The Ziebart Experience

There’s a certain serenity about sitting out on your patio in the morning, blogging away on your laptop. It almost makes me feel a little decadent. Almost. Considering the patio is unfinished, unpainted wooden planks that are going to dump me into the animal infested junkheap below ruins the illusion pretty fast. Still, it’s a nice morning and I get to spend it outside instead of cooped up writing inside of the house.

Now all I need is to find a drink that will wake me up in the morning that won’t make my tastebuds revolt. Any recommendations? I figure it’s about time I stop using Mountain Dew and Coke as my wake-me-up at 6 in the morning, and I have a deep hatred of the typical coffee bitterness. The closest thing to coffee that I’ve found I can tolerate are Starbucks Frappucinos and drinking those every morning is not something I’m interested in. No 8 ounce drink is worth two dollars, unless it’s some kind of godly ambrosia. Though to be completely honest, the drink of the gods is probably only worth about $1.50 to me.

If there’s a decent coffee-esque drink that I won’t hate, I’d love to hear it. I don’t have a very high bitterness threshold, unless there’s sweet involved to offset the taste. For example, I like chocolate covered espresso beans. The bitterness is heavy, but there is also something sugary involved. Does that make sense? Likely not. My tastebuds are bothersome things. If the flavor and texture (yes, texture) isn’t spot on, I can’t drink it. I drink a lot of soda/pop because not only is it sweet, it has caffeine to get me going and the carbonation is a very pleasant feeling. I like the tinglies, thank you very much.

Let’s talk about something else now. That was getting boring.

I’ve come to realize I have a very, very deep loathing of children being treated like idiots. There is a difference between young and being a moron, and it is almost painful when I meet someone who can’t see that distinction. One of those people is my Mother. I love the woman, don’t get the impression that I don’t, but she is a very, very poor person to be raising a child that’s in school. Her and I get along much better now that I’m older, but when I was little? Not so much. My younger sister is much in the same situation now.

Let me lay out the current scenario for you. My sister, who is 8 (9? I forget, I’m terrible) years old, was supposedly given a project in Science class to write 2 pages about an endangered species and make a poster about them. My sister chose Bengal Tigers, despite the fact that there are plenty of species of her favorite animal on the endangered species list. She’s an absolutely massive Monkey nut. She said that she picked tigers instead because a lot of her other classmates picked monkeys. She didn’t want to do the same thing everyone else was, so she picked some other cool animal.

I give her props for that, but she claims she was given this assignment Wednesday night. I can say, without a doubt, that that was not the case. My sister is just becoming a very, very good liar. It runs in the family. I would almost say she’s better than I am, I would have pushed too far and said I was given the assignment the night before it was due. Not as believable as two days prior. My mother is not the sharpest cheese in the dairy case, so she bought it, of course. I’m positive it was given on Monday, but that is beside the point.

The first problem: This report had to be typed on the computer and printed. It’s the year 2008, almost every household in America has a computer of some sort in it. If it doesn’t, you can use one at the local library or school. My mother is of the opinion that my sister is too young to use a computer, even attended. Children can’t understand computers! How are they supposed to type? When I point out that typing a letter is less complicated than the pen motions it requires to write the same letter, it does not go over well.

My suspicion here is that my mother makes these excuses because she is personally not capable of using a computer, nor is she willing to learn. This part here is not necessarily a ‘kids are dumb’ quirk of hers, and more that she doesn’t want to admit she is afraid of learning to use a computer. Still, she writes it off as my Sister being too stupid to type up a report in Microsoft Word. For some reason that irritates the hell out of me.

Next is the writing of the report. This is, perhaps, the most annoying of it all. A two page, double spaced report on Bengal Tigers. People have written entire books about them. My mother sat down and decided to write the entire report herself, excluding my sister from it, because she was ‘too young’ to do this kind of work. My mother didn’t manage to write one page, let alone two pages. She actively excluded information because she believed my sister and her classmates were too young to understand. She dumbed down words because “no nine year old would understand.”

Give me a fucking break.

If a child of that age does not actually know what the word ‘poacher’ means, you teach them. The will understand. You tell them what a poacher is. You ask them to spell it for you. You reinforce the words they didn’t know a second, third, and fourth time during and after the report is written. It is not difficult. The word “poacher” does not carry the same meaning as “killer” and you make your child look like a damn fool trying to tell them that it is. Tell me how ridiculous this sentence is:

“Killers hunt tigers in the woods to kill them and sell their fur.”

Are you serious. How is this something that can’t be understood by a 9 year old: “Poachers illegally hunt tigers for sport, and to sell their pelts.”

Is that second version the most sophisticated, intellectual sentence ever written? No. But it’s something a 9 year old can easily understand. They don’t look like a damn fool reading it, either. You don’t need a college degree to understand what a poacher is and does.

That is just one example. Apparently male tigers don’t spray trees to mark their territory. They “pee around their homes so nobody else comes.” Are. You. Kidding. Me.

Needless to say, the report my mother wrote was an abortion of the brain, so I sat down with my sister and banged out a new report. Two pages, almost entirely written by my sister. I popped open a few resources for her, helped her with the big words, and she wrote it herself in about a half hour. It wasn’t the height of scientific research or anything, but she did the work and she understood it.

I truly and honestly fear for my sister’s brain when I’m living somewhere out of the city/state. This is the type of household that sucks any form of critical thought right out of you and leaves it in a corner to rot. There is not a single book with more than 30 pages in it in this house that doesn’t belong to me, and I don’t even have that many. I was raised that they were stupid and useless. To this day I have a difficult time getting into books, and I write for a living. How screwed up is that?

I think the way that I was raised made me a much more visual thinker, which creates some strange obstacles. For example: When I start a project, my first draft is usually more appropriate for a visual representation. More fit for television, or games, or comics. When writing, you can paint pictures with your words… but they’re still not actually pictures. The two things need to be approached completely differently. There’s some crossover between the two, sure. There’s a lot of it. When it comes down to it, though? They’re different beasts. Even the truest movie adaptation of a book or series of books is going to have differences. Those differences must exist, because the two mediums are different.

What you can do with words is not the same thing that you can do with pictures. What you can do in pictures is not the same as what you can do only in words. All of my fiction starts out as a comic script or a draft of a TV series. I have to break it down into essentials and build it back up into a different form for it to be useful to me. Is this entirely the fault of my upbringing? No, but it contributed. It’s sort of funny.

How in the world did I end up on this topic? I don’t even know where I started.

Oh, right.

Questions of the day:

1.) What do you recommend I drink in the early AM hours?
2.) What books would you recommend I buy my 9 year old sister to convince her that reading is okay? Something light, but not insulting to her intelligence. I’m sick of seeing Dora the Explorer picture books in her hand at night at age 9.

I’ll try to be more coherent in the future, I have no idea where all of those tangents even came from. This is what happens when I don’t inject myself full of caffeine first thing in the morning.