Solemn Bilingual Yo-Yo Instruction

When I came home tonight, Ian seemed unusually unimpressed with my arrival. I was afraid maybe he was upset with me, but when I saw what he was doing, it all made sense. He was standing in front of the TV taking in every sliver of wisdom from these two yo-yo instructor guys. Ian has finally acquired the world's best yo-yo - a weird fashion circulating around his school, and being very actively encourage and culturally nourished by the school administration, which makes me suspect someone must be getting some money out of this - perhaps as a fundraiser... Ian has been agitating - not for the yo-yo itself, the $15 "world's best" yo-yo, but for Mommy to take $20 out of the bank so that he can purchase it, along with a $5 instructional video - the one he was watching when I arrived. I know this sounds like much run-on about nothing in particular, but this is exactly how life has been. I spent much of the weekend with the children and at a distance from Amy, due to a few extenuating circumstances, but every time I talked to her on the phone, Ian wanted to take over the conversation and secure the coordinates for her retrieval of the funds for this most important of yo-yo's. It got to the point, by the end of the weekend, that when I would say to Amy, "Ian wants to talk to you," she would say, "No, I don't want to talk about the $20 right now."

One engaging twist on the instructional scene was that one of the two guys - both of whom were clearly American - started speaking in a quasi-Australian accent, lecturing the youth on fun facts concerning koalas, and Daniel wanted me to know what was going on. He made several attempts to sum up the linguistic phenomenon, with wonderfully rambling paragraphs involving grasps at categories such as "speaking a English that's different," but finally, when I urged him to tell me what he was trying to say - just because I knew it would be pretty good, he summarized the yo-yo instructor's foray into Australian speech as follows:

"His language is English, but he was speaking a different language."

(April 19, 2011)