I'd love to know more about your experience of Hare Krishnas. When I was 19 (snap!) my best friend became a devotee. It was horrible and I hated it at the temple and it made me irrationally want to cry. In fact I think I grabbed my shoes and fled the temple at one time, running down the street in my socks. They freaked me out, those creepy Hare Krishnas.
I hear you. Together 16 years with my husband and we are much more like Phil and Claire than Leslie and Ben. Although of course Parks and Rec is an infinitely better show, I don't think it's either unrealistic nor unpleasant for a longstanding couple to relate to eachother with a healthy amount of side eye, ribbing, exasperation, and mickey-taking.
Can you be all 'I like you and I love you' for 16 years as a couple? Please! Friction is realistic and, I believe, healthy. I'm not defending the show here, but a little bemused by all these opinions that seem to assume that a marriage should be all roses and delight in each other's company. Sweet expectations. But realistic? Uh, no.
Betty is a doll in a dollhouse and my heart aches for her. I think it's a cop out to give her terminal cancer; I would have liked to have seen her go somewhere with her studies - or, for her studies to fail but for her to find something - anything - to fulfil her outside the home. And have Henry suffer because of it. That would have been a great character arc for her - real change and struggle. This way, she gets to be a miserable creature and then she gets to die. Boo. Poor Betty.
I know that exact feeling! I remember my jaw actually dropping as I looked around and thought, 'Is this how normal people feel? No wonder they get so much stuff done in their lives. Imagine if I felt like this all of the time!'
A luge track? My father would lie full length on the old beat-up leather couch in the evenings, drinking wine and cuddling the boxer dog, and my parents started to call this behavior 'practicing the luge.' They would talk about how great he was going to be at the winter Olympics, with all the great practice he was putting in, then they would laugh like drains.
I love that colour blue one the wall in your bedroom. Irrelevant to cat thread, I know, and she is a lovely cat (I especially like her moustache). But you have inadvertently given me inspiration for the exact colour I want to paint the wall at the foot of my bed. Thanks!
This was perfect. Horses, steak, button-down. Nailed it.
Please can you tell me the author of that poem. I find it very beautiful, and, yes, immensely comforting!
"Whatever these little individuals are drawn to and interested in, and however they act, it's part of them and infinitely fascinating."
This is extremely well put. Infinitely fascinating - that sums up my experience as a parent just so well.
When I was living with my boyfriend on the coast in New Zealand, in a wee bach (NZ term for hut / basic cottage by the sea) with no electricity but an incredible wild coastline on our front yard, a pair of little blue penguins, as we call them, nested under our house. Directly under our bed. I would sit in the evenings and watch them make their way waddling up our lawn, and if I moved and scared them, they would erupt into this cartoon-esque panic, running in circles flapping their little flippers, falling over head over heels, scrambling back down the beach. But they'd come up every night and make their way under the house (once I found one asleep in my snowboarding boot, all snug). Through the thin floorboards we would hear them call to each other, weirdly, like screeching goblins. For cute birds they have a hell of a crazy call. Then, one night, we heard them call as usual at 2am (like 2 feet beneath us) and then, in a moment of quiet, a wee tiny, soft call we hadn't heard before. I swear we felt as proud at that moment as if we had become parents ourselves. It all went downhill from there though. The smell of regurgitated fish became fairly strong as they fed their growing chick every night. Eh, we loved them though.
![[Avatar]](/images/avatar26.png){kind=avatar}
Creation