blah, blah
Feb. 20th, 2002 03:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanSo very bored. It's not that I don't have any work to do, it's just that, you know, I don't want to do any of it.
I wish I had something profound to say. Instead, though, I have some stuff to say about being part of my mom's social circle.
My mom and I joined/co-founded this choir together a zillion years ago. But then I went away to college, and while I was there, the chorus built up from like five people to more like a hundred, and my mom was president, and she made a bunch of friends there, many of whom are now officers of various sorts in the choir hierarchy.
Then I came back from college and re-joined, and at that point I felt like a kid among grownups, but that was cool, because I enjoyed the music and the cameraderie. And I basically thought of myself as still a kid anyway.
But at some point in the last few years, I started noticing that the rest of them -- who range in age from probably mid-30s to my mom's age (pushing 60) -- didn't treat me like a kid. It wasn't like when I was in elementary or high school and would hang out with my mom and her friends and they treated me like a kid (because I *was* a kid). It was more like, you know, being a grownup and having grownup friends, only they were also my mom's friends, and ostensibly closer in age and "life" to her than to me.
It took me a while to figure out that I could legitimately call them *my* friends as well. And took me quite a while to get comfortable with the notion of going out to dinner after rehearsal even on nights when my mom didn't come along. Like, for a long time I felt like I was there on sufference, permitted to come along as my mom's adjunct. Finally, I started feeling like I was welcome at the dinners on my own merits.
All this is coming out because last night, after rehearsal, I went out to dinner with a bunch of them (and not my mom) and it was fun ... and then. At one point I turned from a conversation on my left to tune into the one on my right. And tuned in just in time to hear one guy saying, "But wouldn't you agree that there are people you'd have sex with who you wouldn't be willing to have *oral* sex with?"
So I had to chime in and say that, no, I didn't think that was true. The other women at the table, whom he had been asking, were pretty much agreeing with me. The mouth, he wanted to point out, contains more bacteria than any other part of the body. Yeah, so?
I can't adequately express how surreal it was to have that conversation with people I still largely think of as my mom's friends. Not so much the fact of the conversation, but the fact that I joined into it and no one went, "hey, who asked you" or "oops, there's a kid at the table, we better zip it."
Still, I've always been more comfortable hanging out with people older than me (even if only by a year or two). I guess that's a topic for another day, though. So I guess I have all these chorus-related friends now, and that's cool. They are some fun and cool people, too. It's heartening. I don't have to turn boring as soon as I hit 40 after all! ;)
I wish I had something profound to say. Instead, though, I have some stuff to say about being part of my mom's social circle.
My mom and I joined/co-founded this choir together a zillion years ago. But then I went away to college, and while I was there, the chorus built up from like five people to more like a hundred, and my mom was president, and she made a bunch of friends there, many of whom are now officers of various sorts in the choir hierarchy.
Then I came back from college and re-joined, and at that point I felt like a kid among grownups, but that was cool, because I enjoyed the music and the cameraderie. And I basically thought of myself as still a kid anyway.
But at some point in the last few years, I started noticing that the rest of them -- who range in age from probably mid-30s to my mom's age (pushing 60) -- didn't treat me like a kid. It wasn't like when I was in elementary or high school and would hang out with my mom and her friends and they treated me like a kid (because I *was* a kid). It was more like, you know, being a grownup and having grownup friends, only they were also my mom's friends, and ostensibly closer in age and "life" to her than to me.
It took me a while to figure out that I could legitimately call them *my* friends as well. And took me quite a while to get comfortable with the notion of going out to dinner after rehearsal even on nights when my mom didn't come along. Like, for a long time I felt like I was there on sufference, permitted to come along as my mom's adjunct. Finally, I started feeling like I was welcome at the dinners on my own merits.
All this is coming out because last night, after rehearsal, I went out to dinner with a bunch of them (and not my mom) and it was fun ... and then. At one point I turned from a conversation on my left to tune into the one on my right. And tuned in just in time to hear one guy saying, "But wouldn't you agree that there are people you'd have sex with who you wouldn't be willing to have *oral* sex with?"
So I had to chime in and say that, no, I didn't think that was true. The other women at the table, whom he had been asking, were pretty much agreeing with me. The mouth, he wanted to point out, contains more bacteria than any other part of the body. Yeah, so?
I can't adequately express how surreal it was to have that conversation with people I still largely think of as my mom's friends. Not so much the fact of the conversation, but the fact that I joined into it and no one went, "hey, who asked you" or "oops, there's a kid at the table, we better zip it."
Still, I've always been more comfortable hanging out with people older than me (even if only by a year or two). I guess that's a topic for another day, though. So I guess I have all these chorus-related friends now, and that's cool. They are some fun and cool people, too. It's heartening. I don't have to turn boring as soon as I hit 40 after all! ;)
