Well-Decorated Dining Room

Dinners at my house are chaotic beyond belief. More often than not, we eat leftovers or get takeout rather than preparing an actual meal. We don't eat until 9 or 10 at night, after my brother's baseball game or my sister's dance class or my rehearsal. We eat at the dining room table, which is seldom clean. The table manners of my brother, sister and I are probably atrocious, and when my dad eats with us, he always tells me to stop holding the fork by the neck. Sometimes, everyone in my family forgets about dinner altogether, and we go to bed perfectly content with two out of three daily meals consumed.

Reading the above paragraph may shock you. When I told a friend of mine what time I eat, she couldn't believe it. But living like that comes in handy. For example, when I was in the musical, rehearsal would often go to 6, when most people eat dinner. Therefore, at the end of the day, the cast would be hungry and tired. I, on the other hand, was just tired.

While I don't eat dinner with other people besides my family often, it can be a little bit of a shock to experience someone else's habits. When I went over a friend's house to study, I was amazed to find that the dining room was what she would call "organized" and what I call "completely and totally sterile." It was so weird for me to see that her family's dining room was just the dining room, not the dining room/homework station/crafts area/place where bills are kept/place where failed art projects are kept. We keep our dining table adjacent to the kitchen counter, the TV, the couch, and the piano, (all of which clash terribly) whereas she kept her dining table separate from everything and you could tell that someone put a lot of time and thought into the decoration.

We ate the same thing that I usually eat with my family, leftover pizza, but it was pizza that her dad had brought from his trip to Chicago, a place I haven't been to in years. Over dinner, he regaled us with stories about Chicago, and everyone respectfully listened (also doesn't happen in my family.) Nobody started yelling. Nobody interrupted him. Nobody turned his stories into symbols of the decline of America. When the conversation turned to school, her parents just asked us what we were studying, instead of having us come up with elaborate plans for the future, as my family might have done. While it was nice to have a quiet, pleasant dinner, I don't think I would ever be able to sustain that kind of lifestyle. Dinner at my house is a lot easier, and it comes with a lot less pressure.