(no subject)

Our guests are gone. We said goodbye on Saturday, and since then I've been luxuriating in solitude. I like them, really (Laura much more than Richard) but two weeks is too long. And the space they'd promised us when they said they wanted to stay an extra week never materialized - or did at their convenience (for example, when they were too tired to come over) rather than as a planned arrangement.

I did wind up seeing a lot less of Richard in the second week - I think he was finding all the social contact stressful just as we were - so that helped. When I did see him, things went more smoothly. That seems to have been partly because we were planning more structured activities, and partly because I was doing a better job of not getting drawn into arguments. Laura might have spoken to him about it, too - I don't know.

Last night Misha and I took a two-hour nap together during the early evening, and then listened to a baseball game while we hung out at our separate computers, doing our separate things. I didn't cook. He did enormous piles of laundry. It felt good to get back to our ordinary way of living.

Don't know if I'll be going to English Country Dancing tonight. I've got a headache for the third day in a row. I need to start carrying Advil with me.

(no subject)

In all persons there is the possibility of decency, however it may have been warped and deadened. The greatest adventure is to seek it out and establish it.
-George O'Dell

This is one of my articles of faith as a therapist. I heard this quote yesterday, at church, and seized upon it as an expression of something I have long believed. I used to say that my therapeutic skill rested on my ability to find a grain of likeability in just about anyone, and my belief in the possibility of change. But I like this way of expressing it better, because I can believe in the possibility of decency (however deadened) even in people for whom I can't find a single present thing to like.

I'm not sure that this is a particularly common article of faith. In some circles I move in, I get the feeling that the reverse is true - that there's a usually-unvoiced belief that real people, decent people who matter (because they're highly intelligent, and read for pleasure, and weren't popular in high school, and don't believe in silly things like Christianity or mainstream culture) are a small minority, while the majority of people are pretty much wastes of space. Deadwood. Sheeple.

How to explain the eagerness to believe that "most people" are everything you despise?