Anna has shown an independent streak, just lately.
She has turned her bedroom into an apartment.
When I was about 11 years old, my Dad seriously thought about putting a toilet in my closet, just for me. I liked the idea. Why, you ask? Well, I was showing an unusual affection for the toilet. I was going in there and sitting on the thing for up to an hour at a time. And there was only one bathroom in our house.
When I was 11, my sister and brother were both entering their maximum-irritating years, which they both have just recently started to come out of. She was maybe 5, and he was maybe 3, and I was maybe wanting to spend long periods of time away from them, so I would go into the bathroom with a book, a long book, and I would do my job, but when I was done, I would just keep right on reading. Eventually, Dad would beat on the door and shout, “It’s been over an hour! hurry up and get out!”
It was a wonderful place, because I shared my bedroom with both of the irritants, and I couldn’t drive, and my brother could climb as high into the tree as I could, even when he was 3. The bathroom had a lock, and a fan (good for shutting out the sounds), and it was my friend.
I so wanted that toilet in my bedroom. With a toilet, I could come out of my bedroom every 3 weeks or so, stock up on food, and go back in there, lock my door, and never bother any of the family. I could have become a hermit, or agoraphobic, or a semi-anti-social type of guy, instead of the well-rounded healthy individual that I ‘ve actually become. It would have been a lot better.
But Anna has gone way, way beyond a private toilet:
She no longer sleeps in her bed. She likes it to look nice, so she carefully arranges the blankets in aesthetically pleasing and balanced and well-folded patterns. She won’t sleep under the covers, because that would ruin the bed.
She really doesn’t like to sleep on top of the bed, either, because it makes wrinkles. Instead, she has cleared a space in her closet, and put some extra blankets down, and she asks every night if she can sleep in there.
Sometimes I say yes.
She also has a dining room table. In her room. It has a nice tablecloth, a couple of chairs, and a decoration on top. She asks if she and Abbey can eat at her table.
So . . . Anna has a bedroom in her closet, a bed that she won’t sleep on, so it’s turned into a large piece of decorative whatever, and a dining room in the corner, next to her dresser, which she uses to hang random decorative decorations in decorative fashion. All she needs is a toilet in the closet.
Abbey, meanwhile, is learning to beat people up.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a karate demonstration at her school, and she came home and said that she liked it. Good enough for me; I signed her up the next day.
It was either that or some sort of dancing.
I won’t be having any dancing. I am a fair athlete; I play basketball, and people who are awful think I’m not bad. I can hit tennis balls, sometimes all the way over the fence. I do the P90X without causing damage to the house. I’m not a muffin of studliness, but athletically, I could be a lot worse. And I can’t dance, at all.
Anything I can’t do is suspect. Dancing often involves shaking your booty at members of the opposite sex, which is absolutely no good. Dancing is supposed to look graceful, but frankly, it mostly makes me uncomfortable, even when it is not I , personally, who is doing it. Watching other people dance makes me slightly uncomfortable.
This goes for all dancing:
Ballroom dancing? Slightly uncomfortable.
Salsa? Slightly uncomfortable.
Country down-home hoe-down boot scootin’ line boogying? Slightly uncomfortable.
Ballet? Slightly uncomfortable.
the funky chicken? Slightly uncomfortable.
Ghetto thumpy-beat dancing? Slightly uncomfortable.
Cheerleading? Slightly uncomfortable.
Interpretative dancing? Slightly uncomfortable.
Modern dance, with non-musical noise as accompaniment, that sort of back-to-our-primal-roots stomping about that seems to be filling our modern art schools? Slightly very uncomfortable.
Really, all dancing is uncomfortable for me, no matter who is doing it. Frankly, gymnastics is uncomfortably close to dancing, which is enough discomfort for me, thank you very much.
Abbey is not learning to dance at all, though, which is what her mother wanted her to do. But I was against it, because of the whole comfort thing, and also because Abbey has never shown a shred of interest in physical coordination. However, she has shown interest in beating her sister up, and good parents are always looking to encourage their children’s natural proclivities, so we are helping her to learn to beat people up at a higher level of effectiveness.
She has a gi (Pronounced gi), which is the karate uniform, and it comes with a little white belt . . . she looks awesome in her outfit. She’s not actually allowed to do any beating up until she progresses to her black belt, so I told her if she tries hard, we’ll just spray paint it for her in a couple of weeks.
