InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Beep."

muppet_thighs (muppet_thighs) wrote in tensor,
@ 2011-03-10 00:13:00

Entry tags:

jono_starsmore, paige_guthrie

Paige
After Dinner

The internet was a great thing, but having too many pages open confused him and more than once had destroyed hard work when the wrong red X was clicked. So Jono was taking some of his miserly hoarded money and using it to buy a good Spanish-English/English-Spanish dictionary before he tossed his laptop out the window. A good thick one. Maybe even a heavy one, to see if his arms could gain any muscle.

He'd tried to get down to the bookstore in the Activities Center during dinner to avoid the crowds and clubs and noise, but with the three people he shared a bathroom with out, he'd decided to take a shower instead. When one did not sweat or become oily or use the toilet, one did not have to bathe as often, much to his surprise. Jono had thought he'd have to bathe more because he was... dusty or something. But his hair didn't even become stringy or flaky. It was a pleasant surprise.

Still, unwrapping was a private thing he didn't let anyone see, and he had to when he bathed.

In his uniform minus his tie and blazer, sleeves rolled up, shirt untucked, top button undone, Jono had slunk into the bookstore and into the reference section. None of the foreign language dictionaries had that comforting heft but several of them looked good and meaty. He flipped through them, looking for ones with definitions he understood easily. He hated those dictionaries where a single word definition, when looked up, was the first word he'd been trying to define.

Eyes still on the various definitions, Jono stepped back to let any others around easy access, but bumped into someone behind him.

*Oh, god, terribly sorry,* he murmured.

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muppet_thighs
2011-03-12 06:56 am UTC (link)

*I s'pose tha's true. And aye. With Posh 'n the kiddies. Though I think Poshie's back in the UK to 'ave 'er baby there.*

Jono tapped his pencil eraser on his notebook while he regarded the next two problems. The first one was easy, *Diez y ocho* but the second one was thirteen and he couldn't remember what that was. So he looked at his notes. *Trece.*

Which looked more like it should be pronounced 'tres' than 'tres' did. 'Tres' looked like 'trees' but spelled wrong.

He quickly filled out the rest of the page and skipped the question asking for an answer in the millions and moved on to the second sheet. Crude black and white drawings illustrated various sentences, like a boy and a girl walking to the cinema or park, and various little drawn clocks with hands pointing hither and yon.

*Marisol and Benito go to the park at three o'clock.* The first part was easy and he wrote 'Marisol y Benito'. Translating the times wasn't bad either, it was the verbs that got him.

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skinny_girl
2011-03-14 09:32 am UTC (link)

Paige tried to look interested in where Posh was going to have her baby, but she honestly had absolutely no clue that Posh was even pregnant. It was one of those things that just had absolutely no purpose taking up valuable space in her brain.

She opened her mouth expectantly while Jono tried to remember trece. When he peeked at his notes and figured it out, she nodded in agreement, smiling as he finished out the rest of the sheet. He didn't seem to be doing all that poorly, and she sat back slightly as he turned to the second page.

"Those worksheets are frustrating," she commented. "The illustrations are really ambiguous sometimes... but I guess that's okay because they'll probably give you credit if the sentence is right even if you don't interpret the picture the way they want you to."

She watched as he hesitated, after deciding what the sentence was in English. Nodding, she offered, "Ir."

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muppet_thighs
2011-03-19 11:04 am UTC (link)

Jono didn't care about Posh and Becks anymore than Paige likely did, but knowing what was going on with them was currently part of being British, or so the tabloids would have them believe.

*Eh. I ignore th' li'le pictures. Just there t' take up room.* They were high schoolers, for Christ's sake. They didn't need illustrations on their worksheets. Especially cutesy ones like these.

Jono's pencil tapped the paper again. *Ir, tha's right. That tricky one.*

Ir did not conjugate nicely as 'iro' or even 'irgo', but as 'voy', 'vas', 'va','vamos', and 'van'. So sometimes Jono remembered one of the v-words and sometimes he remembered ir, but when he recalled one he could never remember the other.

There were two of them, so the verb was 'van'. Jono mumbled as he wrote, *Marisol y Benito van a el parque a las tres.*

*Wait.* It wasn't 'a el', it was 'al'. He corrected after scrubbing his sheet with his eraser. But 'a las' was fine.

*Marisol y Benito van al parque a las tres. Sound roight t' yeh?*

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