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I'm developing a Sunday night dinner and Soprano's routine. I saw the first six episodes of this show on video, and starting last week I am now watching the show weekly. The violence can be a little shocking (to me at least) but apart from those scattered scenes the characters are very likable. This feels almost manipulative, but I think they (writers? actors?) pull it off.
Anyway, for me, the routine is the really great part. Maybe it's some phase I'm going through, but it seems like the weeks (months, years) can really slip by quickly. I feel a certain amount of pressure towards scheduling lest I get so busy that I forget to do anything (cue Pink Floyd DSotM...) I guess these routines are like self perpetuating schedules: once you set them up they just sort of run, filling in the time.
In a dream last night the Wheel and I were staying in some big house (with a big group of people and a powerful matriarch) in Amsterdam and I knew I had to get back to the States, but MB wasn't there, and the Wheel was staying on, and I just couldn't deal with getting the tickets and making my way to the airport by myself. The whole process of making the arrangements was just too complex. Everything was strange and foreign. Do you ever get that feeling in dreams where you are trying to move, but it's like somebody cranked up the gravity, or the air has been changed into a thick viscous goo? You try, but nothing gets done. You can't make any headway. Luckily, in the end, I just had to wake up in order to be home.
I guess it's pretty much the best thing in the world to wake up next to someone you love. That's the best routine in my life. The loop that drives everything else. The constancy. Like a heartbeat. On a slightly different level, my regular thursday night outings have become very important for me as well. Marking the weeks, since the weekdays and weekends all blend together. And now Sundays (at least two in a row, we'll see how that develops) are added in. Another beat driving the score. I know over the long term these arrangements come and go, or at least re-arrange, but right now everything has drifted into a nice tight formation. Lots of repetition, but with the beats falling on the things I like the most. That's some kind of blessing.
You're not waiting for a point, are you? I don't have one. Except tonight I'm going to a friends house for dinner and the Soprano's, I'm not stuck in Amsterdam somewhere on the way to the airport, and even though my life is busy these days, I guess it's the absolute best kind of busy. The kind that keeps bringing you and your friends back together.
Time for some work now. Putting a new machine on the network in the office and starting in on the DSL. This kind of stuff is the other routine, and really it's not too bad either. Until something goes wrong and there's a driver conflict, or the network goes haywire, or the dog gods of Sirius decide that packets are going to mysteriously disappear at the firewall today. And even then it's not so bad. Only a few more hours until the Soprano's.