Saturday, August 01, 2009

College redux

As with all bad situations, a silver lining is present if you look hard enough.

This isn't as much a silver lining as looking at the situation as the cup being half full rather than half empty.

I've moaned loud and miserably about missing my kids now that Packrat is ill and is suspected to have H1N1.

And it's true. I miss them terribly.

But I've realised something about the both of us, now that the kids are not in the house.

Our house is a mess. Not in a 'we've emptied our drawers onto the floor' kind of mess but a more chaotic 'leave things as they are' mess. There are many reasons for this.

Obviously, we are spoilt and now that we don't have our helper picking up after us, an empty box stays on the table for as long as we forget to throw it away.

We are also, obviously, messy by nature and have defaulted into our original non-parent states. Because Packrat can't go out and I haven't been feeling up to going out, we've done one of four things. We are either eating, watching television (or doing both at the same time), on our computers online or asleep.

After 3 days of doing this, it dawned on me that this was what we did all the time when we were in college/ uni, especially in our thesis years when we didn't have formal classes. The day began when we woke up, usually when the sun was high up in the sky and meals were had in front of the television on the coffee table. Crockery and cutlery would pile in the sink till the tape (then, it was video tapes) ran out and we had nothing else to watch apart from Aussie day time soaps. If our eyes were too goggled by all the television, a nap would follow and then sometime on the computer mostly chatting with friends on the then chat platform (ICQ) and possibly some work followed by preparing dinner and vegging out in front of the television for the rest of the evening till we fell asleep in front of the television. Occasionally, television was swapped out in favour for the Playstation and its games and the same vegetative state would ensue although there would be a little bit more talking in terms of yelling at one another for killing the other.

This has been what we've been more or less doing the last few days to while away the time while we waited for Packrat to stop coughing (he hasn't yet and mine has gotten worse). If not for the fact that I worry about the twins and miss them and actually do leave the house to go see them, these days would seem like a strange and surreal gift of time to be able to live the lives we led when we were carefree, young unmarried and unencumbered students.

Unfortunately, the reminders round the house of the twins act as the resounding foghorn at the back of my head that echoes louder than my conscience did all those years ago that reminded me to go back and do my work while I whiled away another afternoon/ night watching yet another 6 episodes of Friends/ Buffy/ The West Wing.

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Ondine tossed this thought in at 22:28

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