jethrien | Writing dreams

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Last night, I dreamt that

trinityvixen had the writing group over to her house for a sleepover. (Not her actual apartment, her parents' house. Like we were all 13 or something. Not that I've ever been to her house, or even met her parents.) I kept waking up, but no one else was awake yet. Finally, I ended up pulling books off her shelf and reading them. There was a story she'd written when she was younger - it showed promise, but was pretty bad. Anakin Skywalker made a cameo appearance. There was also a series of books on writing. I'd just pulled the first one, on plot, when everyone else woke up. I was going to make waffles, but trinityvixen's mom beat me to it. (I've never met trinityvixen's mom. But in the dream, she was a very nice lady. Trinityvixen is very nice, so I'm sure her real mom is, too.) There were waffles and muffins and danish. I was a little worried that I was eating too much, but I didn't have the willpower to turn down the double-chocolate muffin

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Hi, Jethrien's mom! What a nice lady you've raised, and nice lady you must be to have done so :) You are also the most web-savvy parent I've yet to come across, besides Chuck's Dad!

I found out Nancy Drew was team-written or whatever and was a bit crushed myself. The newer books that I read were all late eighties-early nineties set, so she was a cool teenager then. I am pleased to report, however, that my fifth grade teacher was horrified by my solely reading Nancy Drew and introduced me to other things. I've never revisited the series, but I have a few reprints of the WWII ones, so maybe I should!

Actually, Chuck's mom also is a frequent poster on both our LJs. If there's an anonymous post, you can almost always assume it's one of the two moms.

Hurray for cool moms.

Cool Mom--

That's why we have cool kids!

I read all the Nancy Drews (no shock there.) I read them all night under the covers with a flashlight, of course, but I also have a very clear memory of being in the 4th grade and being forced to play field hockey. It was autumn. This was in the days of knee socks rather than pants or tights and I remember my legs all blue and goose-bumpy. Worst of all, they expected me to learn rules and actually run around. So...

I got myself chosen goalie, sat between the goal posts, and read my newest Nancy Drew. This did not endear me to my classmates who actually cared about field hockey, but I doubt that any of them even knew what a roadster was.

There's a very good new book out on the Strathmeyer empire. Fascinating the influence they had on a generation.

I kinda liked field hockey. I also liked floor hockey. Hitting stuff with sticks and scaring the bejeesus out of the boys is fun!

...this explains so much.

Yeah, they did the Hardy Boys, and did they do the Bobsey Twins? They also did another girl's series, but I remember I didn't like it as much as Nancy. I loved the description of Larkspur Lane, and of her "frocks". I didn't like the ones written to match my era - I liked the ones that could have been about my grandmother.

And I can identify with the hating gym thing. I never got good at a single sport until a boyfriend taught me tennis in high school. I remember my gym teacher was blown away when she saw my serve - she'd written me off as a geek and never even made an effort to teach me anything.

Didn't the same group/company do Tom Swift, too? I remember reading a couple of "Hardy Boys/Tom Swift Ultra Thrillers" at the tail end of my Hardy Boys phase.

I was terrible at most gym activities, and hated many. Floor hockey, however, most people weren't all that good at. And I had a secret weapon - terrifying aggression. Most people assumed that because I was smart and kind of on the quiet side (that wore off when I hit college!), I would be mild and meek. And then they saw me charging down the floor at them with a big stick and a fierce light in my eyes. I was pretty damn good at intimidating people into getting out of my way, and thus pretty good at floor hockey. It was great. Suddenly I had the respect of a bunch of the jock guys for sheer nerve.

This was why I was always fantastic at soccer and basketball. I'd run at girls, and they run the hell away. It helps being the tallest.

Also why I loved fencing and lacrosse (but only with the boys' rules).

Wait, there were different rules for lacross for boys and girls in gym class? I vaguely recall there being a few differences in the actual college sports, but don't recall there being that many rules that could be changed when I was in gym class. Of course, the only rule back then seemed to be "hurl the ball with as much force as you can towards someone else". My body blocked an awful lot of lacross balls in those days.

Ivy went to a prep school. I suspect they were more serious about using the right rules than we were. My school did lacrosse for about a week, and when no one could catch the damn ball, gave up.

True - in high school, they had a men's lacrosse team and a women's lacrosse team (my brother played - in most games after the first quarter they checked each other enough that you couldn't see the uniforms anymore - it was always the browns versus the browns).

I didn't have gym in high school, though. We had one semester of traditional "gym," which had three units - fitness center, ropes course and swimming. The rest of the time, you just had to do a sport.

In middle school I think we did some lacrosse, but I doubt it was by any uniform rules.

Men's and women's lacrosse have hugely different rules. For one - there is no out of bounds in women's; there is in men's. The pouch of the lacrosse stick in women's is required to be shallow enough so that you can see the ball over the top of the plastic. In men's, it can be deep enough that you can almost see the top of the ball below the plastic. This means that in women's and men's, cradling is an entirely different thing - it's a lot harder to drop the ball in men's.

The biggest difference, though, is that checking is allowed in men's, but not in women's. This means that men's lacrosse is a rough-and-tumble sport (fun, in a painful sort of way), and women's lacrosse is all about technique and strategy.

Give me men's lacrosse anyday. Cause if I can't check, I have no advantage at all.

You're sweet, but I think I only seem more web-savvy because I've been let in on the secret by my daughter. Most people don't let their parents know it exists, I suspect.

Nice to vicariously meet you, by the way!