You men and your size thing
6:27 pm | Blog | Conversations, The Man | Comments Off
My friend Lance, the e-mailing genius, the part-time photographer, the man who will be photographing my wedding, sent me another e-mail yesterday. The text in parenthesis was added by me so the e-mail makes a little more sense:
“hey ding-dong, i was planning on going (to the Y) tomorrow night after work but i may be going to a “gentlemens club” to take some photos for my hempstead rd project. ill let you know tomorrow morning. hows life minus a (future husband’s last name redacted)? we should sell his tv and buy a fucking helicopter. if you get lonely come over and have a drink. that soundtrack (“The Life Aquatic”) is the bananas, annie has it.
When C and I first started dating, one of our very first dates was a “movie night” at his house. We both love old movies and artsy films, and he subscribes to Netflix, so much of our time together in the following months was spent on his couch in front of his TV. I had been to his house before, but this was the first time we had really planned a night in. I think he cooked something, and I’m positive he mixed some rum drinks.
As we sat down on the couch, he turned to me, in all seriousness, waved his arm in the general direction of his six-foot-tall flat-screened high-definition television, and said “You know, there’s only one TV on the market right now that’s bigger than this one.”
That right there sealed the deal, folks.
Bachelorette Party: Day 4
4:02 pm | Blog | Girly, The Man | Comments Off
C left for South Korea, where he’ll be spending the next seven weeks, early Sunday morning. So early, in fact, that I had no plans to drag myself out of bed to walk him to the door, so we said our goodbyes the night before, and I laid in bed futilely fighting fatigue until 1:30 or so in the morning, afraid to fall asleep because I knew it was the last chance I’d have for the next seven weeks to lay in the arms of this wonderful and amazing man.
When he gets back, we’ll have a month here together in which we have a checklist of things to accomplish. Some of those things include getting married, getting vaccinated and visa-ed, packing everything we own and trying to fit it into a 10-by-10 storage space, and moving to South Korea. Until then, I’ve been trying to keep busy with wedding planning, 40-miles bike tours of Houston and running with our running club each week.
C called at 11 p.m. Monday evening, which was 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon his time, to tell me that he had landed and was safe and okay. I was so glad to hear from him that I couldn’t really think of anything to tell him other than I love you and I miss you.
I don’t know how military wives do it, waiting for the letter or phone call that — for a few days at least — sets their concerns at ease. Sunday night, Monday night and last night were pretty sleepless for me. Here I am, alone in his house, trying to fall asleep in his bed, the bed I’ve never slept in alone.
“It’s hard for me to imagine you there without me,” he said over the phone.
Sure, my stuff is there, I live there too, but when I walk into our closet in the morning to get ready for work, all I see are the rows of his vintage dress shirts from Sears hanging all around me and his gigantic house shoes — the shoes that normally annoy me in the morning because they make a “clop clop” noise on our concrete floor. But I look at them now and wonder if, since it’s still winter in South Korea, are his feet cold? Does he come home after work and just lay in front of the television until he falls asleep like I’ve done for the past several days? Does he feel displaced too, or is he settling into the far-away apartment that will be our first home together as a married couple?
I’ve been trying to keep busy — I really have. I have plans for every weekend this month. I’ll be doing this, celebrating this and going to a party here. And I have plenty of friends who are begging at my door to take me out and show me a good time.
The problem is I don’t want to be shown a good time. When I’m with C, I always have a great time. Life is so much better when you have someone you love to share all your experiences with, miserable and euphoric.
I can’t wait to move to Korea.
Doctor, do you mind if I lay down for this?
5:53 pm | Blog | Family, The Man | 3
One week into being engaged and my family is already reminding me why I used to say I would never get married.
It’s not that I don’t believe in the sanctity of marriage, it’s just that in my family, divorce is like a pastime, nothing is permanent and no responsibility is too great to eventually shirk.
I spent most of last night crying myself to sleep. I can’t figure out why I’m so emotional lately — if it’s because C is supposed to leave for Korea in a week or if it’s because I don’t know how in the world anyone could be so unconditionally giving or if its because I have my own issues to get over before I can really let him love me without freaking out.
Left and right, members of my family that I have barely spoken to in the last two years have already started inviting themselves to a wedding I haven’t even planned yet. I owe it to them, they say, and they deserve to be there after everything they’ve done for me. Who cares that it’s my wedding, and unlike most everyone else in my family, IT’S THE ONLY ONE I PLAN ON HAVING.
Over the past week, I’ve continued, in passing, to refer to C as my boyfriend. Someone pointed out yesterday that I can’t call him that anymore.
So when my fiancé and I started to get really serious, about a year ago, I just couldn’t fathom that someone would be so loving and giving without expecting something from me in return. It makes me feel vulnerable to open up to him because I’m so used to having the ball drop, to having things go bad or to having other people take advantage of my own emotions and just leave me out in the cold.
Part of my coping mechanism is to always be in control. It’s like the old saying — if you want something done right, do it yourself. In trying to separate myself from my family, I was forced to become real independent real fast. Now, suddenly feeling so dependent on someone else has really taken me for a ride.
This summer, after we get married and we move to Korea, I’ll quit my job and just live on his money. I’m already living in his house for free and eating his food for free and using his utilities for free. And so is my dog. Considering that I saw man after man after man do this to my mother, and that I vowed to never let myself become dependent on anyone, this development is a serious kink in the plans I made when I was a 19-year-old feminist.
It’s been, so far, one of the hardest things for me to deal with, but also one of the biggest blessings of my life.
I really believe that C and I were put together so that he could show me that sometimes, people do really just love you and don’t expect anything in return. That relationships can be nurturing and healthy, and that you don’t have to give up any part of yourself in order to deserve that.
After years of taking care of other people, and falling into that spiral where they start to SUCK YOU DRY, and then struggling to look after just myself, its wonderful and relieving to have someone who suddenly wants to take care of me.
Aaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhh
1:58 pm | Shorts | The Man | 2
The worst thing in the world is trying to keep a secret about something you want to scream out to the whole wide world. *Huff.*
Some cheese with my wine
4:23 pm | Blog | The Man, Two Wheels | Comments Off
We entertained this weekend. C, being the ultimate host, wanted to have friends over for drinks to celebrate The Official Unveiling of The Bamboo Bar, which is a little late considering he installed The Bamboo Bar, like, six months ago.
Still, as a Happy Bamboo Bar gift, some friends of ours presented us with a bottle of red wine. “It goes good with food that is really spicy,” I was told, so now I am guzzling it while eating pepper jack cheese and Triscuits.
There is nothing better than red wine to really get me in the mood for writing. Okay, that made me sound really artsy-fartsy and pretentious. But it’s true. Hard liquor clouds my thoughts too much, but wine gives me just the right amount of euphoria and creative-stupid ideas without any of that pesky “mean drunk” behavior that runs in my family.
Anyway, I was recently exposed to the most arbitrary occasion of spousal nagging I have ever witnessed. I won’t go into detail here, but suffice it to say the verbal scolding left the poor guy with the same sort of bewildered look Gus gets on his face when I catch him in the middle of doing something he doesn’t know is wrong.
I try really, really hard to fight my natural wiring (or training, depending on your perspective,) and not nag my boyfriend for anything, because I know what happens when men and women get together, and the women move into the men’s houses, and then they take over all the space in the closet, and then the women suddenly begin to treat their men like five year olds, and then the men get together at the bars and talk about this, and then the men collectively decide that the women are trying to change them, and I don’t want my wonderful boyfriend to change, because I fell in love with the him that he was before he met me, not the him the he becomes after I verbally neuter him by harassing him to death.
So it took a lot of self-control today when he sends me an e-mail titled “Drivers who talk on cell phones kill thousands.” In the text of the e-mail, he had written, simply, “Please read.” Below those cold, cold words was a link to some news story about some stupid research that backed up this claim. No other comment from him, nothing.
I resisted all urge to send him a reply explaining that I felt the headline was a little over-exaggerated — it could just as easily have read “Drivers kill thousands,” which is also true. I also resisted sending him a reply extolling the dangers of, say, smoking a pipe and cigars, eating ground meat cooked rare and sending personal e-mails on company time.
See, I resisted, because I know talking on the cell phone while driving is dangerous.
The problem is that I have what I like to refer to as a couple of quirky character flaws.
I am extremely independent, and therefore, extremely stubborn. I have always done things my way, and my way works just fine for me, thank you. In addition, sometimes I feel like behaving like a reckless teenager.
In conclusion, I do not need another set of parents.
Now, in his defense, I know that all this nagging, gentle coercion, he calls it, is really in my best interest. He does it because he loves me and he doesn’t want to see me get hurt or lose me. But come on.
A few weeks ago, we were getting ready to go out for the evening to celebrate my suddenly-free weekends, and we got into an discussion because I was going to wear white go-go boots and a mini skirt, even if I planned on riding the scooter, because I want to, and nobody is going to tell me I can’t.
“But Brit,” he pleaded. “You never know when the gears might slip or you might hit a wet patch on the road and go skidding across the pavement.”
Still, I persisted in my stubbornness, and I looked cute on that scooter, too. NOW STOP HARASSING ME.
We got to the bar where we were supposed to meet our friends, and I was on the verge of parking my scooter when…
Let me explain a few things about vintage Vespas. Scooters, unlike motorcycles, shift via hand. Both the clutch lever and the gear selector are on the left-hand side, so that you engage the clutch by pulling it in and then roll the gear selector to, you know, select. A gear.
Because they are old, they come with a lot of quirks. My particular scooter, the one I’ve only owned since October, has had 26 years of love, and the result is that it is occasionally possible to change gears without even touching the clutch at all. And boy is this fun when you’re cruising down the street at 45 miles an hour and the scooter suddenly and miraculously downshifts into second. Wheee…
So I was trying to park my scooter by using all my weight to pull it back and up, rocking it onto the center stand, when, all of a sudden, it shifted. Into first gear. And took off. With me on it.
First lesson learned: always turn off ignition before trying to park scoot.
Actually, it didn’t take off immediately. Instead, I did a wheelie for a few seconds, spinning my back wheel while desperately trying to figure out in my head exactly what the hell had gone wrong here.
Then the scooter, with me on it, was basically catapulted over the curb of the parking lot and directly, at a right angle to the flow of traffic, into the street.
Second lesson: in an emergency, engage the clutch. It immediately kills all power to the engine and makes you look less like a bumbling fool who’s about to wreck her perfect, red vintage scooter.
Finally, anticlimactically, I found the break, and the engine, without the aid of the clutch, died. The scooter, me on it, mini-skirt and all, toppled right over into the gutter of the street. Realizing that I no longer looked so cute, I jumped to my feet, announced to my boyfriend that I was alright, and did a quick damage assessment. The scooter was okay, nothing a rubber mallet couldn’t fix, and I had just barely scraped my knees. My friend Steven laughed for minutes after, in all earnestness, I exclaimed, “I didn’t even scuff my boots!”
There goes this saying that there are two types of motorcycle (or in our case, scooter) riders — those who have wrecked, and those who haven’t yet. Now that I’ve had my first wreck, I must say I’m glad I got it over with.
I spent the rest of the night telling C how right he was but that he should be happy I was okay. Just a couple of scrapes and bruises. OH MY EGO!
C, master of self control, never once uttered the words “I told you so.”
But here is the biggest lesson I learned: when C, during an argument, says that there is the slightest possible percentage that something even remotely minor might happen, it WILL happen. THAT VERY SAME NIGHT.
Two stinkers
3:08 pm | Shorts | El Perro, The Man | Comments Off
Do not try to blame your farts on the dog. The dog does not try to blame his farts on you.
A testament to how much my boyfriend truly loves me
3:06 pm | Blog | El Perro, The Man | Comments Off
C has never had a dog before. In my world, that means he never actually had a childhood, but hey, I don’t judge, unless you’re a cat person, and then that makes you a very, very bad person.
So it goes without saying that when my obsessive-compulsive boyfriend allowed not just me to move into his immaculate house (which really resembles a museum dedicated to Polynesian artifacts more than a condo in a major metropolitan city) but also all of my stuff and my attention-hungry Boston terrier, I understood that this was a major step for him.
A few weeks after I first moved in we had a little gathering where I proceeded to get sick and fell asleep on the couch, when I should have been doing one of two things: a) paying attention to our guests, or b) paying attention to the dog, who, apparently, desperately need to be walked.
After all of our friends left, C announced that, since I was basically incapacitated, he would walk Gus so I didn’t have to. But the sound of the front door closing obviously triggered some sort of repressed gag reflex in my body, because the minute my two boys walked out of the house, the nausea hit me.
I somehow managed to make it to the bathroom, but I did not make it to the toilet, if you get my drift, and C returned to find me in a heap on the floor, the remains of the my stomach in a heap next to me.
In the meantime, Gus, who had been basically ignored for most of the evening, had proceeded to poop on the floor of our computer room.
So C put me in the shower, then spent the rest of his evening cleaning up both puke and poop, neither of which originated in his own body.
That’s right, ladies. He’s a keeper.
My name is MC Speller and I came here to spell
1:03 pm | Blog | The Man | Comments Off
For years, C worked offshore. He went to college on a ship, he’s worked for shipping companies, and he even grew up in the water, on a sailboat his parents navigated from Florida to the Bahamas.
In all those years, in all that dangerous work, my boyfriend, Mr. Safety, never sustained a work-related injury.
A few years ago, he took a promotion that moved him to a cushy office with privacy and a chair and a computer.
At construction sites and car shops, you always see those signs that say, “It has been ___ days since our last on-site injury.”
Now, after several years of freedom from bone-crushing, eye-gouging or flesh-ripping on-site injuries, now, he has RSI.
From sitting. In a chair. At a desk. All day.
The kicker is that a team of expert doctors can’t even tell him what caused it, or how to make it stop. Because of the pain he has a hard time playing the guitar and ukulele, and sometimes it even hurts his wrists to drive his car.
The good thing, I guess, is that his work has provided him with all kinds of fancy technology to help ease the pain.
Last night, he was installing this seeing eye device on his laptop which basically acts as a mouse, using a laser beam to read a sensor stuck to his face. When he moves his face, and therefore the sensor, it moves the cursor just like a mouse would.
But my favorite thing is his voice recognition software.
At least once a week we go jogging with this crazy group of runners that go by nicknames unfit to print in this venue. A few days ago, C was writing an e-mail to some of these friends of ours. It entertains me to no end to hear him dictate to his computer.
“Eargasm jumped right into the bayou, and found himself standing in mud up to his knees,” he says.
“Select ‘orgasm.’ Spell that. E-A-R-G-A-S-M.”
“Select ‘by you.’ Change that to ‘bayou.’”
“Select ‘sneeze.’ Change that to ‘his knees.’”
It takes him about five minutes to dictate a single sentence. In the meantime, I’m cackling like a mad woman, enjoying both the goofiness of a grown man saying such obscenities to an inanimate object and the utter frustration I feel emanating from his general person.
“You’d be surprised at the words I’ve taught this thing,” he says.