A productive day yesterday, as we prepare for Thanksgiving and the resulting guestification and turkey-waving.
And then we played Raving Rabbids for awhile–Kevin had never seen it, and I got a cheap used copy, because That Cannot Be Allowed To Stand. (I mean, Superbunny! How can you not love Superbunny?) So that was a pleasant end to the evening.
He’s off at church now, and I am wallowing in the contentment that comes from having slept in, had tea, and avoided church. This is interesting, because Kevin’s never particularly pressured me to come along with him–occasionally I do, on the principle that these people are important to him, generally I don’t, on the principle that I’m a semi-secular humanist and his priest’s sermons tend to be fairly mediocre God-wants-you-to-do-good-stuff rather than anything intellectually interesting* and anyway I have a bad habit of showing up on the days they’ve decided to do communion, which necessitates me slipping out halfway through because respectful observance stops there.
Nevertheless, I still feel a sort of smugness at having successful avoided church, although avoiding church required no effort on my part whatsoever and was pretty much expected and condoned. This is completely a holdover to my childhood, when church was a big damn production, all of it tedious, and in my childhood opinion, a waste of a perfectly good morning. I hated getting up, I hated dressing up, I hated having my hair curled, I hated sitting through the sermons, I hated Sunday school, I hated the laughably-ignorant-of-the-minds-of-actual-children writing in the little handouts…yeah. So far as I was concerned, any morning when I managed to weasel out of church, either because I was sick or had successfully feigned sickness (this required me to start by midday on Saturday at the latest in order to convince my mother**) or through some other happy accident, I felt wonderful. I felt smug.
(There was never any chance at all of me going on my own when I became an adult–even if I hadn’t had a de-religious experience, even if I’d retained a nominal Christianity, I would never have gone to church. I felt the whole thing was unneccessary and unneccessarily tedious.)
But even now, when it’s completely a moot point, I spend most early Sunday mornings in a good mood, wandering around the house with tea, maybe taking a nice hot bath, and generally feeling smug. I have Dodged a Bullet. Sure, it was a blank, and aimed in completely the other direction, but some early-childhood part of my brain is convinced that it’s the non-principle of the thing.
*I know, I know, the members of the audience who would actually be interested in a dissection of the cultural context of the symbolism in Elijah or whatever are basically…um….me and Kevin. I can’t fault the man for catering to his audience.
**I have since realized that she probably didn’t believe me even then, but some days found it easier not to argue.
