Valerie

This is Valerie.

She is sleeping, and yes, she is half underneath my bed. And on top of a mattress I keep there for sleepovers. It wasn’t intentional, mind — the sleeping, that is. The sliding half-under the bed was. She slid under there for reasons still unknown. And after doing so, she complained of her back hurting (and wouldn’t it, if you’re going to subject it to such posture torture?), so I interrupted my reading,  slotted two pillows underneath her torso to keep her back moderately supported, and turned back to my book.

And then she fell asleep.

Which just shows that she is a bit of a dork and a doofus, no matter how much she denies it.

I don’t know why she denies it. If you carry around a backpack and you think you are cool, you are probably a bit of a dork and a doofus.

(Yes, Valerie, even if it’s a Crumpler backpack.)

But I love her anyway.

I think of her as wearing vest and tie outfits quite often, though she only has a few.  This is how she dresses, generally:

See, no tie. I think there’s a photo of her be-tied here, though.

You mustn’t think she is posing in this photograph. She’s not. She’s actually giving me a rather threatening look because I have snatched the camera away from her. She has actually just put her cup down and has shifted her weight so that she can launch at me and tickle the camera away.

I am terribly ticklish and she knows it. Abuses it, even.

 

She keeps telling me to make sure that everyone knows that she is Awesome and Cool. I’m not sure that I can, although with the threat of tickling looming on the horizon, I can but try.

Sometimes I write mock fairy stories with someone called ‘Valerie’ as the protagonist, which pleases her very much. Which baffles me very much, as who’s to say that Valerie-the-character is Valerie-the-person anyway?

Here’s a snippet of a Valerie-story:

Once upon a time, there lived, in a little house, the eldest daughter of an eldest son, and her younger brother. The girl’s name was Valerie and the boy’s name was Vincent, and while alliteration and mirror-meanings and strange syntax certainly are the realm of the fairy-tale genre, it must be noted that their conveniently similar names were not fabricated for the purposes of this story.

Vincent, as most younger siblings are in these kinds of things, was absent for much of the tale. This means that we must focus on the exploits and escapades of Valerie, once pirate king of the eight seas (for she discovered one while sailing ’round the Cape of Good Hope); now simple, rested, retired adventurer — though as we all know quite well, no adventurer ever truly retires.

We begin our tale by documenting Valerie’s morning wander through the woods. It was a habit of hers to step into her weathered and worn brown leather boots, take some bread and cheese and a flagon of well-brewed tie guanyin tea, and munch on them while striding through the trees. It kept her boots in tip-top condition, for one thing, and fresh air is the ideal condiment to simple meals of bread and cheese.

 

And, you know, in some ways, it’s not very far off the real Valerie at all. Someone who makes up her own adventures (even if it is merely traipsing through a different path from our uni courtyard to the library) and, as most fairytale characters do, gets tea and scones at the end of it. (Even if they are mediocre scones and tea from T2. Anything to keep the story up.) That sounds terribly wet but it’s a lot more fun than it sounds.

See, the adventures often have pirates. Or ninjas. Or dragons. There are often lots of dragons. Once we commandeered a pirate ship with an abacus attached to the deck (translation: scrambled around playground equipment that had those baffling giant three-row abacus things), and so we made it into a dungeon and kidnapped an accountant to keep our gold in order. With the help of the abacus. Of course.

We’re very good at plot. Sensical to the marrow.

 

That is how cool she is. (And I hope she’s satisfied.)