![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
had for df and mm
via https://ift.tt/2ZPlDfe
was at MM’s house for Halloween. Her son pranced past, on his fourth or fifth costume change of the day. (He had dinosaur pajamas, a Stormtrooper costume with mask, truck pajamas, a dragon costume with metallic jumpsuit, wings and tail, the dinosaur pajamas again, the truck pajamas, a brief foray into a shirt and pants to go play in the mud and then have to get washed, the truck pajamas for dinner, and then he went out trick-or-treating dressed as the Grim Reaper. It was a typical Sunday up until that last bit.)
“I,” she said, with an air of sudden realization, “am going to have to sit through so many musicals, starting in a couple of years.”
I watched him go by, and his sister behind him, who had been wearing wire-frame bat wings for two days now.
“Oh,” I said. “Shit. Yeah.”
“I’d better get a hip flask,” MM said.
“No,” I said. “No, what you’re going to do is get a really nice one of those travel coffee mugs? and then never ever put coffee into it. I know from experience once you’ve used them for coffee they always taste like coffee afterwards. No, you’re going to have a really unexceptional-looking one that you never put coffee in.”
“Oh good idea,” she said.
I thought about it for half a second, and then said, “wait you’re walking distance from the high school,” and she grinned broadly and said,
“Oh, listen, I bought this house for a reason.”
I realized in that moment that, naturally, I also am going to be attending a lot of amateur musicals, since her family has really proven that they’re not really gonna be there for her or her kids much. Probably I am going to be the one recording them on video for the absentee grandparents.
Well, I also will get myself a nice travel tumbler and put myself into a place to be chill about that sort of thing. (Not wine, surely. No, probably something like a sangria. Though you’d have to be careful not to have anything that needs ice in it; ice makes a distinctive sound sloshing in an insulated tumbler. The point is to be discreet.)
I’m glad to have a couple of years to mentally prepare myself. My mother had a venerable career as The #1 Audience Member at all the school plays– she’d usually have been to enough rehearsals with one or the other of us that she knew where all the jokes were supposed to be, and she’d still laugh even if the kid flubbed the line during the performance, so that the rest of the audience knew it was supposed to have been a joke.
Well, I probably won’t make it to the rehearsals, but I know most of the classics anyway, so I’m ready.
Semi-relatedly, DF is dyslexic and so reading is rather hard for him and he tends to reserve it for the constant studying he has to do for recertifications for work, so he’s started outsourcing his pleasure reading to his wife again now that she’s got enough time to almost sleep enough to almost be sane, what with the kids in school. He gave her a book on the philosophical discipline of hedonism to read and explain to him, and she did so diligently, and the upshot is that the hedonists were, as many things, misinterpreted by the Victorians; they were not actually arguing for orgies of mindless heedless pleasure, but rather devoting themselves to the elimination of unpleasantness. Their actual tenets called for moderation in most things; to truly avoid unpleasantness, one must avoid excess. So a true hedonist would stop drinking before they hit the point of nausea, or even the point of having a hangover. A true hedonist would eat a balanced diet so as to avoid the consequences of excess. A true hedonist would simply attempt to live live while avoiding anything with bad consequences.
Not a terrible philosophy to adopt, overall. Middle age has already started me down that path.
(He’s not really assigning her reading, he just got the book and said he wished he had time to read it, knowing it would take him a very long time, and she was happy enough to summarize it for him. Of course, given her everythingness, she took notes as she read so that she could present it as a report, but that’s actually the kind of thing she’d do for fun anyway. So we all got to hear the report on hedonism, over dinner. It does in truth sound like rather a dry book.) (Your picture was not posted)
