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Time-travel, sort of.
Oct. 4th, 2003 02:08 pmI have to tidy up my room. My mother decided that since I didn't do anything worthwhile all the vacation (sic!) at least I should finally really clean up. Which means, not my usual tactic of putting all papers in one box (on top of all the old ones) and all the rest in some drawers, so they're out of sight, but real clean-up. So I sorted out the drawers and took them out and collected all the stuff that fell out behind them and was never seen again, I sorted through all my papers, I sorted through old magazines. I threw away all the copies from school that I only kept because I didn't dare to throw them away previously, I collected all my old exams - no reason to have them dispersed through the whole room. In my desk I found ancient stuff - "Welcome to class 1b, my name is Helgard Reininghaus and I will be your teacher for the next four years" sort of stuff. Booklists for grade three. Pictures I drew back then. Two stories I tried to write back then. One sounds rather like a parody, but I remember that it was meant seriously - Wickie (yes, the little viking), Babar (yes, the little elefant), Thomas (yes, my brother) and Christiane (well, yes, me) are out to become heroes, so they check some sort of "hero guidebook" (don't ask where I got that idea) and see there's a "Cave of 100 Dragons" nearby so they go and behead all the dragons (sorry to the dragons- I was young and did not know what I did!), or rather, Wickie, Thomas and Babar do so, for Christiane was very cowardish and always hid behind Wickie (she had some sort of crush on him, back then, you know). The other was about Ilachi, son of some pharaoh, very lonely 'cause he's not allowed to play with other children and therefore always on some adventurous trips on his own, getting lost in pyramids and stuff. I must have been in grade two when I wrote that stuff on our old typewriter. The spelling is very good, though.
It made me remember other stuff from that time - Geschichtenland, for example. That means "land of stories" and was, basically, my country, where all the characters from my favorite stories and some of those I made up myself lived and I was empress. My brother had another country of his own, and so had Stefanie, my best friend back then. I don't know how often I drew the maps of the world where these countries lay. I remember that we had some - well, today I'd say NPC - countries and of course the lands of a villain, Sabor (our lawn-mowing machine was made by a company named Sabor. As you will have guessed, my brother and me didn't like that lawn-mower much). Thinking back, Geschichtenland must have existed for quite a long while, for its capital was later named Chribaanika, which was a pun on the names of the girls in my room on the class trip to Bernau in grade 4. I know that my palace had Chinese-style roofs. I don't know, though, when it was that I left it for good never to return.
Of course, eventually Lyra Ca Siba from Dathomir, or Gil'hin, the Force-sensitive Twi'lek space pirate, or even Erica's adventures in Cimnarár or Muriel/Earcalime's sudden journey to Númenor are only heirs to Ilachi and Geschichtenland. My heroes may be more mature, and especially more what I would like to be like rather than what I feel I am like, but they are in the same tradition.
I also found the vocabulary-list of my first own language, Laconic, which I invented with my friend Franziska in grade 6. The only sentence I still know from that language (in which we could converse quite fluently, as much as its limited vocabular allowed) is "Lalamam bi fatsali alariaki", which means "You are an idiot"...
Seeing through that, one might have guessed that I would be someone to fall for Middle-earth and live action roleplaying, Quenya and mythology.
I remembered the many codes I tried to invent for the letters we wrote to each other in class (which was, obviously, not allowed, and when we did, teachers would read the letters out to the whole class, so we needed a code to make the meaning secret) - from changed letters to a whole script system of our own, some so complicated it was impossible to ever reconstruct what had been written there, others hard to de-code but easy if you knew how to do it. My earliest, dating back to grade one, was extremely primitive, consisting of only six different shapes and numbers. A would be a circle, B a triangle, C a pentagon, D a square, E a drop, F a star. G would be a circle with a 1, M a circle with a two, and so on. It worked well enough for someone who had just learned to write...
I found old scout fotos, from what back then was "the big adventure" for me, before I read Pam Houston and the Lord of the Rings - climbing, canoeing, jamborees, adventurous indeed, but lacking the last factor, the one of crossing the limit between courage and recklessness.
I threw away quite a lot of stuff, kept other stuff even though I had not missed it, but maybe I'll want to show it to my kids sometime, or to go on another clean-up induced time-travel another time.
I still hate tidying up. But finding those old treasures at least makes me see that maybe there is a point to it.
- - -
( Eine Art Zeitreise. )
- - -
It made me remember other stuff from that time - Geschichtenland, for example. That means "land of stories" and was, basically, my country, where all the characters from my favorite stories and some of those I made up myself lived and I was empress. My brother had another country of his own, and so had Stefanie, my best friend back then. I don't know how often I drew the maps of the world where these countries lay. I remember that we had some - well, today I'd say NPC - countries and of course the lands of a villain, Sabor (our lawn-mowing machine was made by a company named Sabor. As you will have guessed, my brother and me didn't like that lawn-mower much). Thinking back, Geschichtenland must have existed for quite a long while, for its capital was later named Chribaanika, which was a pun on the names of the girls in my room on the class trip to Bernau in grade 4. I know that my palace had Chinese-style roofs. I don't know, though, when it was that I left it for good never to return.
Of course, eventually Lyra Ca Siba from Dathomir, or Gil'hin, the Force-sensitive Twi'lek space pirate, or even Erica's adventures in Cimnarár or Muriel/Earcalime's sudden journey to Númenor are only heirs to Ilachi and Geschichtenland. My heroes may be more mature, and especially more what I would like to be like rather than what I feel I am like, but they are in the same tradition.
I also found the vocabulary-list of my first own language, Laconic, which I invented with my friend Franziska in grade 6. The only sentence I still know from that language (in which we could converse quite fluently, as much as its limited vocabular allowed) is "Lalamam bi fatsali alariaki", which means "You are an idiot"...
Seeing through that, one might have guessed that I would be someone to fall for Middle-earth and live action roleplaying, Quenya and mythology.
I remembered the many codes I tried to invent for the letters we wrote to each other in class (which was, obviously, not allowed, and when we did, teachers would read the letters out to the whole class, so we needed a code to make the meaning secret) - from changed letters to a whole script system of our own, some so complicated it was impossible to ever reconstruct what had been written there, others hard to de-code but easy if you knew how to do it. My earliest, dating back to grade one, was extremely primitive, consisting of only six different shapes and numbers. A would be a circle, B a triangle, C a pentagon, D a square, E a drop, F a star. G would be a circle with a 1, M a circle with a two, and so on. It worked well enough for someone who had just learned to write...
I found old scout fotos, from what back then was "the big adventure" for me, before I read Pam Houston and the Lord of the Rings - climbing, canoeing, jamborees, adventurous indeed, but lacking the last factor, the one of crossing the limit between courage and recklessness.
I threw away quite a lot of stuff, kept other stuff even though I had not missed it, but maybe I'll want to show it to my kids sometime, or to go on another clean-up induced time-travel another time.
I still hate tidying up. But finding those old treasures at least makes me see that maybe there is a point to it.
- - -
( Eine Art Zeitreise. )
- - -
