This time, I thought Sparky’s argument was really weak, and I had some complaints of my own.
Sparky’s complaint is that sometime when he’s on my lap, I am distracted, looking at the computer, or not petting him or giving him my full attention.
That’s not fair. “Sparky, I’m doing all the work. You’re just laying there, not moving, hell, you could be asleep. You aren’t paying attention at all.”
Sparky says that’s okay, because his eyes aren’t closed and he is like a hundred times cuter than I am, and just showing up is it’s own reward.
“Yeah, okay, you are awfully cute, so I don’t mind. You aren’t as adorable when you squirm around to stare at me. It’s like you’re judging me or something.”
Sparky says he is judging me. He thinks there is no point in looking at pictures if they all smell the same. I must be daft, so when he isn’t judging me, he is trying to hypnotize me to get me to stop.
That’s pretty harsh, so I get a little tough on him. “You’re left eye isn’t tracking, and it creeps me out.
It doesn’t bother him. He says the “mal de ojo” is supposed to creep me out. How else could an evil eye break the spell?
I don’t know what he’s talking about again, so I ask about the sniffing. “Sometimes you start sniffing me like a vengeance. That’s ruder than me watching a video on Youtube.”
He says he was trying to smell if I have, “rickets or lupus or watcha-call-it”.
Now I know he’s just making shit up. “You can’t even smell out Mr. Moose if I cover him with a towel, and you slobbered all over him.”
We do this exercise for Sparky’s intellectual development. He knows this, and is aware that he isn’t great at it, so changes tack to criticize a different exercise.
Sparky says that I get distracted, and forget to put treats under all of the cups.
We do an exercise where I put a treat under one of three cups, then point to the cup with the treat. Sparky goes to a random cup, and is often disappointed to find that I failed him again by forgetting to put a treat there.
I am really curious to know what Sparky thinks he’s supposed to be learning. He seems to think the message is to look under every cup.
I reminded Sparky of the documentary we watched, Inside the Mind of a Dog.
“Remember how dogs understand where people point, but monkeys don’t understand pointing?”
I’m starting to think this whole conversation is pointless.
Sparky wanted to know if we could get a monkey. A small one, that could ride on his back. The monkey would be riding, but not driving, because monkeys don’t understand pointing like dogs do.
Sparky doesn’t understand pointing either, but I was happy to change the subject. We were both grumpy from being sick and had been having roommate squabbles all afternoon. We were feeling better, so I thought we should lighten the mood.
I told him that if we can catch a monkey, we can keep it as a pet.
Sparky wasn’t sure how to catch a monkey, so I told him about an exchange student I had from Brazil. That student told us that him and his friends would throw balls at monkeys up in the trees. If they hit a monkey, it might fall out of the tree, and be stunned from the fall. They would put the monkey in a pillow case while they collected more.
They didn’t do anything bad with the monkeys. They’d just release them somewhere else. It was stupid and didn’t make sense, proving that Brazilian kids were as dopey as kids everywhere.
Later on, it came up in class that our Brazilian exchange student had never heard of grilled cheese sandwiches. Since this class was committed to cultural understanding, we had a grilled cheese day just before Christmas break.
The NoRo Science Department was enthusiastic about food, so we had plenty of electric skillets, hot plates and frying pans. Students brought in the ingredients, and demonstrated how to make grilled cheese sandwiches.
That’s when I learned that mayonnaise can be used instead of butter to coat the outside of the bread.
In Education fairy tales, it’s often said that, “I think I learn more from my students, then they learn from me.”
That statement always struck me as stupid since I was the one getting paid, but that day, I learned a lesson that will be with me for life. Butter from the refrigerator is solid, and doesn’t spread for shit. Mayonnaise is always spreadable and makes no difference to the quality of the sandwich.
Sparky thought Brazil sounded nice, and that we should make some grilled cheese sandwiches.
We’re good.