When I was in the 6th grade I had a friend (fittingly named Eugenia) who introduced me to romance (mostly gothic) novels. I began with Phyllis A. Whitney who, I just discovered, passed away earlier this year. I then moved on to Victoria Holt and all of her pseudonyms. Eventually I read some of the Brontës’ work. I never read Jane Austen.

One trait most of the women in these novels possesses is a sharp tongue and the habit of provoking bantering conversation with all men, but mostly the men they were interested in romantically. Being relatively sheltered and shy, I didn’t have much opportunity to converse with males other than my relatives, so I didn’t really know how to talk to them, especially guys I was interested in. So I took a cue from the romance novels I read and, in my imaginary conversations with guys, carried on sharp-witted banter with them in my head. Oh, I was witty. My fictitious retorts to imagined flirtations were brilliant.

My real conversations with guys wasn’t so successful. Either I’d blush and look down and stammer something unintelligible until they walked away, laughing; or I tried to be witty and the guys would look at me like I was insane. They never bantered back.

I didn’t realize that “normal” people didn’t talk like that. That it was just fiction. In fact, it wasn’t until the past ten years or so that I finally really understood that I was not going to find my perfect verbal sparring partner and that the banter I’d expected to experience just wasn’t going to be a reality in my life and, in fact, was a pretty annoying thing to listen to.

Clare and I started watching Becoming Jane last week. We got about a quarter of the way through it and couldn’t’ deal with the banter. Perhaps Jane Austen did talk like that. Perhaps men and women of the late 1700’s and early 1800’s bantered. Perhaps to be the ones bantering was exhilarating. But to listen to consistent banter? It’s downright irritating.

Did a little work on the HTCA site again, messed with the themes. We’ll see how that goes. Put in 4 straight hours of work for pay - barely even blinked. Finally finished the ten templates - and put them in the correct spot. Monday will send to the SME for her approval. Finally feeling better about the process. Still very time consuming, but it seems to be working ok now. The still have tons of work to do on the forms though.

Bade Clare farewell as she went to GS camp. Poor thing - she has a ton of studying to do and didn’t want to go. She’s also feeling a little sick - allergies. Her voice was nearly gone by the time she left. Andrew was at a band function - Six Flags in NJ. So, being child-free for a few hours, Dean and I went to a Scottish Pub in Wheaton for dinner. I a bottle of my favorite beer and an order of fish and chips. Then I had a wee drop o’ Ardbeg. Yum.

We thought about going to the AFI to see a film, but since we had three Netflix movies at home, chose to watch one of those instead.

I let Dean choose the movie since I’d picked them out from Netflix. He chose Closer - which is what I was hoping he’d pick. I knew nothing about it, and was pleased with the location and actors. However the dialogue was very contrived, none of the characters were likable and nothing much seemed to happen. I was disappointed and Dean left before the movie ended. This morning I looked it up and found out it was a screen adaption of a play. That made a lot of sense. The dialogue was more along the lines of what I’d expect in a play.

Since I had to stay up to get Andrew at midnight, I watched another movie on cable. I’d begun watching Match Point before, but thought I’d save it to watch with Dean. Last night I felt I deserved to see it, and did. Same setting as Closer - sort of. British men and American Women (well, one woman in this one was American). Match Point was the better of the two movies, although still not going to be on my top 50 list.

Picked Andrew up at school - left here at 12:00 got back home at 12:50. The bus was late, then he had to wait around to take his instrument into the building. Lots of kids just dropped their instruments off at the door, Andrew was going to, but I insisted he stay and help take the other instruments in. He admitted that it was the right thing to do, even though he was tired and wanted to go to bed. He said he had a great time.