in the form of my husband.

Today before he left for work he looked me in the eye and said, “Remember-you are still recovering from a serious illness. You are not well.”

And it was a good thing he reminded me, because I’d already begun to hear the siren song of a little voice in my head that said, “You know, I bet it would be totally fine for me to vacuum the entire house today all by myself.” And I believed it.

What is that-that part of me that has absolutely no connection whatsoever to reality?

I really don’t know.

All I know is, that part of me will not be vacuuming today. Lying on the couch and watching NCIS on DVD is probably a much better option for me.

That, when the need arises, there is always someone you can turn to and say, “I need you to check out my nipples. Is this how they always look?”

Today is my birthday (YAY!), and to celebrate I went to North Carolina last weekend to see my family.

My brother and his wife were there, and as a couple who have been married a little over a year they were discussing all the various adjustments they have been going through as newlyweds. Apparently sleep has been kind of an issue for them, as one of them goes to sleep and stays in the same position all night, and one of them moves around in their sleep. A Lot.

My brother described it in the following way:

“Are you familiar with Restless Leg Syndrome?” he asked us.

We were.

“Well, we’ve decided that [my sister-in-law] has Restless Existence Syndrome.”

Last Friday was our 11th anniversary, and in honor of that event my husband gave me an extra-special present, a gift that made my heart go all a-flutter.

What was this amazing gift? Flowers, jewelry, poetry? Nope.

In honor of our anniversary he rewired the house so that I can now plug my computer directly into our Internet connection, rather than having to rely on the sometimes-spotty connection I used to get through the wireless router. And I could not be happier. As a matter of fact, when describing how enthralled I am with my very fast, very reliable Internet connection to my husband, I believe my exact words were, “This is a dream come true!”

Apparently the road to my heart runs right smack dab through the middle of my Inner Nerd.

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.

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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.)

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.

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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.

He always sees the good in me.

This weekend we were playing a new video game featuring characters from the X-Men series of comic books. I’m playing as “Storm”, the character who can harness the power of weather.

I’m a bit directionally challenged , so I told him, “It’s a good thing you’re the one in charge of getting us around, because to me it looks like we’ve come back to this same exact room about 27 times.”

“That’s OK, baby,” he replied. “Some of us can read maps, and some of us have lightning.”

My husband is really, really good at fixing things. It is rare that we have to call in the help of a professional, but every so often we do. Like in the following situation.

Me: I can’t wait to get this mole removed.

My husband: I can take care of that for you.

Me: Thanks, but I think I’m gonna leave this to a trained professional (aka, “my dermatologist”).

My husband: Oh, what, like you think she took a class in “Removing Funny Things From People’s Bodies”?

Me: Yeah, actually I do. LOTS, as a matter of fact.

Yesterday I taught a Spanish class in which one of the students happens to be my husband. We were doing a sentence completion exercise, and one of the other students asked me how to say “space travel”.

“Well ’space’ is ‘espacio’,” I began.

“That sounds like a word you just made up,” interjected my husband (who, I feel compelled to point out, has attended all of six Spanish classes in his life as opposed to my ::cough::Master’s Degree in Spanish::cough), as he reached for his Spanish-English dictionary.

“So, what does the dictionary say,” I asked, with just a wee bit of testiness in my voice.

“Espacio,” he replied.

“Oh really? It says exactly what I just told you two seconds ago?” I taunted, feeling the sweet wave of vindication rush through me.

“Wow,” interjected one of the other students. “I’d love to see what arguments are like in the Ryan household.”

“Well, we have had to pull out the Almanac occasionally,” I said, in the tone of one who has just admitted to Bringing Out The Big Guns.

“I bet they Google everything and then one of them is like, ‘Hah, I can type faster than you so I win’,” continued the student, officially destroying for me any remaining vestiges of pride and vindication.

Ooh, man-the truth? Really does hurt.

If I had to identify one of the most outstanding characteristics of my personality, it would unfortunately have to be my Stunning Inability To Locate Myself In Time And Space. I get lost all the time, so often in fact that there now exists a Greatest Hits Collection of my best “getting lost” stories:

-the time I got lost leading a group of friends who were helping us move into our new house

-the time in grad school when I got lost on The Loop in Athens, GA-it was a LOOP for crying out loud, with a FIXED NUMBER of places you could go. Eventually I HAD to find something that looked familiar-and called my husband (then boyfriend) who was in grad school in Atlanta to announce that, “It’s pitch black and I have no idea where I am. Oh and by the way, I’m completely out of gas and am running on fumes. And even if you wanted to come and rescue me you couldn’t, because there’s no way to tell you how to find me. Tell my parents I love them.”

-the time I was driving down Interstate 85, headed to the same place I’d gone every single Monday night for an entire year, missed my exit, got off the highway, turned around, and headed back in the opposite direction (because, HELLO, that’s supposed to work!), somehow ended up on an entirely different Interstate and had to call my husband to guide me home so I didn’t accidentally end up in Alabama.

-the time I was in Phoenix and had to physically drive to the airport in order to change my ticket so I could fly home early. But I didn’t actually know how to get to the airport from my hotel, even though I had driven that route only 4 days earlier, so I called my husband and asked him to guide me there. (I don’t think he minded that much, because it did give him an excuse to fire up Google Earth). Then I had to drive back to my hotel, the exact same way that I had just come only minutes earlier. But I got lost again and had to have him reverse all the directions for me verbally in order to make it back safely.

I truly am one of those people who needs to wear an ID bracelet at all times. But instead of having a medical alert mine would need to say, “While extremely proficient in exploring the realms of the mind, wearer is completely incapable of navigating herself around the physical world.” [Read more…]