On Domesticity

My partner flew in from Barnet last Monday. Her last rotation of the year--Emergency Critical Care--is over, and for the next two months she is supposed to be doing a series of short internships at veterinary clinics, as well finishing up her research project on equine physiotherapy. These two weeks she is working at TLC, the veterinary clinic of choice for Los Angeles musicologists.

I've meanwhile been finishing up the quarter--running review sessions, proctoring a final, lots of grading, and tying up the usual loose ends. Ordinary, but also unusual. For the first time in a long time, Mary and I are living and working together. This has rarely been the case over the past five years. We have spent a fair amount of time together, of course, but necessarily this time together occurs when one of us is on vacation. I'll visit her in Barnet, and hang around town while she is off fixing animals. She'll visit me here in Los Angeles, and hang around while I torture undergraduates and go to my own classes. So as odd as it seems, it is actually quite nice, and quite special, to be living and working together. She goes to work, I go to school, and we come home at the same time and cook dinner. Weekends off are actually weekends off, and there is nothing wrong with lazing around and relaxing in the evening.

So this is domesticity, and I like it a lot.