Routine

So I am reading my family bookclub book called "The Art of Fielding" which is about baseball which means that I am NOT in love with the book but he does have a way of stringing words together, I'll give him that. Some really lovely sentences and ideas.

There's also a lot of gay sex. Thankfully my grandma (who is also in my bookclub) decided that she didn't like the book and wasn't going to read it, way before she got to that part. Not sure how well she would have done with that.

Anyways, there is a scene between these two guys who get together and have sex in the afternoon and then one of them goes into the kitchen and makes coffee and brings it out in the same two mugs every time...

The routine became entrenched: After they did whatever they did that day, Owen would go out into the hallway and return eight minutes later, always bearing the same two steaming mugs from the particleboard shelf above the coffeemaker: KISS ME I'M IRISH for himself, IF MOMMA AIN'T HAPPY for Affenlight. They sippsed their coffee and smoked a cigarette, chatted, read Chekhov together, passing the book back and forth once Owen's headaches subsided. The kitschy mugs had been culled, over the years, from Mrs. McCallister's home kitchen cupboards. It might have sounded silly, but Affenlight loved the way Owen always picked these same two mugs and even, presumably, went so far as to rinse them in the sink when they were dirty. Such consistency suggested, or seemed to suggest, that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating, even down to the smallest detail. This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.

I just love that. You always hear about people being "stuck in a routine." But you don't always hear about the flip side- which is that something can become a routine because it is perfect and exactly what you WANT to do every day.

Makes you think about the word "routine" in a different way. :)