8 posts tagged “matrimonial ruminations”

April 7, 2006.  Holy Saturday.

We'd decided (I was not part of the decision-making process, if you want to get overly technical about it) to attend the Easter Vigil mass to facilitate some early traveling on Easter.    Also because, as the priest at our church droned on during his homily, "the Easter Vigil* is the most beautiful liturgy of the whole year."  He went on to assert that none of us appreciated how awesome the mass was and also, and I'm not joking, called the collective of the congregation "Judas."  I'm a Roman Catholic; this isn't some strange Jesus Camp religion.

Assuming that church, which is five minutes' walk from the house, will be overcrowded due to the mass, my wife tells me that we have to leave early, which I'm fine with.  It's not a big deal.  Now, because she's obsessive-compulsive, she starts to schedule.  I enter the shower at 6:45 and have until 7:15 to get ready to go.  We'll be leaving at 7:45 to walk five minutes to get to the 8:00 mass.

At 6:45, I get in the shower.  At 7:10, I'm shaving, and will probably be out of the bathroom and half-dressed within the next couple of minutes.  However, at 7:10, I'm interrupted by my spousal unit barging into the bathroom to harangue me for not being ready yet, and how I always make her "feel rushed" because I don't do anything on time.  I'm sure that I've discussed this notion in the past.  I'm then thrown out of the bathroom so she can shower, and I've got about 25% of my face left to shave.  Now, I could probably shave without a sink or mirror handy, but I'm just not that brave.  So, I have to wait until she's out of the bathroom, and then I rush in and finish shaving, get dressed and ready to go, and it's then that I get bitched at for taking too long to get ready. 

This is not even the best part, because there's something like vindication about to happen.

We get to church at about 7:48.  There are maybe 30 people there.  Maybe five more come in after us.

*Which clocked in at 2 1/2 hours.

Dinosaur Comics is a treasure trove of wisdom.  Who saw that coming?

I've been trying to figure out exactly how I'm unreliable.  I don't not do things; when I'm asked to do something, I do it.  If something needs to be done, I do it, and while I may procrastinate, I never procrastinate about something important.  This is not rocket science.

This is another area of massive disconnect between most people who know me and my wife.  It's amazing how diametrically opposed the unique visions of these two groups are.  Part of that lies in the fact that there are additional and hidden criteria in my spouse's assessments of my behavior.

1. I 'wait until the last minute' to do anything.  Like, if I come home and there's a note that says 'fold the clothes', I may not do it until 10pm or so, but if I'm home by myself the whole time, and I do it, I don't see the problem.  The clothes are not going to catch fire if they don't get folded and put away by 9 o'clock.

2. I don't enjoy housework.  You know that part in "The Break-Up" where Vince Vaughn asks "Why would I want to do dishes?"  That's me.  The knock-down drag-out fight in that film is so drawn from my life that she actually started to cry during it.  Of course I don't enjoy work, it's work.  And I'm not even compensated for it, except in the sense that doing housework allows me to not live in squalor.  

I don't think that either of these even support her argument that I am unreliable and don't do anything.  Even if they did, they could easily be countered with facts.

My spouse called me from work a few nights ago.  Normally, which is to say 99% of the time or more, she does this to remind me to do my chores or to add a new chore to my list, or to ask me to go and run an errand for her.  This call, though, was different.  She called to tell me that we were compatible.

This seems at first to be kind of uncanny, because this is exactly the issue that I've been dwelling on for the past, oh, two or three years, presumably unbeknownst to her.  Perhaps some kind of communications breakthrough has occurred here.

We are compatible, she tells me, because of our numbers.  I am a 4, she instructed, and she was an 8, and those numbers 'go together'.  I'd normally think that I was being called a 4 out of 10 or something insulting, but (and this is creating continuity) as my very first post suggests, I love lunatic fringe late-night radio, so I recognized this quickly as some type of numerology nonsense.  She told me that a coworker of hers is 'into' numerology, and that on their dinner break, she was 'doing' numbers for people, and that is probably the most distressing thing in the world to me.

My wife, you see, is a medical professional.  The assumption here is that her coworkers are too.  This means that people responsible for your healthcare, and mine, believe in numerology.  My wife has a degree in neuroscience, and she believes in it.  Not only that, but she had to call me and tell me about it, like it had some kind of validity or weight.  That is as unsettling to me as my first viewing of The Blair Witch project.

"I don't get many things right the first time," starts one of my favorite Ben Folds songs. I know, Ben: I get told that a lot, too. And not necessarily due to any kind of incompetence on my part (except maybe that most overarching kind, the broad, beach umbrella kind of idiocy that recasts even a man's most competent moments as something much less), I've developed, in my marriage, a reputation as a bit of a fuckup, a guy who never gets anything right ever. I think that's less because I am one and more that I'm not willing to forgo my essential sanity in order to 'get' the processes of my wife's brain.

This weekend, we fought about strawberries. I'd been given a shopping list and sent off to the store, coupons in hand. I come home with all of the items on my list, and I'm yelled at - yelled at - because I bought the strawberries at the wrong store.

A word on yelling. My lifemate often tells me that I have too thin a skin, and that she never yells at me, a notion that is, in fact, complete and total self-delusion on her part, as well as being, if it could not already be inferred as such, total bullshit. When you've raised your voice to a level that is audible to our neighbors over fruit, and you do not consider that vector of content and volume to be yelling, then one quakes to wonder at what point on such an imaginary chart marks off the borders of Yell Land.

Of course, pointing out that my dear heart is yelling over fruit only leads to a discussion about how I 'don't care about anything,' one of those emasculatory accusations that leaves you with nothing to say beside the 28 year old version of 'Yeah huh,' which may actually even still be, 'Yeah huh.'

I spent the better part of my weekend watching my fiancee wrestle with a $500.00 coat.  It would have been much more entertaining, I think, if the match didn't occur exclusively on the psychic plane and featured a bit more torn clothing and shouting.

There are times when I start to think that I have the girl figured out, and that she can be defined as a mix of the simple farmgirl she grew up as and the icy cosmopolitan bitch that her education has turned her into.  But while I'm watching her be appalled by the prospect of paying in excess of $500.00 for anything, I realize that the icy cosmopolitan bitch is nothing but a facade.  I extrapolate this across the rest of our day in NYC and I realize that she is afraid of the city, deathly afraid, a heavy revelation considering that she spent nearly a year of her life in or near it.

Part of me would hold it over her head, but it's held in check by the part of me that blanched at our $40.00 lunch and nearly got hit by a cab that ran a red light.  Equilibrium through humility.