A True Night Owl

Yesterday was not particularly exciting. I worked on a story based on a fairy tale (by "based on" I mean "ripping off the plot of"), set in England during the reign of Bloody Mary. It's a considerably lousy story, and it is not being helped by the fact that I keep on wishing I could quote or otherwise refer to Shakespeare, and keep on remembering that he really came later. But the main purpose of it is to write for my own amusement. Then I spent an unconscionable amount of time reading "Notes & Queries" on the Guardian website. I just discovered the rubric yesterday and it went to my head. And, last but not least, I watched clips of the British television series Blackadder on YouTube, which, in between the really low jokes, is excellent entertainment.

Then, however, I began to help my brothers with their homework. J. came first with his Spanish homework. He was supposed to sketch a country with its rivers and mountains, and list a national dance, dish, and the national language. After wavering over Nepal, he decided to take Lesotho (because, so his reasoning went, he would only have to put down "South Africa" as its neighbouring country). We ended up googling and trawling Wikipedia for ages. The national language (Sesotho) was easy; at considerable length we came across behobe bread, so the national dish was taken care of. But then came the search for a dance. We finally came across a dito-something-or-other dance. Then I did a search on the dance, and the paper where we had read about it was the only site where that was mentioned on the whole world wide web, according to Google. Anyway, this has proven yet again that internet research is far more trouble than it's worth. Sites are lousy and don't have nearly enough information. But homework has often made me search for the oddest trivia (if I remember correctly, here is another example: the mealtimes of British soldiers during World War One).

Then I helped Ge. research Portuguese geography and its relation to tourism. As Ge. went slowly off to bed because he had to in order to be awake in class this morning, I translated the notes into German. Then I helped Gi. with his notes and overheads about the Portuguese climate . . . The process confirmed my theory that doing homework late at night, half-heartedly, is a potent soporific, worthy of investigation by the medical establishment. Reading online books is (for some reason) ten times as enlivening. At one point I just gazed and read everything on the website -- anything to avoid having to think. But I did soon have a second wind; there were, after all, two or more flashes of lightning outside, wind gusts, and the occasional car rushing down the street. Still, one or two all-night work sessions during my own school years returned to haunt me, for example the peculiar one when T. and I alternately worked on a Spanish project, and I read portions of the Bible (including, appropriately, the Book of Job) whenever it was T.'s turn.

In this work session things began to go badly when I tried to use the pencil tool on a map in Adobe Photoshop. I tried and tried to use it, and to adjust the settings, to no avail; I was on the verge of tears when Papa came and figured out that I was only on the wrong layer. Then I used Microsoft Office Word 2003, in a very limited sense of the word "use." Apparently, after you insert a picture, there is no way to move it except by using the tab and enter keys as if it were a block of text. It seems that the software developers had implemented a Bushian policy: do the opposite of everything that works. But in the end, I felt cheerful again.

Anyway, the others eventually woke up (surprisingly well rested in the case of my brothers) and everything was finished and printed out. So now the question is to sleep or not to sleep.