a kiss the mentalers

this is a tiny bit of video of me & G kissing yesterday in the same park that i did those cutup tree films in:



(i've only just realised that the videos don't show up in the livejournal feed of this blog... i'll be trying to remember to link to the video as well as embedding it...)

and then the mentalers:

it was on thursday, i was observing a primary school placement for work and before the lesson the class teacher brought a child to the student teachers (my students) to apologise to them for his behaviour... even though it wasn't really my place to say it i thanked him for the apology - neither of my students were going to thank him and i think it's important...

anyway, over the course of the lesson that i observed he played up a fair bit, he clearly has some kind of special needs in terms of his behaviour, he kept looking at me, i started to identify with him in my mind, his way of being completely oblivious to what was going on around him until brought back to focus by a teacher, something i miss about my adult life, the ability to completely absorb yourself in some tiny detail... i say i miss it, i think i still have it to an extent, i just don't let myself do it very often...

when the kids left the room he said goodbye to me about 10 times... there's some connection there that i really like, even though i'll probably not see him again...

leaving that school i cycled up to near londonbridgework and had lunch with producer G which was great, loads of ideas floating around about our little project, a student came to sit at the next table...

now i have an ability to speak my mind without fear of consequence... i rarely regret what i say but i'm often aware that it wasn't the most appropriate thing to say at that point...

the night before this me & G had watched king of comedy, the scorsese/deniro black comedy, it features sandra bernhard as an obsessive fan of jerry lewis... this particular student had come to my mind as i watched sandra bernhard's character, something i told her when i saw her in that cafe, taking care to mention that it was how mental the character was that made me think of her...

she took it well, she said i might have said she was cute but she accepted mental... (she has a stage persona who is entirely mental)...

anyway as i left the cafe i said see you tomorrow morning to her,

bright and early she replied...

she didn't come in the next day...

i hope it wasn't to do with what i said, i guess i'll find out on friday... odd to be telling this story today, even though i've been meaning to tell the story for a few days, because today i read ganching's very sad and beautiful account of her friend who she lost this week through mental illness...

the words mental, mentaler have a negative connotation attached to them generally in english and i just want to say that i don't mean it in a negative way... if anything is clear to me these days it's that we're all mental and i count myself a mentaler... not as mental as some, but mental enough...

x