Posts Tagged by The Man

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.