#178. Dis-Order (Friday, September 18, 2020)

What was your best day…of doing kid’s stuff again?

For most of the second half of 2020, after my brother returned from his partly virtual final term at McGill, he was pretty much the only person I interacted with in real life. My mom had cleared out a nearby condo so the two of us could move in and give everyone more social-distancing space.

And as inevitably happens in a forced situation like that, tension accumulated. We had different approaches to cooking (his: properly; mine: throw everything into a pot as fast as possible), cleaning (properly vs. don’t until a literal plant is growing out of the sink), and even tennis (properly vs. run after everything until collapse). And with me already in a bad headspace after a rough 2019, most of the unfair snapping came from me.

The worst of the tension had broken a few weeks earlier after one especially bitter argument. My brother made me explain why his objectively reasonable behavior was making me angry. I couldn’t. Eventually I admitted I was mad at him basically because he was there. He responded:

“Why are you getting mad at me? I’m your brother, man!”

I had nothing to say to that.

Still, I badly needed personal space—for the first time in two years.¹ That weekend I finally got it: my brother went to a new friend’s place for an extended medical school orientation party that included a two-night sleepover. With him off having his own unrestrained fun, I had the condo to myself.

Now I needed something that made proper use of the freedom: an activity I could disappear into completely without anyone judging, interrupting, or getting annoyed.

The answer came naturally: watch the classic Disney animated movies, start to finish. True Dis-Order.

Friday, shortly after my brother leaves, I open Disney+ and start with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I’d owned it on home video and watched it countless times as a kid, but not once in more than a decade, so it produces this strange transportive nostalgia.

Then comes Domino’s and Pinocchio, another childhood movie I hadn’t really appreciated until later and now considered arguably the best of classic Disney. After midnight, Bambi—which I had never seen at all, and which teaches me that almost nothing actually happens in this supposed masterpiece.

I don’t manage a literal eighty-hour marathon, but over the weekend I knock out several more classics I’d somehow never seen: Cinderella², Lady and the Tramp, The Black Cauldron, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Beauty and the Beast, which is still playing when my brother gets home Sunday night.

There was something deeply satisfying about finally filling in these pieces of cultural background I’d somehow missed for thirty years. Movies everyone else seemed to have absorbed in childhood were suddenly becoming part of my own memory too.

And because the normal world outside had been shut down for six months, disappearing into these simple children’s stories felt strangely restorative. For one weekend, the smaller disorder inside the condo made the much larger disorder outside a little easier to live with.

I’d moved back to my parents’ house in late 2018 after spending a year in the townhouse I owned, which we then rented out.
Which, despite wasting ten minutes of its short runtime on a cat-and-mouse scene that has NO bearing to the plot, is surprisingly heart-warming. Something about her being the only Disney princess who doesn’t start off as a princess or with any plausible avenue of becoming one, and fate just shining upon her.