Silly Names for Invisible Griffins

As I've said before, I work as a school nurse. I’m sure you can envision the kind of silliness I see. (For instance, I had one girl come in the other day with a bug bite, clutching at it and wailing that she was dying, and someone should call poison control, or maybe her grandmother. Truthfully, I’m not sure what she expected her grandmother to do.) Ironically, the part of my job that most taxes my ability to hold in my giggles is the names I see.

You get your usual myriad of misspelled nouns and adjectives, of course – I’ve seen every misspelling in the book of Jewel, Precious, Dove, Special, and Sky – but then I get some like Devon’cling Darknyss McSmee the 11^th (whose mother and father, of course, are named John and Rachel) or some such silliness, and you think I’m joking, but I’m not.

Of course, the above is not the name of one of my students, because that wouldn’t be nice, and I wouldn’t do that, Mom, but it is similar in many ways to the name of a student I sent to archiving today. That is to say, it was an ordinary name, apostrophe, verb, followed by a noun, and that was just the first name.

I’m actually a little worried, because I’m giggling a little less at stuff like this now than when I started. What if I’m becoming immune to the ridiculous? After all, familiarity breeds indifference. Isn’t that the theory behind vaccines and allergy shots and griffins?

A friend informs me that I have to explain what griffins have to do with familiarity and indifference. See, when I was a kid I was encouraged by a student in my class to introduce her to my pet griffin. Of course, I didn’t know I had a griffin at the time, and I suppose he was probably imaginary, but I did anyway, because what if he was real and I was the only one who couldn’t see him? So I named him Jaunita, speaking of silly names, and my imaginary griffin and my friend (whose name, I confess, I have forgotten) became good buddies. She spent so much time interacting with Jaunita that I convinced myself I could see him, too.

By the time I got to second grade, I realized, of course, that there wasn’t actually a pet griffin, and that was why all of the fruit I left out for him rotted and we had fruit flies. Please don’t tell my parents.  You know what, forget it, I don’t think that would actually surprise them.

I suspect, though, that Juanita was real, and familiarity just, you know, bred indifference. So eventually I became immune and stopped being able to see her. That’s why kids know that unicorns and fairies and dolphins exist, and adults insist they’re made-up. We can’t see them anymore because we were exposed so much we became indifferent. Hush. That is totally a correct way to use that word.

This is why I have to find work outside of the school system. I’m already immune to griffins. What if I stop giggling at silly names and then stop giggling at silly students and then stop being silly myself? How would I survive?

My cat would probably be happy, though.

PS: Not all of my students are silly-named alarmists. In fact, most of them either have perfectly ordinary names, or they have really epic unusual names. Yes, I do totally get to judge what’s epic and what’s just silly. This is my blog, thank you very much. As for being alarmists… Let’s just say I had a student come limping in last week with a massively swollen and bruised foot, asking for ice.

Some of my students should be more alarmable.

PPS: Don’t assume your students are fine just because they wail that they’re dying. I had a student do that once, and I made the mistake of figuring they were being melodramatic, and while I was going through my routine assessment (heart/lungs/pulse/PO2/BP) for chest pain, she started going gray, which is impressive for a particularly dark African American girl. This was right around when I noticed that her heart beat was doing some scary things, and called 911 and then the principal (which is only polite if you’re bringing an ambulance to their schools. They tend to get a little grumpy if EMTs show up and they weren’t informed) and tried to help her keep calm until they got there. I don’t know if I succeeded, or if she was just making good progress towards passing out. I’m leaning more towards passing out, personally.

PPPS: That student is fine.

PPPPS: Probably.

PPPPPS: I’ll be honest, I just wanted to see how many p’s I could get away with.

PPPPPPS: Six. The answer is six.

Thi'ev the Magical Talking Squid Thing

When I was going up, I had a dangerously over active imagination. This really isn't too terribly unusual in and of itself. Every child is creative at ten years old to some degree. Unfortunately for my family, I was armed with two things that most unusually imaginitive child lacked. A large library of fantasy novels and a younger brother who was willing to go along with pretty much whatever I wanted to do. This is a very dangerous combination. 

One those very dangerous novels was called Water: Ascension. It was about a mermaid who finds out she's half human (I mean, half of the amount of human that mermaids normally are, I suppose) and goes on to bond with a Farworlder and become an Avatar, just in time for Atlantis  to sort of die. 

It's not a very far stretch from half human mermaid who looks like a mermaid to half mermaid human who looks like a human. Within the course of a morning, I managed to convince myself that I was actually adopted and one of my real parents was an Atlantean. If I found a magical-talking-squid-Farworlder of my very own, I could find my real family and go live in the sea.

My lack of gills never seemed like a big problem to me. Farworlders were magic, right? All I had to do was find a baby Farworlder. 

I also conveniently forgot how much I hated seafood. 

I don't really remember how I convinced James to help me in this quest. Possibly he was still grumpy about my fake Hogwarts letter and wanted me to drown. Or maybe not. He was a little young for revenge. I hadn't really gotten around to teaching him that yet. 

Between the two of us, we decided that pools were kind of like the sea, and maybe we'd find a Farworlder infant in our pool. I seized upon the idea with the same singleminded determination that had me trying to acquire our cockapoo, thats's a dog, you pervert, every night so that I could morph into her. There really is a fine line between creative and crazy. I would know. Probably. 

So that's how an eccentric ten year old and her six year old brother wound up scouring every inch of a kidney-shaped swimming pool looking for a magical squid.

We searched for hours. By the time we'd gone over the entire pool four times, I was convinced that I was Serai, a kidnapped mermaid princess from the Dolphin clan of Atlantis, and my brother (who really was adopted, and so could be anyone) was probably my best friend before we were kidnapped by these cruel, terrible humans. Shortly after deciding that I'd already bonded with a Farworlder (who totally had a name - Thi'ev) who had been stolen from me, and that I loved him more than pie and was totally a tragic heroine, we did actually find something. Or at least, James did.

Well, it had a whole bunch of legs, all right. Which is kind of what we were looking for. Unfortunately, the exact number of legs was eight. 

I don't have any memories before this of being afraid of spiders. Maybe this was the first. He was a whopper, all right. We call them Banana Spiders. God knows why, because they look nothing like fruit, science. They're about the size of a man's hand. This one was dead, which didn't make him significantly less frightening. He floated in a corner of the pool like a war casualty. I don't know where he came from. He wasn't there before. (Actually, it was probably a she, but I didn't know that at the time. All scary animals were male to me, god knows why.) 

My eyes bugged from my head, and I utilized my most terrible weapon against the evil spider. I screamed at the top of my lungs, and while it was recovering from my brutal attack, I swam for it. 

It was an epic battle for survival. In the end, I made it, a slightly baffled younger brother trailing behind me as I yanked open the sliding glass door and ran inside. I can't imagine my mother was thrilled about all of the water. I don't remember. 

The terror wore off pretty quickly, because honestly, fear was much less interesting than the pizza the cruel, terrible humans were offering, and by the time we'd both wolfed down three pieces of pepperoni-covered-glory, I'd forgotten all about Thi'ev.

Which just goes to show, really, that sometimes when you search for Atlantis you find magic, and sometimes you wind up running away from dead spiders in a swimming pool. Sometimes, if you have parents like mine, you have both. Or at least pizza. 

Pizza makes everything better.