I wrote the following bit while I was sitting in the test lab yesterday. I wrote it in spurts between testing and waiting for fixes and waiting for return e-mails and talking to K.T., so excuse me if it sounds a little disjointed.
Mental Furniture: KT has been writing, for most of the day, a journal entry about her father. I haven't read this entry yet, but I've been talking to her as she writes. She's doing what sounds like a fairly in-depth analysis of her father, and his behavior, and her reactions to his behavior. She's remembering things she resented as a child and trying to re-evaluate his actions from the perspective of an adult. She complained that all she was doing was typing, but felt exhausted.
My explanation was that she was doing some heavy self-inspection, and quite a bit of mental realignment. I told her, "If you think of your opinions as mental furniture - and the older they are, the bigger and heavier they get (haven't you ever noticed how antiques are big and heavy, even the really pretty ones?) - then it's not surprising that re-arranging them is tiring."
She liked the analogy, though it's something I've heard before. It doesn't quite work, of course. If you stand in your house and look around you, it's possible to take an inventory of all the furniture and items there. You can write them down: "Sofa, lamp, desk (contains four pens, two pencils, and a dry inkwell)..." et cetera.
But it's not really possible to do that with your mind. You never know when something is going to change on you, or jump out of nowhere leaving you gasping and wondering where the hell that came from...
But you can catalogue a lot of it. That overstuffed comfy chair in the middle of the room, there - that's Matt's love for me. I alternate between sitting gingerly on the edge of it because I'm afraid it will disappear suddenly, and bouncing violently on the cushions to test its strengths and limits.
See that sortof beat-up looking desk over there? That's my friendship with K.T. Watch out, it's got that sharp edge there... It was there almost from the very beginning, but I had to move the desk to get the chair in here, and it got pretty badly damaged in the process. I've been trying to put it back together. It's almost as good as new, and I've been reinforcing the walls while I was working on it, but that one edge is still a little sharp.
There are some chairs along the walls - that's my family. The two big ones in the center is my relationship with my parents - they're pretty sturdy. For all the climbing and clambering and leaning and shoving and pushing I did growing up, they have hardly a crack. That sortof crooked one is my brother's. When I was younger I could only sit in it for a minute or two at a time, and then that crooked piece would get on my nerves. Now, I can rest there if I'm especially tired, or especially lively, but if I'm just a bit tired, it gets on my nerves again. All the rest? They look comfortable, but are really only guest chairs - good for a few hours or days, and then I want to get up and move again.
I've got a small collection of antique mirrors - the friends they represent can only see me through the eyes of the past. I keep them around because some of those views are nice. This one with the crack in it, I keep to remind myself that I have not always been so pretty on the inside.
There's more, of course - the mind is infinitely more cluttered than a real house. But I'm not opening to the public the structures over my bed, or the mess in my closets, or my medicine cabinet. You get the idea.
So we went bowling last night. It was T, Sara, K.T., Colleen, Carl, Matt and me. Most of us were really awful, except Carl, who used to bowl on a league, and K.T., who took bowling in college and was pretty good once she got back into the swing of things. Some of us were more awful than others. I came in second to last on all but the first game, which I lost soundly. (The other two games, I beat Sara, but I suspect that was only because her skinny little wrists got tired faster than mine.) The fact that we sucked didn't bother us in the slightest. We took pride in it, even, walking away from many a gutterball with two thumbs way up in the air, chanting proudly, "I suck!"
About halfway through the night it occurred to me that 1) I wished I'd brought my digital camera with me (I've been saying that a lot lately - I really ought to take it with me more often!) and 2) I should write down the things people were saying that were funny. So here you go: some quotes from last night, in lieu of pictures:
Carl: "I never made a man scream before!"
Liz: "You're supposed to suck for your boyfriend!" (to Colleen, on why she ought to bowl for the late-arriving Carl)
Liz: "I suck, and no one is going to take that away from me!"
Multiple people: "The William and Mary Precision Bowling Team!" (a standard response to having the "skill" necessary to knock down only one pin out of the ten.)
Colleen: "You need bigger holes!"
Liz: "College taught me to take pride in my fuck-ups!"
Liz: "You don't need to win to prove you're better than him!" (to Colleen, who was irritable because Carl was beating her)
Matt: "If I say That's an ugly baby, and you tell me that baby won the Nobel Prize, it's still an ugly baby!" (to Sara, in reference to a wild throw of Sara's that by some fluke got her a spare.)
You'll notice that most of those are things I said. That's because bowling alleys are very loud places, and I don't filter sounds very well. It's nearly impossible for me to have much of a conversation in one, and so I'm sure I missed a lot of really great quotes. Anyone who was there who'd like to post other funny things that were said or done is welcome to hit that "Talk to me" link below and post them in the forum somewhere!
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