The Happy Tedium of Cohabitation
We spent the majority of my last week in Christchurch with Mark's family. Mark's father was in town for the CAF, and whenever Mark's father is in town, mark is expected to "do his duty" to the family. Mark's father HR is a very old world sort of man--still wears cravats and believes there is a right sort of person and a wrong sort of person, believes in manners and tradition and breeding and all those fantastically classist institutions that we as Americans tend to believe are antiquated. I find his approach to living both exhausting and fabulous.
The first thing we did
en masse was eat out at the Family Restaurant. Mark's uncle owns a
farm/vineyard which has a very good restaurant on the premises, and HR invited us to eat one evening with Mark's grandfather and wife (Mark's step-grandmother). I talked to the grandmother about cruises, and the grandfather told us old war stories.
I guess I didn't embarrass myself too badly because HR called Mark the next day with an entire itinerary for the week. And because we were poor and wanted to be able to get out but lacked the resourced to do so, we agreed to almost all of them.
On Sunday HR got us tickets to see his pet project, the Christ's College Madrigal group. I haven't seen many small chorus performances, but these boys did a good job. It was an interesting cross section of Oxford/Eaton looking boys (though all of them were attending Oxford on musical scholarships)--or at the very least, what uppercrusty British Boys should look like. Thin necks, bespeckled, watery eyes, lacquered hair. The program was Victorian compositions paired with Victorian poetry. Some of it was quite good, though there were a bit too many odes to the pastoral for my sake.
Afterwards, Mark's dad took us to "the races". Horse racing is one of those things that combines
the best and the worst of society; in Britain and New Zealand, it skews towards more refined, where in America it bends more towards the sleazy. Since HR was taking us, we had to roll with the big boys, which meant we had to stay in our cathedral clothes, make good conversation, and carry drinks about with us all the time. Luckily it was slightly more sunny than it had been, and it ended up being a pretty good day. I was up something like $20 by the end of it. I also had a chance to meet Mark's stepmother Dorothee, an impressively thin German opera singer with a broad, flat face and high cheekbones.
Afterwards Mark and I decided to counterbalance our day of high culture by seeing "Live Free or Die Hard." That movie was so awesomely ace I don't even know how to describe it. It was like, THE MOST AMERICAN MOVIE EVER MADE. Brawn over brains! Material reality trumps the Internet! French baddies! American flags! Explosions and national anthems! Cops as good guys! Excessive force and collateral damage used in the defense of family! I cannot convince enough people to see this movie--it's a fricking national treasure.
Other family events included a birthday lunch for Mark's Uncle, which was my first introduction to whitebait. Whitebait is like jellied eels--small baby fish that are harvested right after they hatch, when they look like transparent worms. You mix them with egg, form them into fritters, and fry them. I'm not really a seafood person, but whitebait are more freshwater item, so I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. THAT SAID there is something very disconcerting about seeing black spines and eyes looking up at you.
We took a break from the fam on Wednesday and went to Lyttleton, a shipping down over the mountains on the Pacific. I spent the entire busride over recounting the Scientology museum experience. Lyttleton was embarrassingly small--"downtown" was one street, 2 blocks, with 3 cafes, a bookstore, 2 corner shops, one high end furniture store, one hippie shop, and an art gallery. We had an excellent breakfast by the wall and attempted to visit the Timeball, a Victorian nautical clock of sorts, but after an exhausting hike up hill discovered it was closed for garden restoration. So we spent the rest of the afternoon eating cream cheese brownies and reading music magazines in a cafe.
On our way out of town we decided to go up the Christchurch Gondola and get a panorama of the Canterbury area. It was outrageously expensive, but Mark and I see each other so rarely anymore that we go into a temporary blindness about finance when together and splash out for ridiculous "experience" moments. The sun was out, the goats and sheep were eating anything that rustled, and it was exceptionally quiet.
Once up top, we went through the gift shop looking for the scenic deck only to find ourselves
distracted by "the Time Tunnel" aka "The World's Gayest Ride." It was included in the price of the gondola, so Mark and I descended down into a dark room and jumped onto a cart not unlike those on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. We headed into the tunnel, which was a journey through the different time periods of New Zealand history as narrated by a Child of the Corn, all dimpled and blond and strangely stiff. The whole ride was, at best, 3 minutes: The lava room, the Maori forest room, the english settler boat, the english front porch, and finally the Hall of Famous New Zealanders. It was creaky, boring, uninformative, and frankly a complete disaster. I was tickled by the sign on the way out though: Additional rides $4.
Because it's New Zealand, we left the gift shop and ducked past the "No Entry" chains in order to walk around the hillside. The employees saw us doing it too, which was the great thing. There's a sense of personal responsibility in that country I like, which America used to have. The idea that if you spill hot coffee on yourself, or if you drive off the road when there isn't a guardrail, well then it sucks to be you--you're an idiot. It isn't the goverment's job to pay you for your mistakes.
The hillside was definitely dangerous-there were steep cliffs on several sides that dropped hundreds of feet. The weather had taken a nasty turn, dark and windy and brutal cold, but Mark and I made the most of it, snapping photos of each other looking cold and wonderfully
happy. Mark's photos of me, I confess, are much better than my photos of him. He is the only person I trust implicitly to photograph me--I look in his photographs the way I feel, the way I think I look. In Mark's photos I am sometimes a bit sad, sometimes happy, curious and full of wonder, pretty and strong, and (most importantly for a girl my height and weight) NOT FAT. It makes me terribly sad to be single when I look at those photographs.
The final night with Mark's clan was Thursday night. HR had worked with some of the Christchurch arts council to plan an "Opera with the Stars" event, where some famous New Zealanders would sing some famous arias in front of a famously old and rich crowd. Since Dorothee was a Kiwi by marriage, she was on the bill, and I had been anxious to see her sing for some time. HR was very kind to get us orchestra tickets--I had no idea how he swung that, they were absolutely smashing seats, and it will probably be another 20 years before i can afford seats like that again.
All the singers were quite extraordinary--I was especially fond of the bass singer who performed his Rossetti and Bizet arias with a real swagger and twinkle. He was young, very tall, very lithe and dashing, and when he broke out into his Carmen aria you could tell he was enjoying every moment of it. There was also a little tenor who looked like a penguin--I wasn't really feeling him for the first half, but in the second half he completely nailed his Puccini, and I was in tears, like I always am in Puccini arias. I'm a complete baby, I know--everyone gets misty over Puccini. There's no glory in being moved by Puccini.
Dorothee was very German: precise, technical, and beautiful in an icy, powerful sort of way. And yet despite her iron-and-ice voice, she was dressed in black velvet and pink taffeta. Interesting choice.
Afterwards we went to a cocktail party with free sandwiches and champagne. I mainlined orange juice and tried to keep Mark on his feet, as he was feeling feverish. After some very long speeches by various patrons, we kissed HR and Dorothee goodbye, and headed over to a seedier part of town for a goodbye party for Sarah. Mark was feeling too sick to stay long, so we made dinner plans for friday and kissed her goodbye.
Friday Mark was feeling better, so we went to a fudge cottage to watch the fudge making process. Free samples! We then went to a food court, which was inexplicably shut down by the police just as we had seated ourselves. We jogged across the street to McDonalds and had lunch there, where I spent at least 20 minutes crying about things I really don't want to blog about here. To his credit, Mark really stepped up--he didn't used to. He used to shut down completely when I would display emotion, especially if he felt the emotion to be out of proportion or irrational. I think we're both beginning to recognize the importance of small amounts of constrained emotion in a relationship.
This is how objectivists love with their tiny frozen hearts.
We met up with Sarah at a pizza joint which was inexplicably having a Redbull snowboarding competition in the back lot behind it. We kept pushing off an overly-friendly Jaggermeister reindeer as we waited for over an hour for a table.
Poor Sarah--it was her last night out with her friends, and all she wanted to do was stay inside (she had just broken up with her boyfriend). We tried to entertain her with old college stories. Most of the best, naturellement, involved Andrew Mason.
Mark's fever turned out to be chickenpox, so I spent my last days in Christchurch in Mark's apartment watching DVDs and making medicine runs. I didn't mind though. I just can't believe his mom never sent him over to a friend's house to get chicken pox--that's totally a rite of passage!
I was pretty devastated to leave Mark. Even though the religion thing has kept us from staying
together romantically, we are committed to staying together. We care so much about the other that we are willing to put up with the pain and embarrassment of having to talk out all the problems that happen in situations like ours. He understands me so well, he is so good to me, he is such a genuine joy to be around, I am intensely thankful he is willing to make room for me in his life. I'm quite depressed not having him here--talking to him is such a joy, going to museums and going to movies is so effortless, without him I feel a huge absence. We're closer now than we've been in 3 or 4 years. It's like opening a door to the outside and having the wind push out the stale air.
I miss him so much.
