In the same room

Round 33: January 2038 (Summer)

last update/next update

Rose and Joanna Draper are 43, Sylvia is 12 and Levi and Will are 6.
(Adam is 83, Lake is 81, Athena is 78, Wade is 48, Simon is 13 and Alice is 12)

Narrated by Joanna Draper

I mostly enjoyed my years of teaching but now that I’m working in natural science, I feel much more at home. Teaching is much more social and being sociable has never been a strength of mine.

I can’t completely ignore other people, especially seeing Wade works there too. He's a people person, so I can hardly get away with not talking to him.

In general though, my co-workers leave me in peace, even Wade.

If I ever start to miss it, I always have the option of teaching here at university level. I’m not interested in that right now but maybe in the future.

Rose is spreading her wings a little too. She’s still in journalism but she’s also taken on her dad’s pottery shop, which originally belonged to her grandfather.

Business-wise, everything has already been done for her. Lake already had a great customer base and an excellent reputation, not to mention the store itself.

Lake employed a manager, who knows the business inside and out, so Rose only needs to go in as often as she wants to.

Rose won’t even have to worry about stock for a while, because Lake has so, so much in storage already.

She’s still practising her own skills though, because it won’t last forever. Lake taught her when she was in high school but she says she’s rusty.

She really loves that shop. When she’s done writing for a living, she wants to take an even more active role there.

She'd have more flexible hours running the shop, assuming she kept the manager on staff. Who wouldn't want that?

Rose has been trying to get the kids interested in pottery, in the hope one of them will want to take the shop over from her one day but they’re all incredibly bored by the mere idea of it.

Will and Levi are still only young but I just don’t think we have particularly artistic children.

Well, Sylvia is but not in any way that would help with pottery. She’s more into literature.

She’s always loved to read but she’s also starting to write now. She’s writing her own play at the moment, so she’s quite ambitious.

Rose and I figured she’d definitely do something with writing when she’s older but Sylvia surprised us. Over dinner the other night, she told us all that she wants to be an actor.

Levi then claimed he wanted to be an actor too but I think we’ll wait a while before we take him too seriously about that. He just likes to follow whatever his big sister does.

Sylvia seems to be over the teasing phase she went through when the boys were little and now, Will and Levi just idolise her.

Sylvia has always been quite serious. Somehow, she found Alice, who is probably the only girl at school who is equally so.

Alice is not really a theatre kid but she indulges Sylvia. They’re always acting out scenes from books and plays together.

Sylvia tends to get frustrated with Alice's supposed poor acting skills but it's not like either of them have ever had much experience with it.

Sylvia is looking to change that soon and did her first “real” performance over the summer. A local coffee shop held an open mic event for under 18s and Sylvia couldn’t wait to enter.

She performed a soliloquy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was probably a little heavy-going from some of the audience but her performance was excellent.

Mum and Dad missed Sylvia’s debut but Dad congratulated her on what he was sure was an amazing performance.

They were both very keen to hear all about how Sylvia thought it went. She was more than willing to fill them in.

They want to come and see her perform next time. Sylvia’s dying for a bigger audience, so she’s thrilled about that.

I haven’t kept up with news at the high school since I left but I hope they do a school play this year. Sylvia would love it.

Maybe it would stop the nagging about finding her an agent. She keeps asking me and Rose and it is just so not happening.

I’m really uncomfortable with that. If she wants to do school plays, then I will fully support that but I’m not going to have her rushing out to audition for commercials or anything like that. It’s still the summer now but school goes back in a couple of weeks and Sylvia needs to keep her mind on that.

Already, I can see her starting to get distracted by boys and she doesn’t need to be distracted by acting on top of that.

Especially if the boys she’s interested in are as allergic to studying as Simon Lane. I never taught him but I'm friends with his mother, so I'm more than familiar with his attitude towards anything other than music.

Sylvia hasn’t asked us anything about dating yet, so I don’t think she’s really ready for that sort of thing anyway. I’m still really hoping she’s lost interest in Simon by the time she is!


Notes:

• Title is from In The Same Room by Jimmy Eat World.
• The longer Joanna works in natural science, the more I think it suits her personality. I can definitely see her as a very inquisitive type, so all the experimenting and researching involved in her job would fit her to a tee. That's on top of that fact that she's a bit anti-social, so being left alone in a lab/office wouldn't bother her in the slightest.
• I kind of forgot I hadn't already given the pottery shop to Rose but it was time. Lake is 81, so he should be able to laze around the house all day if he wants to. He pretty much did anyway, but now he can do it guilt-free.
• Sylvia hasn't rolled any specific romantic wants yet - just a couple of generic "Flirt" wants. She did heartfart over Simon though and they have two bolts. They're already best friends from childhood, so we'll see what happens with them.