Growing up, I always assumed that it was pretty much the worst thing in the world to be ordinary. My parents always stressed the importance of the extraordinary, and dismissed the mundane. But itching at the back of my mind for several years now has been this bizarre craving for the most normal life possible.
This is odd for me. Nothing was ever entirely normal about me growing up; I was always the weird girl with the good grades (clearly I got
all the boys sniffing around...), and I knew that excessive normalcy would be frowned on by god knows who. Everybody. Myself. But there was always this sneaky little June Cleaver inside me whose favourite game was to pretend to breastfeed my dolls while wandering around the house "tidying" and sighing about, I kid you not, the hassle and expense of daycare. This same little girl thought that minivans were pretty much the most magical things ever, and bore a closer-than-amazing resemblance to airplanes (there are more than two rows of seats! and there are more than two bucket seats! and you get individual controls with headphone jacks! like an airplane!) ... Okay, clearly I still think so. And no one can convince me otherwise.
Me, being clearly very normal, with my big brother
and baby cousin. Already a protective Momma.
Also, since taking up with The Boy, whom I have started to refer to as SamuEL on the prodding of a beloved friend (say it out loud; as she says, inflection is key), I have become entranced by the bewitching and lovely normalcy of his family. It can't get much more nuclear than that household: one mother, one father (whose marriage is a continual and secret delight and hope for me, child of the hilariously non-nuclear family), one older brother (my Boy), one younger sister, sensibly close in age, one dog, one cat, nice house, nice jobs, nice neighbourhood. Two cars: a loveable old Mazda, and, you guessed it, a minivan. Both kids got highly decent grades, both can play instruments, both have fun and rewarding social lives, and both are very good athletes. It's enough to make this Weird Girl go get her dolls and investigate decent local preschools.
I guess that I'd always assumed that if you were ordinary, you were doomed to be unpleasant, boring, or socially useless. I'd always presumed that everything about my life would push beyond, be something different, be weird, at least. For god's sake, I'm planning to be a diplomat, where you change continents every 3 years! But is it wrong to instead daydream about taking a child to run around with a sport I've never played? To want them to go to the same schools their whole childhood, knowing people from kindergarten and living blocks from their classrooms? Is it wrong to want my future children to be near their grandparents, and the icons of my childhood? To go to stupid parties in high school, and have inappropriate boyfriends, and date their friends' exes, and come home drunk and get grounded? To love their life and their home and their surroundings with gentle contentment and grace instead of whirlwind excitement?
As you might be able to tell, I've started to find my previous scattered itchings and minivan excitement coalescing into a full-blown Pod People-like desire to have a life just like The Boy's family, because really? They've shown me that ordinary can be extraordinarily beautiful.
... Just don't tell him that. I'd like to keep my boyfriend, thanks.
Who I'm Judging Right Now: my lungs. Why do they feel that it's necessary to give me a persistent little cough all day every day for the last week, and then the moment I've convinced everyone that I'm just fine, and I'm not really That Girl in the lecture, they feel it's necessary to have me cough up, truly and literally, a big live ball of bright green phlegm exceptionally visibly onto the sleeve of my black coat. Thanks, lungs.
On that note, out of pure spite, I'm judging That Girl Who Has A Slight Cold In Class. Shut up, That Girl, and go get a freaking kleenex.
Cough like this...
(TM Satine, Moulin Rouge's consummate
consumptive heroine)
... Spit up something like this.
(Also, why is it that if you so much as cough in a dramatic romantic
movie, you without a doubt will be dead by the end? Cough = death,
apparently, and now I'm judging you too, Studio Executives!)
