Prickles and Complaints

Oh, my lands. The wind. The rain. The combination of said. It woke us up at and unholy hour this morning, the wind whistling through the vent at the top of the window, the spatter of rain against the window, as if some miscreant were throwing a handful of pebbles against the glass. Wow. Stormy weather. And that little chickie from the UK Consulate office in L.A. assured us, “Oh, it’s such a soft rain there. It’s kind of misty…” Um, yeah. Admittedly, it is now bright and icy cold sunshine outside, but the rain this morning was FIERCE. Is there anything misty about thirty mph. wind gusts?!

This day started off with more corroboration from the universe that we are, in fact, losing our minds. T. wakened in the wee small hours, suffocating and pouring sweat from the heat — to find that the comforter was folded in half on top of her, and D. was sleeping peacefully – sans blankets. (T. considered kicking him, but gave that up as a bad idea, as his legs are much longer. She was later informed that it was her fault anyway for leaving on the hallway radiator – more on that later.)

D. went whirling out the door with his bike and his gear, only to call T. ten minutes later and inform her that he was, in fact, sitting in an empty classroom — an hour early to his course. It’s the little things that have us stopped and laughing. Somehow, the more absurdly annoying things get, the funnier they seem.

Even as we whine, we can smile because we know we are whining. T. has a bit of a moan daily that she still can’t figure out how to make the dryer part of the washer/dryer combo work — and has to rely on drying racks and radiators (which explains the blistering conditions in the night), and that it takes forever to do anything — to walk to the University, to wash dishes by hand, to do laundry or clean the floors (the vacuum cleaner is abominable.), and that we’re practically pioneers, here — which is a vast and wild exaggeration, but this is whining, see. D. has a good moan about homework, the University professors who seem to prefer to hide in the pub or in their offices rather than be available, the rasp-tongued old baggage who screamed at him to “learn English” and “read the highway code,” when he rode by on his bike. (And you know, he DID go home and read the highway code. That’ll show her.) Imagining these complaints set to music doubles the amusement – yes, we have discovered the vast amusement afforded by complaint choirs.

If you’ve never encountered these, you’re in for a surreal experience. They’re the most niggling little collection of pointless bleatings ever, but that’s the point — our complaints are tiny pebbles in our shoes, just the steam blown off from our over-full lives. Nothing is really wrong with most of us — but the paper running out in the bathroom, the “some assembly required” nature of Ikea furniture, cellphone ringers, the nagging of spouses, the scarcity of good conversationalists, typos in the newspapers, the weather — these are the little things we collect to hand out to others as conversation, though complaints are not real communication. Who wants to talk endlessly about how awful they find the weather? Do you really listen when you ask someone how they are, and they wind up their list of prickles and pains? Not really, yet the amusement of hearing little petty pouting in four part harmony is somehow funnier than it should be. In any case, learning to laugh at these things helps us to let them go and to lighten up. That’s our goal right now, as it gets darker — to be sillier, to lighten up, to laugh. (This explains T’s DVD of belly dancing lessons — sometimes she just falls on the floor laughing, she’s so bad. And there we shall draw a veil…)

I never realized how Americans appear to people in the UK, but it seems we’re seen as …gun crazy. It’s still rankling, what a friend said last week, about “everybody” having guns. (Granted, it was in response to a comment about the legal drinking age here being sixteen, to which they retorted how it’s not like it’s as dangerous here, because “at least in the UK everybody doesn’t have guns.”)

See, here’s the thing: I don’t have a gun. My parents don’t have guns. My siblings don’t have guns. We don’t even know people who have guns (with the except of law enforcement personnel, and they don’t flaunt theirs). Granted, it’s because we lived in the depths of suburbia, where hunting just isn’t part of the routine, and most of the gumshoes and police we know are retired — but just the idea that we’re all some sort of cowboys, swaggering around in some ridiculous extended-adolescent gunslinger fantasy, well… Well, all right. There are definitely some people like that. But we are the LEAST gun-happy people I know. “Everybody,” in this case, doesn’t include most people…

The holidays are coming, and it seems odd that no one here seems to realize it. Well, no, take that back — they’re definitely revved up for Christmas, and something called Hogmanay (which has an unfortunate similarity with ‘Hootenanny,’ which just gives T, giggles) which we’ve found out is just New Years (apparently Boxing Day also comes in for its share of excitement). No Thanksgiving, though. Of course, it’s not as if we can expect the United Kingdoms of Britain to be celebrating the day some of its former colonists settled safely elsewhere, but the absence of people talking about what they’re cooking really stands out. D. will go to school that Thursday: it’s not a holiday in the UK. Instead, we have Firework Night and Diwali — two perfectly fun November holiday substitutes that involve more candles, less food and fewer relatives (well, I don’t know that for sure about Diwali, but certainly the fireworks don’t require relatives – and they seem to go on forever.).

It will be harder for us to miss Thanksgiving at home than Christmas. The quasi-traditional Thanksgiving routine has remained unchanged through the years — get together, annoy each other, be thankful for the opportunity, eat. This year we will simply be thankful to annoy each other long-distance, thankful to know that around some charmed candlelit circle, other people’s families are annoying each other, too.

– D & T

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