Part dos! Let there be tomatoes of celebration! :D
Zwei = dos = two = 2! XD
Zwei: Not Bored and Lonely
"Hey, Mattie! Check out this awesome list I made of ways for you to be awesome!"
"Um, okay …"
"Come on, read it!"
"Uh … 'How to be Awesome (by Gilbert Awesome Beilschmidt): One, talk awesomely. Two, act awesomely. Three, think awesomely. Four, make sure everyone knows howawesome you are. Five, eat only awesome foods (like wurst and potatoes.) Gil, uh …"
"What? Is my list not the most awesome thing you've ever read?"
"Well … you can't really define something by using the word you're trying to define in its definition."
"Huh? You're confusing The Awesome Me."
"It's just … well … uh …"
"What?"
"Oh, never mind."
"Then, we can move on to our first awesome lesson about how to be awesome! Okay, so, to talk awesomely, you have to talk in a way that's really awesome. Like, use the wordawesome as much as possible, refer to yourself as The Awesome Me, and constantly remind everyone else how awesome you are and how awesome everything you do or say is. Mattie, are you writing this down?"
Thus began Mattie's long and grueling training.
The very first thing the Canadian learned was that his teacher was, in fact, a horrible teacher. He had zero ability to explain things. When asked how to be awesome, his answer was, "Be awesome, duh!" When told that that made no sense, his reply was, "It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, because The Awesome Me thought of it, which makes itawesome!" He had no patience and would give up on attempting to teach Matthew something after five minutes. He was easily bored and distracted, and would often call off a "lesson" to point out a weirdly shape cloud or describe an elaborate plot he planned on using to humiliate Austria.
As a combination of these unfortunate things, by the end of two weeks of Awesome Lessons, Matthew had learned practically nothing. Not even observing Gilbert during the lesson taught him anything; there was no pattern or reason for how the Prussian acted, talked, and thought except for an endless repetition of the word "awesome."
Yet, for some reason the Canadian was still enjoying his lessons. Maybe it was Prussia's hilarious jokes and antics; maybe it was his beautiful grin when he found something he liked; maybe it was that body that Canada found himself staring at when Gilbert wasn't looking; maybe it was just the presence of someone else in his house that actually recognized Matthew for who he was; maybe it was a combination of all four; maybe it was something else altogether; but something about those lessons made Canada actually eager to wake up in the morning for the first time in decades.
The very first thing the Prussian learned was that his pupil didn't have any self-confidence whatsoever. Matthew wanted to be confident, arrogant, noticeable, all the good qualities that came with awesomeness. The problem with that was that the Canadian was exactly the opposite of all of those things and Prussia had no idea how to teach him how to solve that. Personality traits weren't just clothes one could pick out of a box and try on, after all. In order to change one's personality, one had to work at it. And, well, Gilbert had never had to work at being awesome. He'd been born awesome. How does someone who's always been awesome by just being awesome teach someone who's never been awesometo be awesome? Prussia had no idea.
