Lessons in Life and Architecture

Let me be perfectly honest about my working situation... while holding down these two jobs does keep me out of the house for a good 13 hours every day, my jobs are relatively enjoyable and low-stress in and of themselves. The kid is sweet at the babysitting job, and the most difficult activity I have at the jewellery shop is chatting with tourists about the best restaurant in town and the prettiest cameo in our window. Best of all, my day is filled with moments of down-time: while the kid is napping, the interminable stretches of time when no one comes into the shop, and the 1.5+ hours spent on the bus.

So currently I am catching up on a whole chapter of culture which was as yet, to me, unknown; 18th century English literature. I started out with Jane Austen this fall, and devoured every book with glee. I moved on through Charlotte Bronte, and now it is my enviable task to read that great ode d'amour to the Gothic Era, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Let me just say right now, without any quibbling, that I liked Jane Austen infinitely better. Reading this book, I feel as if I were taking a course in ancient architecture from a cross between Ben Stein and Stephen Hawking. Whole chapters are dedicated to describing the facades of 15th century Paris and lamenting the follies of Renaissance renovations. Every now and then I come across a very nice line, such as this one this morning: "Architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of a man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence." Ah!, I thought, How true!, and I mused over this sentence for a few minutes. When I turned back to the book, I found that Victor Hugo had found it necessary to spend 12 more pages convincing me of this theory, little knowing that I was already satisfied with his observation. Honestly. I'm on page 200 and I believe I've read about 10 pages that have an actual Hunchback in them.

Well... besides beating my head against this paperback wall, some of you may remember that Angelo and I were taking a Tango course this year. It's going swimmingly! It's the only thing that can convince us to get out of the house after 10 hours of work. We love it. But here is something interesting... we fight like Siamese Betta fish during the lessons. Why do we do it, then? My theory is this: we're going to have disagreements regardless, because we are two people living under the same roof. It is inevitable. That we are in a relationship only strengthens this inevitability. But if we do it on the dance floor, we can leave it on the dance floor. Similarly, these sorts of disagreements are always so easily arbitrated by our teachers. Example: whose fault was it that my foot was continually stepped on last night? Angelo's error or mine? We consulted the instructor. It turns out we were both doing the step absolutely correctly. The problem was much more basic: that our dance posture was sloppy, meaning our feet were closer together than they were supposed to be. I'd like to take this as a metaphor. That we were both doing exactly what we should have been doing in the moment, but the result of our combined effort was incorrect, was only indicative of another underlying problem, not the fault or ill intention of either one of us. We thought this was a very keen observation for life.