MOOP!

((Yes, I'm jumping back to eight. We'll see how many more I manage to crank out over the next ten days. Maybe all of them!))

Clifford B. Hicks has a character named Alvin Fernald, who has all sorts of books and goes on all sorts of adventures. And I think Wabbit would likely write about The Pest, if she knew of these books. (A girl desperate to be thought of as a boy, to be able to do fun things with her brother and his friends).

I like The Pest too. And I like Alvin (and though my brain never quite ran the right directions, I always *wanted* to be an inventor.) But what I like most of all --and who I relate to most of all, after a weird moment of thought, is Shoie.

Shoie is not The Magnificent Brain. He's the best friend, the follower. But he's also the incredibly physical one, who burns off energy by walking on his hands or along fences. Maybe it's the ADHD, maybe it's just my own weird quirk, but I've almost always been a fairly physical person. I used to go regular with the high school gang to play blind tag at the playground, and once there, I was one of the ones balancing on the monkey bars with my eyes closed and trying to make the Leap of Faith from the slide to the entrance of the structure. Nowadays, I sublimate a lot of my "need to MOVE" into dance, but I still climb up and walk on walls instead of the sidewalk some days.

Shoie is caring and supportive of Alvin, helping him out of (and sometimes into!) scrapes. He's a good dude, all around, and I'd like to think I am able to be that friendly and that loyal. But most of all, I know full well that neither of us would be happy to live our lives sitting down.

~Sor
MOOP!