I.
The setting: last August. Owen is home for a short interlude between his cross-country bike trip and his D.C. internship. (Ah, the glamour of youth.) It's mid-morning. I've been doing errands and am now heading into the office. Must. Write. Damn. Book. Must. Get. Promoted. I pass by Owen, who has just put in a dvd and is now settling down on the sofa.
"Hey, Mom. Where ya goin'?"
"Work."
"Oh, don't do that. Watch Season 2 of Robin Hood with me. We can bond."
"Umm. OK."
I flop onto the sofa. Owen bursts out laughing. "You know, you're the reason I have no work ethic!" He sees the look on my face. "No, no--it's great! All my life, whenever you have to choose between family and work, friends and work, you always choose family and friends. And I think that's great."
So do I. It was one of the nicest things he could have ever said to me.
We settled down on the sofa, two satisfied slackers.
II.
Yesterday, Owen sent me the following link: http://www.slate.com/id/2274736. If you do not want to bother reading the article, the following excerpt pretty much sums it up: "Dutch women . . . take a lackadaisical approach to their careers. They work half days, meet their friends for coffee at 2 p.m., and pity their male colleagues who are stuck in the office all day. . . . 'We look at the world of management—and it is a man's world—and we think, oh I could do that if I wanted,' says Maaike van Lunberg, an editor at De Stentor newspaper. 'But I'd rather enjoy my life.'"
Owen added the message: "I knew you were born in the wrong country."
Damn straight. Plus, if I were Dutch, I could smoke weed to relieve my headaches. And eat really good Gouda and that amazing chewy salty rye bread.
Actually, I'm 100% ethnically Dutch. I could have been genuinely Dutch, right now, had my great-grandparents not been completely selfish and decided to leave all they knew and emigrate in search of a better life for themselves and their descendants. Damn you, you work-ethic-burdened ancestors. Why couldn't you have just have toked up and chilled out?
Sounds fantastic. I met a good friend for a coffee today and even though it was only 30 min. I was out of the building and enjoying the sunlight. It's hard in the winter when it's dark when we go to work and dark when we leave.
ReplyDeleteThat chewy rye bread!! The chocolate apples!! And the caraway cheese!! And those spicy cookies!! And those chocolate reefers!!
ReplyDeleteWait!!! What am I saying! They never sold THOSE at the Dutch store, not the one in Berwyn anyway. :)
My daughter is a big fan of that Robin Hood series too but I never got invited to watch it with her (although I did get invited to a few episodes of "Merlin" -- she's also an Anglophile . . . and you're a lucky mom.:))