Year Three Almost Free 4: Studying at School and Becoming a Monster

Hello, Tim!

This week was just like any other, filled with new understandings of my surroundings. Schoolwork's still time-consuming, but we have grown more or less familiar with this routine.

Eight-to-Nine

Being a student of Zhong Zheng, I have a unique privilege that I have never thought to exercise until last week. Last Friday, Allison and I paid the school library a visit and applied for a permanent seat in the library. As long as you stay at school until nine o’clock three days a week, you get to have a seat of your own in the study room. You can keep whatever you want on the desk: your books, a pillow to make your chair more comfortable, a mug which you sip coffee from, etc. This offer has always been available for everyone in the school, but since I used to live so far from school, I never consider myself getting home after ten thirty almost every day.

Now I have the distance advantage as well as a company, I didn’t have to hesitate to apply.

A spacious room.

Allison and I got seats directly behind William and Jay, who already have been studying there for weeks. In the spacious room, every seat is evenly distributed an ample amount of freedom. Our desks are about one and a half arm wide, and it was quite long as well. Between desks are also a vertical board that blocks the vision from the left and the right, just to keep out the potential distraction from your surroundings. In the quietness of the room, willingly staying in a place devoid of much commotion, I could focus on the schoolwork I was supposed to finish and was able to finish a lot of revising more than I could ever do at home. About an hour passed, and I had started to feel a bit fidgety. I was about to lose the grasp of my attention as if I was grasping on the wobbly margins of a precipice with only one hand, loosely hanging from the cliff, just one blow from falling.

Then I looked to my left.

Allison was sitting right there, poised and absorbed. Her head lulled slightly to the right, taking in the words presented in her handout, hands working fast and precisely when she saw some bullet points that are more important than the others. The door opened and entered a student who came back from a water bottle refill, and Allison didn’t even flinch, even though she was just a desk’s distance from the door. She would occasionally sit back in her chair and look at me with exhausted eyes, mouthing the words for ‘so tired,’ and she would turn back to her desk, gaining focus like she never lost it.

How could I simply throw in the towel when I saw such a devotion next to me? Partly challenged, partly motivated, I willed the pen back in my hand and watch what the hieroglyphs in our textbooks had to say for themselves.

For three days in this week, I did it, not losing (too much) focus in three four-hour studies.

I guess I still have some determination after all.

Friday Kids Day

It has become official; Friday evening has from now on renamed as ‘take two kids out to a park and wear yourself out’ day. Staying out after nine basically every day, Mom especially asked me, voiced her words with confidence, knowing I wouldn’t say no to the request, that I would have to come back on time on Fridays so that I could go to the park with Sophie and Aiden. ‘You know I can never catch up with their nimble movements,’ my mom added matter-of-factly.

It was indeed the truth, though.

I walked along the road back to Sophie’s house, already dreading the massive amount of physical movements that were so imminent. A bead of sweat slip from my sideburns as I imagined myself sitting in the shelter in the air-conditioned reclusive studying room at school.

The bright side of all this evening was that I could learn something from the two little bunnies every time. When we were walking on the sidewalk, one of the kids was taking me by my right arm while the other was tugging on my other. Both were demanding to have my attention, wanting to tell me some ‘anecdotes’ they came across at school. The two kids both wanted their chance to talk, and it confused me more with Sophie’s rapid-fire sentences with an occasional query for me to see if I really understood, and Aiden’s inability to finish a sentence as efficiently with a lisp but never stopped trying.

I then bent over to the height of them, explaining to them that I couldn’t understand either of them when they both want to talk to me at the same time (with some wide gesticulation) and asked if they were willing to wait for their turn to speak. To my delight, they seem to understand, and albeit Sophie looked a bit impatient when Aiden was relating a story of a police and a ghost kid, she didn’t complain that much.

The travail started in the playground. Sophie wanted to play her version of tag which she named “The Big Monster,” and when she appointed me it, I inferred from the name of the game that I was supposed to be a big pernicious monster. I managed a growl, flexed my fingers as if they were some weird, monstrous claws, and then ran after the kids in whatever scary way that came to my mind.   I must have looked like a distorted version of a bizarre monster, for the kids shrieked and laughed when they tried to evade me. 

I took a picture when they were taking a break from all the running.

The commotion got the attention of the other kids on the playground, and two of them were brave enough to ask if they could join. You know the old saying, “The more, the merrier?” Well, the kids didn’t have to know the proverb to execute it! In no time, there were four little kids in their one-digit ages running frantically, hopping up steps of stairs, and evading from a monster wannabe under the moonlight and the dim and dangling street lamps. One kid we didn’t use to know stayed along and played with the kids a little longer. She had a slightly darker complexion than our two children, and she was wearing a fitting pastel blue dress with ice cream cones on it. She was very shy, and you could see the obvious conflicting gears working in her brain, unable to decide if she wanted to join us. She did eventually, and her parents even thanked me for including her! Being extenuated apart, I had immense fun when playing with the kids.

A girl joined the game (sorry for the quality)

Water fountain show in the evening.

 End

I have perhaps talked about kids and parks for numerous mentions up until now, and maybe I won't be talking about it for a while until something worth bringing up in the future.

Extra: Moon Festival family gathering

Sincerely,

Hugo