The Living Room

 When you get finished, write a paragraph of metawriting; what did you find yourself having to rethink? What challenged you, or conversely, what did you find easy?


I plop down nightly to do homework in the same place that my family plays and relaxes in.  Our living room is the hub of our lives. It's my two year old's playroom, my husband's entertainment area, and for the last year-and-a-half, my study room. 


Nightly, after tucking my daughter in bed, I tromp down the stairs, through our dinky dining space and into the dinky living room.  After plucking up blocks, and balls, and books off of the tan, unpadded carpet (rental grade for this rented space), I sit down on the right side of the olive green micro-suede couch, where my pink Dell is perched on the arm with my textbooks on the antique walnut end table next to it.  I stare across the room at the black rectangle of turned off television, constantly convincing myself that the work needs to be done before relaxation can happen. The yellow plastic school bus seems to ram itself into the red wooden barn in the toy basket.   Some nights, my husband sits on the other end of the couch, where his white Mac and textbooks mirror my own set-up.  Between us accumulate stacks of paper, sweatshirts, and forgotten story books from the course of the day.  If I sit back just far enough, I can't see through the dining space to the stack of dishes in the kitchen sink that will just have to wait until tomorrow, but can still see my little one's art easel and her masterpiece production of the day.  All good reminders of why I sit here studying, working, and writing.




This is a very personal place for me. As mentioned, we do everything right here or within sight distance of the living room.  I'm exposed to this area for hours and hours everyday, and it's just plain old commonplace, and hard to see any differently than I usually do.  I'm not great at writing exercises in general.  It's hard for me to get passionate about assigned topics, so that's always a hang-up for me, but having been sick and home from work all week, I've had a lot of time to sit and look at this space. 


Another issue for me is always that feelings are more pronounced to me than physical details, which I think probably showed through here more than I'd hoped.