cat has recently switched his eating schedule to eating in the morning before he goes outside from eating in the evening when he comes in. And, normally, I wouldn't let him out so early (so wouldn't be up feeding him so early), but I felt bad for him, because the girls just would not leave him alone when he had been trying to go to sleep after the whole being chased down the block incident. Every time he laid down, someone would put her hands on him, and he'd have to move. It was like a compulsion with them; it didn't matter that I kept saying "leave the cat alone." I mean, he would have been happy to lay down next to one or two of them (which he tried to do) if they would have just quit trying to pet him.
So, anyway, the cat wanted out, and I figured I should feed him, first, so I got up, turned on the lights in the kitchen (basically 10 feet away from where all the girls were sleeping), and banged around to feed the cat. The girls were completely zonked out and didn't stir at all, including the one that had just said to me, "But I'm not sleepy!" After the cat ate, I walked over all of the girls, as did the cat, so that I could let him out. I halfway expected never to see him again. I'm not sure I would have ever come back if I had been the cat. I'd have been all, "Meesa outta here!"
The funny thing with that is that when the girls did get up, about half of them tried to claim that they had never been asleep, including Miss "But I'm Not Sleepy!" One of them tried to claim that she had only been pretending to sleep, but none of them remembered me being in the kitchen or turning on the lights or letting the cat out. heh
I gave up on sleep at that point. Or I tried to. It was only an hour or so before I was supposed to get up and start working on breakfast, and, by the time I was finished with the cat, I was awake. Or so I thought. At any rate, I sat down at my computer to work, but I couldn't focus enough to do that, so I mostly just stared at the screen until I decided I'd go do some more work in the garage because that required standing and some movement. I managed that until sometime after 6, when I thought I'd try to get in a 20 minute nap before the alarm went off at 7, my new time for starting on breakfast since all the girls were still asleep. So I laid back down in bed and had just dozed off... when my daughter's alarm clock went off. 6:30 a.m. I sighed and got back up. [Oh, and there was some stuff with the dog in there after the stuff with the cat, and it was the dog that kept me from going back to sleep after the cat went out (because she had to go see if the cat had left any food, and wouldn't stop bothering me until I took her to see that it was gone).]
Then there was the morning drama, which I won't really go into except to say that it's hard to cook when you have to round up a gaggle of girls and yell at them for the misbehavior. It got the day off to a great start, let me tell you.
Eventually, though, all of the girls did leave, including my daughter, because she had to go to her end-of-season league party. Which, again, had to happen before the season actually ended. The boys had gone off to other places so as not to be home during the sleepover (a wise decision), and they weren't home, yet, so I thought, finally!, I could get some sleep, but that pretty much wasn't to be, because the dog decided to spend the afternoon barking at stuff.
There's more stuff to include, but that stuff will come in other posts, because, really, this one is long enough, and I haven't even gotten to the BIG thing, yet, which is that in between all of this I finished getting all of the last things accomplished for Charter Shorts, Too, and that is now available!
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Middle School Boys Are Pantsers
It's Friday night as I'm writing this, and I'm sitting here in the midst of a sleepover for my middle child who just turned 12. How do you turn this aging thing off? Seriously! I'm tired of them getting older. Once May gets here, we're going to lose our last single digit child, and that's... very upsetting.
Anyway, I'm sitting her in the midst of this... well, there's no better word for it than chaos. Maybe cacophony. Actually, I really like the word cacophony. It just has such a cool sound to it. See, it's hard to stay on track with all the noise Noise NOISE and the constant distractions.
"Even better than the real thing... child..."
"Oh, my gosh! You guys are so premature!"
And, um, a lot of video game babble that I don't understand and can't repeat although the words "Mario" and "Zelda" are common.
And there seems to be an outbreak of wet willies.
But all of that is beside the point. If there even is a point.
Well, no, there is a point.
"You're on the road, but you've got not destination..."
The point is that middle school boys, possibly all boys, are pantsers. Other than the fact that I bought some pizza and that they had cake, there is no plan at all involved in any of this. At all. In fact, if there had been a plan, a plot of any kind, it wouldn't have worked, because you can't get all of them onto the same thing at the same time unless it has to do with food, and there was no way that I was going to plan a sleepover that totally revolved around food.
"Through the storm, we reach the shore. You give it all, but I want more."
But, see, I know this about boys. They are kind of easy that way. You invite them over and make sure they have video games available, and they are totally self entertaining. Maybe a movie when it gets late. Actually, yes, a movie when it gets late otherwise they just keep playing video games until they become comatose. That's another word I like, by the way.
You want to know some other words I like? Sure you do. And, if you don't, well, that's too bad.
"Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?"
I like "adamant" and "belligerent." I like the sounds of both of those, too, and I especially like them because they sound like what they are.
"Did I disappoint you or leave a bad taste in your mouth?"
I mean, if I didn't know what adamant meant, I could almost guess it just from the sound of the word. And belligerent sounds like someone itching for a fight.
Did I mention the wet willies?
See, boys, they don't need the plots. They just do their thing. Sometimes they're doing it together, but never are all of them doing it. There's always one or two off on the laptop or some iContraption doing something completely separate from everyone else and being completely fine with it.
"But I still haven't found what I'm looking for."
"No! No pillow lights!"
"Wait! No pillow fights! Turn the light on!"
And now it's time for Mad Libs. With poop. Seriously. Every single one of them has to have the word "poop" or some variant at least once. Unfortunately, some of them are really funny:
"What big poops you have!"
But anyway...
You see how difficult it is to stay on track with all of this... this... stuff... going on?
I'm quite sure this must be what it's like to pants a book. See, the thing is, the boys, they're okay with what's going on, but no one else has a clue as to what's happening or what they're talking about.
My daughter got bored with them. She went off to practice her accordion because she didn't have anything else to do. The boys never noticed she left.
It's completely different from when my daughter has a party. Those things have to be planned. Plotted. Completely. They want things to do. Activities. A time frame. It's an entirely different experience. Okay, true, my daughter's not quite a middle schooler, yet, but I'm pretty sure this isn't gonna change. And the boys have always been like this.
What I do know is that if I were to try and introduce a few girls into this party and make them play by the boy's rules, they'd drive me crazy with how bored they'd get. And, during one of my daughter's parties, if I were to try and put some boys into it, they'd just wander off and not participate.
I don't really know what all of this really has to do with writing other than that different types of people like different kinds of things. Some people like books that don't have a distinct plot where things just sort of happen. Some people like books where only things that matter to the story happen in the story. What I do know is that the two types of people don't mix very well.
I won't be planning any co-ed parties for a while, that's for sure. Wait, what's that I said about halting that whole aging thing?
Oh! Also, don't forget the Great Chocolate Contest in which you could win the greatest chocolate in the world (that I've ever tasted)! Seriously, this stuff is as good as Russel Crowe's ego is big!
Anyway, I'm sitting her in the midst of this... well, there's no better word for it than chaos. Maybe cacophony. Actually, I really like the word cacophony. It just has such a cool sound to it. See, it's hard to stay on track with all the noise Noise NOISE and the constant distractions.
"Even better than the real thing... child..."
"Oh, my gosh! You guys are so premature!"
And, um, a lot of video game babble that I don't understand and can't repeat although the words "Mario" and "Zelda" are common.
And there seems to be an outbreak of wet willies.
But all of that is beside the point. If there even is a point.
Well, no, there is a point.
"You're on the road, but you've got not destination..."
The point is that middle school boys, possibly all boys, are pantsers. Other than the fact that I bought some pizza and that they had cake, there is no plan at all involved in any of this. At all. In fact, if there had been a plan, a plot of any kind, it wouldn't have worked, because you can't get all of them onto the same thing at the same time unless it has to do with food, and there was no way that I was going to plan a sleepover that totally revolved around food.
"Through the storm, we reach the shore. You give it all, but I want more."
But, see, I know this about boys. They are kind of easy that way. You invite them over and make sure they have video games available, and they are totally self entertaining. Maybe a movie when it gets late. Actually, yes, a movie when it gets late otherwise they just keep playing video games until they become comatose. That's another word I like, by the way.
You want to know some other words I like? Sure you do. And, if you don't, well, that's too bad.
"Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?"
I like "adamant" and "belligerent." I like the sounds of both of those, too, and I especially like them because they sound like what they are.
"Did I disappoint you or leave a bad taste in your mouth?"
I mean, if I didn't know what adamant meant, I could almost guess it just from the sound of the word. And belligerent sounds like someone itching for a fight.
Did I mention the wet willies?
See, boys, they don't need the plots. They just do their thing. Sometimes they're doing it together, but never are all of them doing it. There's always one or two off on the laptop or some iContraption doing something completely separate from everyone else and being completely fine with it.
"But I still haven't found what I'm looking for."
"No! No pillow lights!"
"Wait! No pillow fights! Turn the light on!"
And now it's time for Mad Libs. With poop. Seriously. Every single one of them has to have the word "poop" or some variant at least once. Unfortunately, some of them are really funny:
"What big poops you have!"
But anyway...
You see how difficult it is to stay on track with all of this... this... stuff... going on?
I'm quite sure this must be what it's like to pants a book. See, the thing is, the boys, they're okay with what's going on, but no one else has a clue as to what's happening or what they're talking about.
My daughter got bored with them. She went off to practice her accordion because she didn't have anything else to do. The boys never noticed she left.
It's completely different from when my daughter has a party. Those things have to be planned. Plotted. Completely. They want things to do. Activities. A time frame. It's an entirely different experience. Okay, true, my daughter's not quite a middle schooler, yet, but I'm pretty sure this isn't gonna change. And the boys have always been like this.
What I do know is that if I were to try and introduce a few girls into this party and make them play by the boy's rules, they'd drive me crazy with how bored they'd get. And, during one of my daughter's parties, if I were to try and put some boys into it, they'd just wander off and not participate.
I don't really know what all of this really has to do with writing other than that different types of people like different kinds of things. Some people like books that don't have a distinct plot where things just sort of happen. Some people like books where only things that matter to the story happen in the story. What I do know is that the two types of people don't mix very well.
I won't be planning any co-ed parties for a while, that's for sure. Wait, what's that I said about halting that whole aging thing?
Oh! Also, don't forget the Great Chocolate Contest in which you could win the greatest chocolate in the world (that I've ever tasted)! Seriously, this stuff is as good as Russel Crowe's ego is big!
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