Over Afternoon Tea

Tea is not only a drink but a ritual over which people have been relaxing, talking, and catching up on each other's lives for centuries. This blog is intended to serve as a virtual cup of tea, helping me keep in touch with friends and family in my physical absence.

Small Miracles
make me stop and think, re-evaluate my cynicism, and pray a little more awakely next time.
I wonder if that's half the miracle.

I wish good things were as hard to spoil as bad things are to mend.

This Is It

College is a life lived in short bursts. You keep promising yourself that if you can just get through midterms, just through this paper, just through finals week, everything will be all right. And it is, because Christmas break or summer vacation is just around the corner. And then you rub elbows with your family and work a boring job and start missing your own space, and soon you're promising yourself that if you can just get through a few more weeks, you'll be back at school, on your own turf. And so it goes, semester after semester, until suddenly, surprise! You made it through one more finals week and it was the last.
Standing there you look back and back, and suddenly realize you've lived life peeping around corners. As a kid waiting for Christmas, for a birthday, for that slumber party. Then in highschool, for that summer vacation with endless empty hours. Then college, and then suddenly, this is it.
Possibly the most terrifying words in the English language. As C.S. Lewis put it, life is "term, holiday, term, holiday, and then work, work, work till you die." There is something apalling about the repetitive infinity the future promises.
But I'm not quite there yet. I have one more corner to peek around. And it's not because I don't like my job that I'm looking forward to the time when I can stay home and just take care of my kids. But I'm suddenly realizing that I've never done anything day in, day out for as long as the two or three years I plan to hold this job. I feel like I'm gazing across a vast plain to an even more illimitable ocean. I want to get there, but I'm more than a little afraid of the time when there are no more corners to peek around, when I say to myself 'this is it' and mean it: this is it, this is what all my life has been coming to, and I'll go on doing this for years and years and years, twenty or thirty or forty of them, depending on how many children we have and how late the last one is born. I wonder if I'll be able to settle down, or if I'll keep promising myself some kind of change, peeking round the corner to when the baby weans, finishes teething, is potty-trained, when the new baby comes and I'm not pregnant anymore...
I don't think I can face this, any this, being it.

There's No Place Like Rome

First, a brief apology: I am aware that I haven't posted in forever. Life got busy, then the Internet went dead, and then I went to Rome. If I'd had net access, I would've told you I was going beforehand. Oh well.

Rome was quite the experience. After a week abroad, I feel I've experienced the roots of ancient civilization and the roots of modern Americo-centrism. Like vents in the bathroom so that your entire hotel room needn't be muggy. And toilets in enough places that you don't have to dehydrate yourself to get through the day without a burst bladder. And heating that works at all hours of day and night (marvelous, isn't it?). It's lack of little things like that that combine to make spending two days out of seven in Rome flat on your back with a 102 fever so much fun.

On the other hand, it was definitely worth it. We spent two days wandering around the Colosseum, Forum, etc. which were worth the two days in bed. Best of all, we saw the site of the old curia house. I couldn't resist bringing Cicero's First Catilinarian along and reading a bit of it from there. (Those of you with better memories may recall where that one was actually delivered; I don't think it was the old curia house but that's OK.) My husband couldn't resist snapping pictures. OK, so like most students of Latin I could be accused of Cicero-worship. Whatever.

The sunshine was beautiful, the gelati was great, the language barrier wasn't too bad. I managed a three-sentence conversation in Italian with a waitress that got my husband and brother-in-law staring at me like I dropped from the sky. But hey, it got them their coffee -- even if it was actually a cafe Americano, therefore coming with foam on top, which caused said brother-in-law (who didn't realize) to pour himself a cup of foam and make faces.

Anyway, Rome was memorable. But for the moment, I'm still weak from the fever (which finally broke the night before we left) so it's back to bed for me. I hope to get some links to pictures up soon. It's good to be home.