The Little Psychopath

I was doing a Froggle Party for a school. I was in the middle of a room, doing the early show stuff of warming them up when I noticed that they had seated pupils behind me, so I had to re-arrange the whole table and get all the students placed in front of it. This completely lost their concentration and I had to fight for attention as I brought up the first kid who somehow already had gotten ahold of both my collapsing wand (which looked longer and more crooked than normal - he wouldn't let it go so I couldn't do anything with it) and one of my normal wands. I couldn't do any gags with it and it all just felt a bit hopeless.

I tried to do the introductions of the magic trick by asking the kid for his name, but he was being silly and presented himself as Pinocchio or Transformers or something along those lines. After joking about a bit and him continually refusing to say his actual name, I got slightly annoyed and asked him seriously what his actual name was. He got nervous and said "lalala?", which I thought was another silly joke from his side and so I said "all right, lalala, how old are you?", which caused a big gasp from the teachers and the kids, including the one I had up, all seemed shocked as if I'd done something really bad.

I realised that him saying that was a nervous tick and something not to be made fun of, so I sat down with him and said "listen, it's all right, I'll be nice to you". He was small and blonde and he leaned in and whispered "thanks, you see I'm a bit of a psychopath".

(When I woke up and went on YouTube I was randomly suggested to re-watch the TED talk "Strange answers to the psychopath test by Jon Ronson")

Scorpion tail terrapin.

I was in my old room at mum's house. There were now two aquariums of terrapins and I had completely forgotten about them for the last eight years. Somehow the terrapins had still survived and happily multiplied and there were now at least twenty in each aquarium, some of them as small as the nail of a thumb.

There was also a really big red-eared slider (which I just found out was the name of that particular breed of terrapin that I used to keep), about the size of the inner circumference of a typical car tire, which was kept outside of the aquarium. However, it needed some water and so I began the project of getting it into one of them.

It ended up with me having one of the tiny terrapins sitting on my hand and on its back seemed to be an even smaller creature, which had a form of scorpion's tale. I remember having the feeling of it not being able to sting me because it was a terrapin that just happened to be misshapen when I felt a sharp sting in my finger. I had to take a pair of tweezers to try and pull the stinger, which was now deeply embedded in my finger, out. I couldn't manage, it was stuck.

(I woke up with a sharp pain in my finger, unlike any kind of normal pain I'd felt, and completely untraceable. I was too tired to make a fuss out of it and find out what could have caused it. Instead, I went back to sleep and didn't feel a thing when I woke up in the morning. That day we ended up at a flea market at a huge temple ground, with a pond full of, yep, red-eared sliders)

Winnie the Pooh.

Mum gave me a really, really old copy of Winnie the Pooh, which she had wrapped with tape crossing the cover, and even some of the pages, so bits of text and pictures were lost as I tried to unwrap it. It had a lot of pictures, sort of in a Mamma Mu style, and I particularly remember the arguing crows, sitting in molehills in the ground.