Someone who, when informed that you are experiencing your first pain-free day in over two weeks, knows enough to clarify that you are, in fact, referring to, “the kind of pain-free that a normal human being would recognize.”
You Say Po-TAY-to, I Say Po-TAH-to
For the past week or so, the weather here in Georgia has been cloudy, overcast, and menacing, and has slowly been sucking away all my joy and will to live. So I have been ECSTATIC since yesterday at the long-awaited return of the sun.
I just assumed that my husband would be as excited as I am about the sunny weather, but I was rudely disabused of that notion just a few minutes ago when he returned from running an errand, narrowed his eyes at me, and said, in his most accusatory tone,
“I HOPE YOU’RE ENJOYING YOUR SUN! IT’S SO F&*^ING COLD OUTSIDE, AND THE SUN’S THE REASON WHY. NOW ALL THE CLOUDS ARE GONE, AND ALL THE HEAT’S GONE TOO. IT’S LIKE SOMEONE JUST RIPPED THE BLANKET OFF OF THE EARTH, AND NOW IT’S F&^$ING COLD! YOU’D BETTER ENJOY EVERY DAMN MINUTE OF YOUR SUN!”
And you know what? I totally am.
I Really Do Try
I’ve been a fan of Star Trek ever since my husband introduced me to “The Next Generation” back when we were in college.
Lately we’ve been watching “Deep Space Nine”, and I try very hard to pay attention to all the science and technology on the show, since I do not have a scientific background (or foreground either, for that matter).
I try to impress my engineer husband with my keen attention to scientific detail, but unfortunately it doesn’t always work.
Like tonight.
“Ooh, it’s really dark on that planet,” I observed, proud of my astute observational powers.
“Mmm, yes,” replied my husband. “That’s called ‘night’.”
“Husband”: A Technical Definition
Someone to whom you can make the following, urgent request, even if they’re in the middle of an important business meeting involving people scattered across 3 different countries:
“Hi, it’s me. I’m calling because I need you to tell me that just because the active, throbbing joint pain of the last 3 days seems to be gone for the moment, that does NOT mean that it is time for me to get dressed and drive 15 miles up the highway to the bookstore, simply because they just emailed me a coupon for 30% off of one item.”
One Of The Lesser Known Benefits Of Marriage
He Knows Me So Well
Standards And Measures
As I am a rather “artsy-fartsy” girl and my husband is an engineer, it is not surprising that we have very different communication styles:
-he enjoys finding ways to turn everyday situations into helpful, instructive math problems; I enjoy finding ways to turn everyday situations into sarcastic, snark-laden posts for my blog which allow for the frequent use of words like “ass” and “bongjillion”, as well as the breaking of every grammar rule known to man.
-he describes his world in precise, easy to understand terms like, “My ear hurts.”; I am incapable of communicating without the assistance of exaggeration and hyperbole as in, “There is a monkey drumming through my eardrum with a nail that has been heated to the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns!”
-I view everything in life as either the best, most amazing thing EVER! or the worst possible travesty ever to be inflicted upon mankind for which someone deserves to DIE!; the most common level of emotional reaction to a situation to which he is willing to commit is, “perhaps”.
So needless to say, we’ve had to work to find some common communication ground.
Through some unfortunate trial and error my husband has learned that if I ever send him the following text message:
I HATE EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING!
that he must drop whatever he is doing and perform an immediate intervention, so as to prevent me from sending a piece of our electronic equipment to its fiery doom.
However we have managed to find one area of mutual understanding and that area is, of course, the scale by which we determine The Urgency Of Our Need To Pee, as measured in Units Of Riley.
Riley is my in-laws’ little Cairn Terrier, and he is famous in the family both for the amount of pee he can contain within his tiny, canine body, as well as the intensity with which he can release it. And so being the kind of people that we are, people who notice the random, goofy crap that most people miss, people who like to bring up private, bodily functions in everyday conversation so as to horrify our mothers, we naturally took advantage of Riley’s urinary prowess and coined the phrase, “peeing like Riley”.
And so, while we may differ on which is the preferred political party, and we may disagree on whether or not women should be allowed to be priests, and we may be worlds apart when it comes to deciding whether a given song should be classified as “country” or “Southern rock”, when one or the other of us proclaims,
“Dude! I’ve gotta pee like 5 Rileys!”
Our minds are one.
Snips And Snails And Puppy Dog Tails
Last weekend we went to the Tennessee Aquarium which is, without a doubt, one of my absolute favorite places on earth.
As we were innocently walking through the doorway into the exhibit of seahorses my husband suddenly grabbed my elbow and said, very calmly, “Just keep moving.”
I was instantly alert, because that is his code for informing me that, “HOLY F*&%, THERE IS A SNAKE IN THE IMMEDIATE VICINITY!!”
Once he had deposited me at a safe distance he went back to check out the snake, because he is a guy, and guys think snakes are cool, and apparently there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. As a matter of fact, when I was telling this story to a friend of mine this weekend he said, “Cool. Did I ever tell you about the time that I kissed a snake?” (Me: Hm, really? Great. Never touch me again.)
There was quite a crowd of people surrounding the aquarium worker who wanted to touch the snake, despite the fact that every few minutes she would occasionally broadcast such helpful alerts as, “Make sure you stay away from its head.”
My husband, of course, was very excited about the whole experience and wanted to tell me all about it when we met up again.
I had a hard time listening due to the fact that he had let the snake coil its tail around his arm, ON PURPOSE, and not only that, but he had actually enjoyed the entire experience.
Me: Why did they make you wash your hands before you touched the snake?
My husband: They wanted to make sure I didn’t give it any germs.
Me (dripping with sarcasm): Oh yeah, wouldn’t that be a shame?
We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby!
In continued celebration of our anniversary, and because hell if I can think of anything funny to say right now, I offer this retrospective piece I wrote last summer, during a time when The Funny was apparently still flowing fast and free.
********
Have you ever had one of those days where you have clearly mapped out everything you need to do that day, but Thing #2 depends on Thing #1, and Thing #3 depends on Thing #2, and everything is woven together in an interlocking chain of Stuff That Is Not Getting Done because you can not, for the life of you, figure out how to complete Thing #1? Well the other day was like that for me.
Normally this is entirely my fault, since Thing #1 is usually something like, “Put on clothes.” (Dammit, you mean there’s no naked grocery shopping today? Well, forget it. There’s no point in even showing up for this day then!) But this day was a bit trickier, because Thing #1 was, “Make The Vacuum Cleaner Not Smell Like Poo”.
Having things not smell like poo is very important to me, but it can also be very difficult because we live with three cats. With humans it’s easy, because you almost never have to speak to them about this particular issue. Humans tend to take care of this themselves. But cats are a different story. And last week there was An Incident while I was changing the cat boxes, and it wasn’t pretty.
So as I was sitting on the floor and dismantling the vacuum cleaner, I began to think about how many pivotal moments in our marriage could be traced back to this particular appliance.
When we were first married and my husband received his first big bonus we bought…a vacuum cleaner. (Well we bought other things too, but I don’t have any funny stories about those items.) We were so excited about this vacuum cleaner. You would have thought we grew up in households without any electricity where we were required to clean the carpets every day by licking them with our tongues. We couldn’t wait to get home at night and vacuum things (and no, I can’t explain why that was, so don’t ask.)
I guess we were just excited to finally be a married couple, out on our own, buying “grownup” things. But man were we funny (as opposed to today, where we are a bastion of sobriety and maturity-NOT).
So we vacuumed, and we were happy, and then we moved into our new house, and we had even more space to vacuum, and we were happy, and then one day…we ran out of vacuum cleaner bags. Normally this would not be a problem, but my husband and I have completely different shopping philosophies.
When faced with the need to buy something my husband compares approximately 800 bongjillion styles, prices, sizes, locations, options, and, please, somebody, kill me now and end this misery! Whereas I decide what I need, go to a store that sells it, find something that meets my needs, and buy it. His method works great when you’re buying things like cars, washing machines, and computers, but it can be a real problem when you run out of something like, say, bread.
The tricky thing is that I grew up with a lot of messages that said, “If anyone ever tells you to do something, you MUST do it.” Especially if that someone is a man, and especially if that man is related to you. (Important Side Note: If you are my husband and you are reading this, you had better not be thinking, “Man, I really miss those days!”)
So my husband told me that before I was allowed to buy any more bags and continue my vacuuming, I had to shop around. And I tried, I truly did. But what I never knew until I became a vacuum cleaner owner myself is that, much as each human being needs their own special type of blood, each machine takes its own particular type of bag. And apparently ours uses the extremely rare, AB- equivalent type of vacuum cleaner bag, because I could not find those suckers ANYWHERE.
So the pressure was building, and the carpets were dirty, and I wanted my husband to approve of me, and then one day…I discovered online shopping. I entered in our type of vacuum cleaner bag, and up popped this luscious list of bags, all ripe for the buying. And I thought, “I can’t take it anymore-I MUST be able to vacuum!” And I bought the first package on the list. And then I sat and waited for the earth to crash into the sun, because I had just made a decision to do something other than what my husband wanted.
Of course it turned out to be no big deal. So my confidence slowly began to grow, and I began to trust in my own abilities to buy things like closet organizers and crock pots all by myself. And now I have become such a Brazen Consumer Hussy that I recently bought myself an MP3 player while my husband was off in a whole other state, and I never consulted him once.
And fortunately the vacuum cleaner lives on, able to continue marking these important moments in our marriage. Because the odor turned out to be nothing that sucking an entire Lysol Sanitizing Wipe directly up into the hose couldn’t fix. (You know, just in case this particular issue ever comes up for you.)
Happy Anniversary!
Today is my husband’s and my 11th wedding anniversary-yay!
We’re going out to celebrate, and while we do I thought I’d rerun this piece I wrote 2 years ago on our anniversary, because it still sums us up really well.
********
In honor of today being my 9th wedding anniversary, I thought I’d write a little about how my husband and I have worked out our own particular division of marital labor in order to ensure a smooth, well-running relationship. Because there are things they don’t cover in premarital counseling, such as how to adjust to the fact that each of you deals with stress differently.
When it comes to handling stressful situations, my husband is in charge of Being Calm, which is best illustrated through the following story.
After we’d been married for three years we bought our first house, and after we’d lived in our house for six months we had a really bad ice storm. We thought the worst that happened was that we lost power, but we soon discovered just how wrong we were when I walked into our bedroom and saw a GI-NORMOUS tree sticking through the roof.
Naturally I called for my husband, and he responded by saying, “What?” Now I’m sure you can picture this situation, so you know the tone I was using. It was not, “Could you please come in here when you get a minute, hon?” It was, “COME! NOW! BAD!” Fortunately he decided to amble in and see what was going on. That was good because I only had the one yell in me, and then I lost all ability to speak and was reduced to quiet whimpering.
So he came into the room while talking on the cell phone to his dad, saw the giant hole in our roof, and… started describing it in precise, rational, scientific terms to his father. Like, “Hm, the hole is about the size of a dinner plate, and the tree is protruding approximately eighteen inches down from the ceiling.”
And I’m standing there looking at him, the love of my life, the man I waited seven years to marry, and I’m thinking, “Who are you, and what is the MATTER with you?! Why are you not freaking out when CLEARLY that is the response called for in this situation?!”
But this is where the whole division of labor thing came in handy, because he calmly organized some roof triage, and I got to come up with a funny story to tell people.
However there are some times when being calm can backfire on you, and that is where I come in. So in addition to getting to do all of the freaking out, in stressful situations I am also in charge of Reasonable Expectations. And I have a story for that too.
About a month after moving into our house, things were going well. I was enjoying unpacking and decorating, and I had just gotten a new job working at a bookstore, which is something I always wanted to try.
One day my husband came home from work and announced that there was a position open at his job for someone to go to Denmark for a year. And he thought we should go. And he was serious. He honestly believed that this was absolutely the best, most rational, most logical next step for the direction of our lives. And he was upset when I responded by bursting into tears and crying for like, an entire day. He said, “I don’t understand why we can’t discuss this rationally.”
So here we are six years later (still living in America), and we’ve gotten our routine down pretty well. He is in charge of Things That Sting, Time, Calling People On The Phone, and Knowing How To Get Around In Any Given Location, and I am in charge of Funny Smells, Sneaking In Decluttering So He Doesn’t Notice It, Knowing Things About People, and Holding His Drink When We Go Out Somewhere.
It works for us.
