It's not really that I'm a witch, but since I get stuck with Muggles (my blood relatives) almost each time there's a school holiday (that's the one annoying thing for me as a teacher: they just have to look at the calendar to know when I'm going to be free to come and see them visit them in order to be slaved), I've taken to comparing myself with a female Harry Potter forced to stay with the Dursleys (some of you even know that I call their house New Privet Drive, or NPD).
Yes, they're deeply annoying, and bigoted, and old-fashioned, and (sometimes) racist, but I've been training for years to tune out bipeds that bug me, so I can be in front of them, nod and 'Oh!' and 'Ahhh!' at all the right places (and if I miss one, since they're becoming deaf, I can get away with almost any wrong answer now).
So, yes, they're a pain in the You-Know-What (Merlin! Sorry for that lousy Potter-related pun!), but I've learnt to make lemonade:
- as of right now, I'm making them pay for half my trip to come see them.
- I get to spend a lot of time in the garden which means that:
a) I don't have to deal with them for hours and hours
b) I don't have to pay a sports club to get very nice muscles
c) I stop looking like the average vampire, and I get a nice tan (except during the Christmas break)
- they feed me (and we're not talking brains [sic] on toast or other horrors)
- I do all the things they can no longer do, which means that:
a) I'm learning DIY skills that I can use in my nest later
b) they're feeling sad because they see me do (quite easily) things that they can no longer do
c) they're beginning (with age) to feel a bit guilty for taking so much of my time (and having them feeling somehow indebted to me can always be useful)
- when I do anything for them, I do that thing I started when I was working on my PhD: I think about what I'm going to write. With the PhD, it started one day as I was unsure about a chapter, and I relaxed and found the right sequence whilst washing up. Now, I've got the plot bunnies in my head, and I plot their next actions as I do stuff for the Muggles.
In fact, the one thing that really bugs me about my Muggles is their slight tendency to sing the same songs several times a day (if they were singing all the time, I'd be in Bedlam - or Reading - by now).
As well, my kitten loves the garden, and he's been through enough. He deserves regular breaks from my tiny flat - and this is why, Ladies & Gentlemen, I still visit my annoying Dursleys, and I try to make the most of it.
3 comments:
The old but trite phrase, you can choose your friends but not your family, rings so true, but often we love them despite themselves. My granny was a miserable old ... well any way no one liked her even her kids and her gran-kids, but no matter what we still visited and had her over for xmas etc, even if all she ever did was criticize and moan and pick holes in every one. I came to realize she didn't know how to be a human and no one else but us ever even spoke to her. She lived to be 90 I can confess to not missing her, but I would never have not visited here even if I got picked on and told off for breathing when I was there.
meh, lemonade tastes nice after a while.
I hear you. Muggles are odd, but we can't just abandon them to emptiness. *hugs*
One does get used to lemonade, indeed. ô.O
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