While volunteering at the Natural History museum, I meet a lot of kids. They are small children who come into my life for an average of probably 15 minutes, and then they disappear out of it, never to be seen again. But for those 15 minutes, I am their best friend. I teach them things, and they are amazed and then they are so excited to show me things and tell me all about what they think and sometimes they grab my hand and run across the room to bring me a picture they colored and then it's lunch time and they leave. Today, there was an adorable 3 year old boy who I could tell was very curious, but he was so shy he would run away when I said hi to him. While he was at the microscope, though, I strategically sauntered over to box of rocks next to him, and started casually dramatically looking at them with a magnifying glass. "Hmm...what's this? Oh wow, what a rock! It is brownish-red!" Since he hadn't moved away as soon as I appeared, I finally took a chance with one of my more successful Discovery Room introductions-(holding a lava rock/cinder) "do you know where this came from?" I had said it in a very low, confidential voice, and he whispered "where?" "a volcano!" "a volcano?" "yeah, this is cold lava. Do you want to hold it?" "yeah." And then we were BFFs and looked at all the rocks under magnifying glasses and he told me which ones were bumpy and which ones were not bumpy and then we held them and compared weights and the whole time I just wanted to hug him. He was adorable. And he was wearing this very poofy orange jacket and he just looked very squeezable. He eventually grabbed my hand and we went to look at bugs. His 2 year old brother was pretty precious, too, and got very into the animal footprint activity and actually remembered which one belonged to a frog AND helped me put all the pinecones back in the pinecone box. I'm jealous of their mom. Maybe I should have offered to become their babysitter. Or kidnapped them.
The book I am currently listening to is called The News Sorority, and it's about Diane Sawyer, Christiane Amanpour, and Katie Couric, who I really knew nothing about beforehand other than that they were female news people. But, now I am getting to know all sorts of things about them. For instance, Christiane Amanpour was college housemates with John F. Kennedy Jr. I know that of all great things she has done, this fact is incredibly trivial, but I just think it is really interesting how random famous people know each other. I also think it would be really interesting to hear them talk personally about "oh, the time before my family was exiled from Iran, those were the days" or "oh, when I used to live in the White House, those were the days" and the fact that Jackie Kennedy has been Amanpour's hero when she was younger and then she got to go hang out at her house. Like how Katie Holmes had had a crush on Tom Cruise, and then she ended up marrying him. Oh famous people.
A story from the past: Back when I took piano lessons, I was once working on a song from Lord of the Rings. I was not good at piano and I did not like practicing, but I liked the song and genuinely did want to be able to play it well. One of my motivating thoughts was "what if Orlando Bloom hears me playing it and it is so beautiful and he falls in love with me," and I would think about that while I practiced. It is a good thing Mr. Bloom never did hear me play, because I never really did get good at that piece.
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