"I’m glad that you are socializing. I always imagine you sitting at the computer…"

T’s mother thinks we don’t get out enough. To ally any concern, we thought it might be time for a little glimpse of “A Day in the Life.”

We’re not up here as early as we are on the West Coast. Six thirty is as early as we can manage, and in the blackness, we usually are out and really about by seven. D.’s classes don’t begin until eleven, so he’s less concerned, but he studies best in the morning, he’s found, so the earlier he can pull himself together, the better.

Despite the words from the worrying parent, sitting at the computer is part of what we do for a living. T. is still writing — daily. Has deadlines. Has the weekly writing group. Has a new manuscript under consideration with Knopf. (Just to clear up any confusion, since her father asked her last week what she does all day when D. isn’t home. *rolls eyes.*) D. is also still working, but only a tiny bit, as he’s having to write the specs for the database project he’s building — before he builds it. And he’s also writing essays. He’s on the second draft of the first one that’s due already. There’s not as much due as we expected… but he’s still a bit swamped, thus the computer time.

There’s also some daily reading time in the house. As previously mentioned, in the mornings, D. reads school stuff, T. reads other people’s manuscripts and reviews books — and every day publishers send packages with more, because now she’s reviewing books for children’s and young adult book award. Usually it’s first thing in the morning on Mondays when we read — each of us on our own couch, wrapped in blankets, hard at work. Or, dozing off again…

Mondays we trek to the library for our reading, and breakfast there. Sounds weird, but our branch has a café, and we have never yet seen a good book that didn’t look better with a mug of tea and a roasted vegetable panino. Thursdays we attend choir rehearsal — (and we’re whipping The Creation oratorio into shape. Just four more weeks until the performance!) and afterwards take advantage of the city-wide Thursday late opening hours to pick up a few items from the organic market. Thursdays are really entertaining nights, because it seems like the whole city is outside, on foot, wandering into traffic en masse. (City people in traffic are amusing – never mind that the little walking man light is red — walk anyway. What, there’s a car coming? No worries, they’ll stop. Don’t count on that from the buses, though…)

The usual bits of daily living get done around D’s school schedule. Mondays he only has one class, Tuesdays he’s out of the house by eleven-thirty and doesn’t
return until after 7 p.m., Wednesdays and Thursdays he’s out until six — and mind you, it gets dark by four. Most days we are together for a quick candlelit …lunch. (It’s SO dark that T. has had a really good excuse to unpack the four hundred or so tea lights left over from her sister’s wedding, that yes! She packed and shipped over [in a rare stroke of genius] to up the coziness factor).

There’s something weird going on with our eating habits. Eating lunch, the light tells us that we’re eating an early dinner. It’s dark by four — just dark. Like it is at eight. So, by the time we should be eating dinner, something in our brains tells us we already did. We are actually less hungry. Mind you, this fluke isn’t working to our advantage entirely. We tend to do meal combining – breakfast is a huge brunch affair, so it’s not as if we’re missing anything in the calorie department by missing a meal. (Drat. T. is crankily beginning another diet. Tomorrow…) On the weekends, D. is still cooking and baking and experimenting; during the week, T. has her turn. With the contents of the CSA box as her guide, she’s branching out — tonight will be roasted parsnips… (pray for us, now and at the hour when we eat.)

We do socialize — but right now, socializing is somewhat like interviewing. Lots of the meet-and-greet things D. has to do are part of academia, where it’s all about who you know that weighs in on determining where you go… It seems like a massive and quite pointless game at times. D. spends his time smiling at philosophy professors and it’s a relief when we can hang out with people who are actually not Associates and Acquaintances, but people who are slowly moving toward the category of friend. Our weekends also have to have room
for Conferences, for more reading, for discover-the-city explorations, for our church-hopping adventures, for our scheduled Skype visits home, and for the Life and Death Struggle previously known as Scrabble. (May we take a moment to rail against those who play only for the cheap glory of the triple word score spots, [LAURA??? and D.???] instead of the elegance of a well-played word? May we??? Thank-you.)

Right now, life feels bizarrely… consequence free… It’s as if nothing we’re doing right now matters in the larger scope. The rent is paid. There’s enough money for food. Sometimes we just sit and say, “Huh. We’re in the UK.

In a way, we left our community for this reason, so we could work without distractions and take a breather, but it still sometimes feels like that “breather” is just a big inhalation that goes on and on. In the silence between breaths is a little pause during which no one cares what we do, or expects us anywhere, or feels like we should or ought to be doing anything. Freeing. Disturbing. This little pause seems like something we should have figured out how to manage without moving so far away…

– D & T

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