Dear readers,

I'm Tiana, a Canadian friend of XP who has been living in Rotterdam since November 2022. Since then, I've been visiting their space quite frequently. Coming from the dark depths of a Canadian suburb, I've been so happy to be living a "15-minute city" life this year, and having XP nearby has been the biggest blessing.

Since meeting the Extra Practice crew in the winter, I've been grateful to be spending time with and getting to know them... I still feel like I have so much to learn about each of them! Making friends in adulthood can be challenging. Meeting a person deeper into their life, you have decades of information to learn about them.

Yet, the older I get, the less friendship becomes about information and the more it becomes about simply sharing a warm, reliable kindness with each other… but even the most mundane fun facts about our friends can say a lot about why they are the way that they are. Uncovering the origins of the friends you make as an adult is an exciting and curious pursuit.

One thing I'm a bit bummed about is that I don't know who my friends (who I've made as adults) were as children. So this month, let's meet the kid versions of the Extra Practice squad.

I used to always order the Coke or Pepsi books from scholastics as a kid (a North American phenomenon). I have such sweet memories of filling in these playful questionnaire books with my close friends as a kid... I liked seeing them iris in, making decisions about their interests and opinions. So, in the spirit of those memories, I've asked the Extra Practice folks to fill in a fun survey about their kid-selves.

Favourite kind of pastry?

Sausage Roll from Greggs, a bakery chain throughout the UK that are somehow known for their medium quality produce in an endearing way.

How do you relax?

Logging onto MSN and chatting with my friends. Updating my Myspace profile with the newest and saddest music I can find and then always playing Call of Duty with my friends online.

Dream job?

“I want to be a computer maker when I grow up” - a phrase taken from an 8-year old self portrait and bio I made in 1999.

How many hours per day online?

1-3 hours a day surfing the web

What do you do on rainy days?

Sit in one of the polytunnels that my parents grew plants in and listen to the rain whilst pretending that I was living in a star wars inspired future and that I should duck for cover once in a while as the empire drove past.

I wasn’t necessarily a bad child when growing up but there were just certain things I cared about and certain things that I didn’t care about. It was usually reflected in the teacher feedback that I got from the school teachers “Ben needs to apply himself more”, “If you tried harder you could do well”…..However, I think my true passions were being on the computer or Xbox at home, skateboarding down hills with my friends and surfing. I applied myself in these activities to the point where in some cases they might have taken over a bit.

I guess not much has changed, but perhaps I’ve learnt to balance things a little bit more and if I don’t care about something I try to figure out why that is and also not let it get in the way of me doing it anyway. I feel like my kid self would be happy in some ways for how things have turned out. I am trying to make computers (sort of) and I do have a playstation, I think he would be happy about that. But for the rest of the stuff I do I don’t know whether he would really notice.

Photo: Two dogs. Where's Ben?

What do you do on rainy days?

Build a lego castle or something that my little brother will play with and maybe destroy but that’s okay then I can build something new

Can you identify constellations?

Big and small pan

What was the last thing you ate?

Slice of bread with two types of jam (strawberry and apricot) and cheese (cow and goat), split into four pieces to make every possible combination of jam+cheese

Any pets? (+ names)

No my mum is allergic and my dad thinks a pig or turtle are not fun!

Dream job?

Open a sandwich restaurant

To be fair, going through the questions was a little confronting. I don’t really remember who I was as a child. I always thought of my kid-self as just shy and nerdy (see photo) but then I later got surprised to see myself act all goofy in front of the Sony Handycam. Framing my kid self as nerdy was probably a way for my teen self to try to distinguish itself as cool. But if my kid self would see myself now, what he has grown into, he would know that the nerdy never really went away. Kid Gijs would quite clearly recognise a continuity from his way of dealing with bread toppings to my current passion for compasses and other grids.

Photo: Classic Gijs.