I’ve decided to embrace summer lassitude.
Every year, I fight against it. Every year, we all gradually sink into it, tolerating a messy house and jungly garden, ceasing productive activity beyond a little desultory knitting and a few bursts of canning.
This year, I’ve been winning.
Oh, the house is of course a mess, and the huge quantities of groceries I bring into the house on Saturday are gone by Tuesday; the boys are doing their best to spend their days eating and making messes, as is the summer tradition.
But I have continued to maintain a fairly good housekeeping schedule and kept working on projects. I’ve been baking and writing and spending only my usual amount of time lolling around. Clean laundry and healthy meals continue to appear at regular intervals. The garden is getting watered and weeded. I’ve been happy about this.
And here it is the 27th of July. Only about three weeks till school starts again. A Floridian was in the store yesterday, and they go back to school on August 3 (like MaMaMoo), as do the Oklahomans. Clearly, though the heat will be with us for some time, summer is fleeting.
Where are the afternoons on the porch reading and sipping iced tea? Where are the summer evenings playing games? Where are the mornings spent in the garden?
I haven’t been overworked (that may still be ahead), but neither have I lazed around any more than usual.
How, then, will I have the satisfaction of getting back to my regular routine after school starts — if I never stopped it? Where will be the pleasure in productive fall days if there is no contrast with hedonistic summer ones?
So I will be adding some hedonistic lazing to my schedule straightaway. Except that tonight I do have a meeting with Chamber Singers to audition a couple of director candidates. That is directly after work, but right after that I will begin lazing in earnest.
#2 daughter has persuaded her roommate to see her point of view, and will be flatting beginning next week. I learned that word from Sighkey. I think it means renting an apartment with roommates in a young and jolly way, and it sounds more glamorous than “sharing an apartment.” Sighkey says that she never flatted at all, which I take to mean that she never lived in an apartment. She makes it sound pretty raffish.
I bet that most American adults have lived in an apartment at least once, and probably with roommates. How is it, then, that we have no word for this, while the people of Kiwi-a-go-go-land, among whom it is optional, have such a cool word as “flatting”?
They probably pronounce it as we would a word spelled “fletting,” too, to add to the exoticism. It would then sound more like “flitting,” a word associated with butterflies and birds and rapscallions.
Anyway, this is what #2 daughter will be doing. #1 daughter will be getting her husband back from the briny deep today, if all goes well and the Navy don’t change their minds. The two of them live in an apartment issued them by the Navy, but I don’t suppose that can be called flatting.
It’s too hot to do anything. And I am too tired. And I am used to being behind. It still bothers me, but I have accepted the inevitable.
I flatted. 🙂
Almost 🙂 ‘Apartments’ have only just started existing in NZ in the last 10 or 15 years. HOw it usually works over here is that landlords own 3 to 6 bedroom old villa houses that were the pride of the cities back at the beginning of the 20th century. These places are maintained just to the point that they do not fall down around the ears of the occupants (although sometimes their student occupants make a fairly good job of bringing the house down (literally) by themselves anyway) and the landlords – at least down here – charge between 70 and 100 dollars a room per week. So our ‘flats’ are really houses in which the bedrooms, rather than the house, is rented. All bedroom occupants are supposed to share the other facilities in the house.
It is the most common form of accommodation for students – second year (approx 18/19) and above in the university cities. Those of my friends who wanted to get away from their parents usually moved into a flat about the same time they left school (so they were about 16 or 17). At the time I was considered very peculiar because I had no issues with my parents so didn’t see the need to move in with a bunch of girls and boys my own age whose main entertainment even back then seemed to be drinking and trying out whatever the newest legal and illegal pharmaceutical compound was. Fortunately they all survived and grew up to be parents themselves but flatting is not quite the fashion now that it was – now it tends to be the parents who are trying to get their kids out of the house, not the kids trying to escape their parents. It has gone somewhat to the other extreme – those teenagers who escaped from their parents now have children, and in some cases, grandchildren of their own and find themselves having to support their children and/or their grandchildren in a less forgiving world than the one we grew up in.
I think I pronounce ‘flatting’ the way I would pronounce ‘ratting’. But of course to you, my ‘ratting’ might sound like ‘retting’.
We should definitely have a term like “flatting it”. It sounds far more glamorous that way I agree. 😉
I read your comment on Leonidas’s site. Interesting take on the whole sex thing. Though for me I have never had the experience since I’ve only ever been with my hubby… As far as I can tell I have more trouble with the whole “getting there” then my more promiscous friends. Or maybe I am just more honest… Who really knows. Still you did provide an interesting perspective. I have always been greatful that I don’t have to go through that because it seems to me it would be incredibly awkward, scary and uncomfortable.
Yes, ‘ratting’ is hunting rats with dogs although the word is not in regular usage here, I remembered it from novels set in Victorian times in England. Even after a decade of hearing accents other than kiwi (perdominantly American) around me on a regular basis, the pronounciation differences are still fascinating. I swear I pronounce ‘flatting’ differently from ‘fletting’ – I can hear the difference and so probably could other kiwis and quite possibly aussies although to kiwis we would hear them say ‘fletting’ for our ‘flatting’. (We think the kiwi 6 sounds like ‘six’ but the aussies pronounce ‘6’ as we pronounce ‘sex’.) While listening to an American say ‘flatting’ today I was attempting to make explicit to myself the difference in the sounds. To me, it sounds as if the American ‘a’ in ‘flatting’ sounds like a dipthong although I am unable to produce the sound and was unable to think of a kiwi word in which we would use the same sound. When I was in the US, my accent sounded ‘flat’ compared to everyone elses and, as I mentioned at the time, by the time we had been in the US for 3 days both I and the other kiwi on the course had started cringeing everytime we heard ourselves speak. Another point of difference we discovered today kiwis and germans say ‘longitudinal’ with a hard ‘g’. The American in the conversation used a soft ‘g’.
Accents are so much fun 🙂
I like bagpipers, too, but not at 5:00 am, and when I have a migraine that’s making me sensitive to sound, two pipers playing “Scotland the Brave” is not my fondest wish.
I might also add that the combination of pipers and too much to drink is sometimes unfortunate.
Make sure to enjoy the summer too!! With a nine and six year old, I have to slow down, because they complain if I don’t, plus they like me to sit with them when they go swimming (if I’m not swimming myself)so I have to sit and read!