wideeyedfunk

Tag: marriage

  • Haircuts and love.

    The WideEyedSpouse had a haircut this morning. “How’re you getting it cut?” I asked while backing the Smooth Ride out of the WideEyedGarage. (And I should not have been talking while doing this. There is a 1 cm gap on the driver’s side and a 4 inch gap on the passenger side with lawnmowers and doorframes and stuff so…concentrate!).

    The Spouse did a little dance step. “You know, like the guy in the movie with the dancing.” I hit the brakes. It was mesmerizing watching this in the dim garage, his just out of bed hair waggling around unpredictably.

    “Huh?” I had nothing. I leaned partway out of the car window, trying to see and hear better. Did that just happen?

    “The movie with dancing, you know.” He did another little dance step with some jazz hands to the side. The garage keys in his hand jingled. I had the sense he couldn’t really get into it because he was stuck in the small space between the Smooth Ride and the Mighty Pathfinder.

    “Wha?” I still had nothing to guess. Partly because the dancing stuttered my thinking bits, partly because I just had no (useful) clue. The movie with the dancing. Dirty Dancing? No, because that would be a ducks-ass/mullet combo and I was pretty sure the Spouse wasn’t aiming for that. Singing in the Rain? That would be weird since I’ve never actually seen it and didn’t the guy have a hat on? Perfect Pitch?  That’s singing and not dancing and girls with girl-hairstyles. Guardians of the Galaxy? I mean, I wouldn’t call that a dancing movie.

    The Spouse sighed, frustrated. “You know…” he did a step step kick to the side and back with a little hand toss-head flick to the left, “the movie with the dancing and the guy.” His Egg Shen’s Medicine t shirt flapped around a bit as he danced.

    Ah. I had it.

    “Ohh, La La Land, Ryan Gosling,” I started backing up again. “Yeah, that should look good.”

    I blew the spouse a kiss through the pollen-encrusted windshield and putted off to the big U for the day’s labors, and I was giggling and full of love as a I drove .

    raw denim levi's hanging in the sun
    Spouse’s pants blowing in the wind. Did the sunshine make them want to dance?

  • My heart is a like a neutron star, dense and heavy.

    My heart is like a magnetar, dense and heavy and a thousand times magnetized.

    Four weeks from this day I will board a flight to the far away field location. I will have no phone, no lights, no motor car – ok, we do have a satellite phone for emergencies but not much else. Our sole luxury is the outhouse we are taking with us. Stacks of long underwear, socks, field pants, and equipment are growing in the front parlor. This is remote field research.

    My heart is heavier every hour. I look at the WideEyedSpouse and I think, I won’t see you for weeks and weeks. I pet the dogs and I worry – will you be ok while I’m gone? Wiggins the Ancient Cat creaks by, I fret, will you be alive when I come home?

    The weight in my chest is a coalescence of the open wide joy of learning that I was going to have a funded research program this summer. As the time for leaving grows closer, the plane tickets purchased, the boat charters paid, my happy heart tripping transforms to a sullen, weighty thunk.

    I know from past summers that this heart weight will increase. That I will be walking and talking and acting normal but this density lump in my chest will work to hold me in place. I’ll feel it sagging in the pericardium, threatening to rip through and plummet past my stomach to my knees, my feet, the floor.

    When the WideEyedSpouse drives me to the airport, the Pathfinder loaded down with crates and duffles and neutron star hearts, I’ll feel breathless. When I turn and walk into the airport, dragging my burdens with me, my magnetar heart will strain toward its lodestone as he drives away. When the plane takes off, I’ll feel it struggling, pulling to the ground, desperately reaching, trying to keep me home.

    Then…snap. The plane will level off and there will be no turning back. Magentar heart changes to neutron star heart, becomes tripping wide open joy heart and the pericardium can’t hold in the radiant glow of a well loved job. This transformation is heart denial, and a simple, true trust that I’ll head back to the lodestone in the coming months.

  • Why my laundry day just got easier.

    “You ask if you’re my laundry hump like it’s some kind of punishment.”  The WideEyedSpouse watched me fold another one of his t-shirts and sipped his Milk Stout Nitro. “Honestly, I’m a little taken aback,” he added.

  • A vexing loss in the spousal competition.

    I’m not saying that the WideEyedSpouse and I compete against each other. That would be a gross exaggeration. However, it is nice to get a win every now and again, to be better at something, like say, concocting the best dill pickle or power shifting in the powerful Mach 5 (the demon on wheels, my Mini Cooper S). Of course the decision as to who is better at any given event is subject to in-house debate. Data proofs and examples are required during the win-lose negotiations. We may query the dogs for their perspective. The judges, Spouse and I, are not impartial. It has happened that I determined myself the winner regardless of the Spouse’s contrary findings. It’s all in good fun. Mostly.

    Yesterday an external judge gave the Spouse a win that will haunt me for decades.

    This is from before we had our own gear. Even then there were hints that I was going to not win.
    This is from before we had our own gear. Even then there were hints that I was going to not win.

    We have had exactly the same number of Olympic recurve-style archery lessons. Six. At them, we stand side by side at the range and are coached as we shoot. We have almost exactly the same gear, except for our differences in size and strength.

    Until yesterday I believed that neither of us was winning at the archery skills affinity contest yet. This took a certain amount of self-delusion because I could clearly see that the Spouse’s arrows were more often in the bullseye. Mine are little wider ranging. But still, belief is powerful.

    Evidently after you loose an arrow you are supposed to maintain your posture while allowing the bow fall as it will. I was told it is like following through in golf or bowling, neither of which is in my skillset. It seems that after I loose the arrow and I immediately collapse my arms and back, entirely ruining the shot. Coach corrected me several times, using a variety of phases: “Keep that arm up. Where’s that arrow? Watch that bow. Stay in position. Follow it through.” Then she uttered the words that, to be fair, I may have deserved.

    “Watch your Spouse,” she said, “he’ll show you how it’s done.” Silence fell across the range. The Spouse, poised to shoot, froze. His eyes wandered over to me and I could his see him trying to stop the spread of him smarmy smirk. I glared at the side of his head. I tried to bore a hole into it, far enough to give him a tiny memory lobotomy with my laser eyes.

    I failed.

    For years I will hear “watch me, I’ll show you how it’s done,” irritating in its own right, and an eternally vexing reminder of my failure to win on that day.  Can you hear my teeth grinding?

  • 17th Wedding Anniversary: Furniture

    No traditional gift is defined for the 17th wedding anniversary. Evidently, being married for 17 years is somehow unremarkable. A middle anniversary. One where you aren’t newlywed, nor have you achieved anything truly notable. It is just part way along the long haul. It is Indiana if you are stuck driving from New Jersey to Minnesota. It is Iowa if you are taking the interstates from Buffalo to Phoenix. Not interesting, not there yet (whatever that means for wedding anniversaries), but at least making some progress.

    In modern gifting etiquette, the 17th anniversary gift is furniture. I am disappointed in this because at first I read the chart wrong and thought it was porcelain. I need a new toilet, a new bathroom sink, and a crown to replace a fracturing molar in my maxilla. Porcelain seemed just about perfect. But furniture?

    I guess the giftie list inventors figure that by 17 years the kids and/or dogs have pretty much ruined anything nice you ever had. Maybe it would be a nice anniversary present to sit on a sofa with no crumbs or dog hairs. To have a chair that only you have read in. To get some new mattresses that haven’t any springs poking up. The Spouse and I don’t NEED any new furniture. I mean, it just isn’t a priority right now.

    The 17th giftie seems better than the 16th though. Last year the Spouse and I were supposed to purchase (or be given) silver hollowware. I guess I don’t know or care what that is. I am pretty sure we justified the purchase of a new double door LG gas range. That’s silver. And hollow. Huh. What do you know, we are instinctive anniversary gifters.

    I cruised ahead on the gift list to see what goodies will come on future anniversaries. Jewels. Land. Books. Luxuries of any kind (ran out of ideas I guess). Then, in year 44, groceries. My god. Groceries. That’s something to look forward to. For my 44th wedding anniversary I’m going to be poor enough, hungry enough that groceries seem like a really great gift. Or I’ll be a survivalist hoarder and groceries will be an even more satisfying gift.

    Yesterday the Spouse and I celebrated 17 years of being married by having saffron poached salmon and mussels cooked on our hollowware stove, eaten on our heritage Grandma’s dining room table furniture. If only I had also been using that new porcelain crown.

    The Spouse brought me a packet of peanut butter cups. I ate them. I bought him a lottery ticket, giving him nothing or millions of dollars. Seventeen years. Where ever has the time gone?

  • Twenty things I could have bought with the $20 I lost yesterday.

    1. 2,000 pieces of penny candy. Two thousand.

    2. 20 minutes of satellite phone time to talk to the Spouse from the remote fieldwork location.

    Strawberry Shortcake Donut, with Angel Cream.

    3. 2 dozen Paula’s Donuts. That’s 24 items of pure deliciousness.

    4. Two tickets to a Buffalo Bisons game.

    5. 20 Mega Millions lottery tickets.

    6. A shovel.

    7. 6 bags of Family Size potato chips.

    8. Gas for a scenic drive to Olcott and back, with a stop at Reids Hot Dogs.

    9. A really big bale of toilet paper.

    10. Contact lens solution, pickles, potato chips and fair-trade coffee at Target: the intended purpose.

    A dog needs a good chair.

    11. A dog chair.

    12. A dog license renewal.

    13. A marriage license (17 years ago).

    14. 180 dukie bags for dog walks.

    15. 2 completely drinkable bottles of wine, or one wine-in-a-box (Equivalent of 4 bottles – stays fresh for a month. Just saying.).

    16. 2 6-packs of quality beer.

    17. Almost 3 months of Netflix.

    18. Approximately 60 showers, 8 dishwasher runs, 5-10 loads of hot water laundry (whites and dog beds) – in other words, a summer month gas bill.

    19. An emergency room copay. The Spouse got rollerblades for his birthday.

    20. 48 vegetable plants.

     If only I had used my wallet to house the $20. All of that could have been mine.

  • You say that like beer would somehow impair my ability to be awesome.

    Actually, I didn’t say it like that at all. It was a simple query about the wisdom of the action being taken.

    Probably it’s completely safe.

    We were having a rainy and cold Saturday evening. The husband was fussing with the 1920s ceiling light we found at Buffalo Reuse last weekend. It was tucked up in a back room of that cavernous, dark, and very, very grungy retail outlet for parts yanked out of “green” demolition projects. Stacks of tiles torn from bathroom walls (the husband is still fighting an infected cut from one of those), old toilets (I mean used toilets, really really used toilets), doors, windows, tin ceiling chunks, and other house bits are piled next to only slightly worn tanks of corrosive fluid.

    Anyway, the husband had just discovered that with careful use of Bon Ami he could remove the filth crust of nearly 100 years to make the molded milky glass of the light gleam like new. All that remained was to replace the dangerously inept 1970s era rewiring with new, legal, and safe wiring and we (meaning “he”) could hang it in the upstairs foyer. The wiring he took out of that poor light fixture was thick and patinated, melted copper wire forcibly shoved through the historic porcelain sockets. I can’t believe the whole thing hadn’t caught the house it lived in on fire – although maybe it had. It was at Buffalo Reuse because its old house had been torn down as too useless for even the crack and meth demons.

    So on this cold Saturday evening the husband wandered from the dining room, where the lamp was laid out in bits, into the kitchen, where the beer is kept. I heard the fridge door open and shut. A few steps and the bottle opener drawer squealed open. Fzzt. The bottle cap clanked onto the counter. He wandered back into the dining room and drank some beer while looking down at the lamp bits. Deciding something, he plonked his beer down in the mess of lamp parts. He picked up one of the bulb sockets and inspected it. With his other hand he gave himself some beer. Plonked the bottle back down. This went on for a little while. I wasn’t exactly watching events, but it wasn’t a real exciting night around the homestead so I was, well let’s say I was aware. There may have been more than the one beer. It is at least possible that there were a few beers. That can happen on a Saturday.

    1920s ceiling light, during beery rewiring.

    The husband settled himself at the table and picked up the coil of new wiring. He sort of held it up to one of the sockets. Measuring like. I thought about that for a moment. I flashed it through in my head, seeing him wiring the lamp, putting it back together, hanging it upstairs, admiring it, and then I imagined the cascade of sparks showering from it because maybe, just perhaps, something went a little wrong, a little beery in the rewiring. The husband is sort of like a savant with this kind of stuff, but I kept thinking about the beer.

     I couldn’t help myself. I asked, “Do you think it’s smart to do that when you’re drinking beer?”

     You know what he said.

     And now you can wonder about that lamp, the house, his ability to be awesome. And you might be examining the image for the kind of beer. Because obviously, some beers lend themselves to rewiring antique ceiling fixtures and awesomeness better than others.

  • Why Can’t My Husband Find the Ketchup?

    Men and women see the world differently. This isn’t my opinion; it’s a strongly supported scientific hypothesis. Men and women perceive space and the items in it differently. I wrote an article about it. I think about it all the time for my work. But for some reason I never applied my ivory tower notions to my household.

     Why does my husband have to lean into the refrigerator hunting the ketchup? It’s been on the same door shelf position in all 11 of our households over the years. It isn’t rocket science. The man memorizes the URLs of hundreds of routers and switches and techie stuff for his work. But he can’t reliably find the ketchup.

     It just isn’t his fault. Evolutionary psychology tells us that men learn large territories and routes through them, while women learn smaller areas in greater detail. Back in the day, men were hunting the big game over days of effort. Women were taking care of every other detail of life, including feeding themselves and their families using their detailed knowledge of local, smaller resource areas. Don’t argue it. Just accept it as an idea. A maybe explanation for inexplicable male behavior in the household.

     The notion has important implications for maintaining a harmonious marriage.

     You have to remember that your man is not being deliberately obtuse to avoid domestic responsibility. He is using the skill set thousands of generations of men developed during critical phases of our species’ survival. He quite honestly may not have the ability to remember that the ketchup lives on the second door shelf.

     You are thinking that he should be able to see the bright red ketchup there on the door. That the bottle placement is stupendously obvious. But evolved psychological tendencies can be remarkably subtle and powerful. Give your man the benefit of the doubt. Don’t expect him to know what you know about the ketchup, the car keys, the dog’s leash…when he asks, just tell him exactly where the object is or pretend you can’t hear him. Don’t worry if he can’t find stuff when he is on his own. He won’t even notice there’s a problem because this is normal for him.

     Is it easier to be a woman? I think so. After all, I can use a map to go the long distances – and I have all that extra time to travel them because I am not hunting the house for my keys, the dog’s leash, or the ketchup. Enjoy the partnership. Let evolution run wild and free!