Lovely sunday around the house today.
My wife went out to see a friend. When she was out my daughters and I goofed a while and I made them hot chocolate. Very chill and fun. I’m pleased with myself that I managed to exercise today and the last two days well. Today I was doing a lat pulldown thing with an exercise band and it snapped, hardly what one expects in a fitness device, I say, standards do seem to slippings these days. Tempted to add an “eh what?” at the end. I’ve been watching more Brit TV - actually said “Brit telly” like a Brit in my head, absolutely shameful.We had a problem during the hot chocolate: my kids really like what they call squirty whip cream, the kind that sprays out in a foam from a spray can. I said they could have that on their hot chocolate and the 6yo got it last and it died in her hands, its sputtering last gasp too little to fill the top of her cup. She was not pleased, to understate it, stormed up to her room awash in grief and outrage. After she calmed down enough to hear me out I told her I’d get some new at the store as soon as her mom got home. (I’d asked the older two if they would be uncomfortable if I left them home while I ran out - the store’s just a mile away - and they said yes so I didn’t do that. I was home alone a lot starting much younger than they bigger two are now and sometimes with my younger brothers, but I was also uncomfortable a lot too!) This news calmed her much and she came out to play, so that felt nice.
I’ve missed the last ten days I think (appropriately enough, because this is post 40 and the last one was post 39 - there is a huge gap between the 30s and 40s, an exhausted exhausting gulf... heh). It’s odd that it’s been that many days. I guess that’s the Thanksgiving holiday week with both weekends, basically? Work’s been frustrating and hard, enrollment shortfall and resulting budget shortfall, cuts projected and a lot of unclear talk from management and pressure to move quickly and undemocratically. Bad scene, tiring, annoying, distracting. Plus holiday stuff.
Thanksgiving itself was nice. I made dinner. Mashed potatoes, tofu, stuffing, cranberry sauce. I should eat the remaining leftovers or feed them to the 14yo, the biggest fan of it all. My wife made a lovely butternut squash pie that she told the kids was pumpkin. Very tasty and the leftover filling we served them today as a pumpkin pudding. (This reminds me I took some of the leftover hot chocolate today and made chocolate pudding - there was a pretty thick residue of cocoa in the bottom of the pan and I didn’t want to waste it. I’ll tell the girls in the morning. Tempted to make some of it into a no-bake peanut butter and chocolate pie, if we have any powdered sugar.)
Before Thanksgiving I asked my family what they wanted, expecting them to not care, and they said something like “all the usual stuff” and I listed the stuff I said above and they were like “Yeah!” and the 14yo in particular said “I like all that stuff.” I had been assuming they wouldn’t care and I wasn’t sure what I’d cook if it was just for me - I’ve always liked Thanksgiving and have pretty fond memories of it from when I was a kid and I like to eat more than anyone else in the house - so I was pleased by that, and even moreso that they liked the meal. Oh yeah, onion gravy too. Banger.
Back to work tomorrow so I should break off, a little sad to come back but whatever. I’m pleased the semester’s almost over. Speaking of work, sort of, I watched several Ken Loach movies this last week while washing the dishes. Really good, really sad, and I feel a bit cultured as a result, which is silly but also something I kind of crave even though it’s silly. There’s a line in one of the movies, I forget the exact wording now but it’s about how - WAIT it’s NOT in a Loach movie it’s in the Greg Davies hosted documentary about the Barry Kines Kestrel for a Knave book, which is the basis for Loach’s movie Kes - about how the main character in Kes learns falconing and that gives him confidence, which we all need and the middle class has a great deal of confidence since they pay a lot of money for it. It really spoke to me, as someone who would like to be more confident and who has ended up interacting with far more middle class people than I grew up around.
I need to get to bed but I wanted to also write this down: the other night I heard myself again, like I noticed I was talking in the accent I grew up speaking. More on that in a sec. I was talking to the 14yo a little about this, I can’t remember how it came up exactly but she was saying that the word idiolect is helpful for explaining what she means by the ‘voice’ of a character to people on fan fiction forums (I taught her that word, I’m pleased to say, and I’m so proud of her). She’s absolutely massively into the She-Ra reboot show and hangs out in online spaces devoted to it. The 10yo was there too and she explained idiolect to her and we then got to talking about codeswitching and she explained that to the 10yo via a She-Ra example. We were talking about how people codeswitch while still speaking their own idiolect and really one’s own idiolect defined expansively anyway includes all the ways one talks in all context and that’s not exactly the same as but isn’t far off of one’s personality. I think that’s interesting.
If my idiolect is the lake of my speech, the rowboat - the lil dinghy - of my self floats in the lake and drifts around sometimes, and I’ll end up speaking like when I grew up, without thinking about it, and sometimes I notice it just after I’ve talked and it’s a bit like, oh I floated over here now I guess. Specifically, I said I was going to the store for our grocery pick up, and I said it “okay um goan a store.” On the short drive to the store I was playing the phrase around in my head and I thought, if I were to say that I would be doing to the store soon and that I wanted to know if anyone needed me to do anything first I would say “okay um goan a store na sec, needening for a go?” (“okay I’m going to the store in a sec, need anything before I go?”) I think it’d be interesting to try to write in that voice - I sort of want to learn to write a novel, though that’s a frightening, vulnerable thing to admit and something I don’t feel capable of and also something that feels snooty to say - and I’d love to read a novel written in that voice spelled sort of phonetically or whatever, a bit like Scottish accents written that way in some Scottish fiction. It doesn’t look like English written down and it stress that people should read it in the right accent. As I get older the more I care a bit about that and also wonder what ‘my’ voice even is - I often feel like in the voice that I communicate in I’m wearing job interview clothes or something else analogous to that, never ‘my’ voice, not that I’m broken up about it or whatever, just an observation. I think that is part of why when I hear myself speaking my home accent - and I do experience it that way, my home accent, though a home I haven’t lived in for many, many years is how it feels and is also the reality! - I try to lean into it and purposefully continue it. At some level I’d kind of like to talk more like that and forget how to codeswitch to some extent - I’ll dress how I want!
(Since the gap was so long between the last post and this one I let myself write a lot longer on this by the way.)
