Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

A Completely Random Entry, Loosely Related To The Beach

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My husband and I are enjoying our yearly trip to the beach. He is especially enjoying the opportunity to eat great seafood. I am not.

I was recently informed by a friend of mine that vacationing at the beach but not liking seafood is “just as big a waste as being a gay man at a women’s festival.”

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As we were shopping for hats tonight in one of the many beach-wear stores on the island I heard what I am pretty sure is one of the signs of the apocalypse; namely, Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” as arranged for steel drums.

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Why I Love My Husband So Much: Reason 3

While I l-o-v-e the beach and the ocean, I am a total wuss about actually going into the water, because I am afraid of being touched by scary sea-dwelling objects that I can’t see.

Instead of running away screaming, my totally awesome husband bought me some Aqua Socks-protective foot coverings that allow me to fully participate in the beach experience without actually touching any part of the ocean.

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For some reason, whenever I am at the beach my naturally curly hair bypasses “frizzy” and vaults directly to “Medusa-like.”

Well That’s Not Something You Hear Every Day

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Last weekend my husband and I went to visit my brother and sister-in-law as part of the official start of our summer vacation. They both have their own laptops, but apparently my brother insists on keeping his in its virginal, pristine condition by refusing to allow anyone to download anything onto it from the Internet. So anytime this need appears, my sister-in-law’s computer is pressed into service.

It’s a good thing they’d told me about this on an earlier visit. Because otherwise, the conversation I overheard between them would’ve been even more disconcerting than it already was:

My sister-in-law: “So, where’s ‘The Whore’?”

My brother (looking around, completely unconcerned): “Um, I think she’s in the bedroom.”

Standards And Measures

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As I am a rather “artsy-fartsy” girl and my husband is an engineer, it is not surprising that we have very different communication styles:

-he enjoys finding ways to turn everyday situations into helpful, instructive math problems; I enjoy finding ways to turn everyday situations into sarcastic, snark-laden posts for my blog which allow for the frequent use of words like “ass” and “bongjillion”, as well as the breaking of every grammar rule known to man.

-he describes his world in precise, easy to understand terms like, “My ear hurts.”; I am incapable of communicating without the assistance of exaggeration and hyperbole as in, “There is a monkey drumming through my eardrum with a nail that has been heated to the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns!”

-I view everything in life as either the best, most amazing thing EVER! or the worst possible travesty ever to be inflicted upon mankind for which someone deserves to DIE!; the most common level of emotional reaction to a situation to which he is willing to commit is, “perhaps”.

So needless to say, we’ve had to work to find some common communication ground.

Through some unfortunate trial and error my husband has learned that if I ever send him the following text message:

I HATE EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING!

that he must drop whatever he is doing and perform an immediate intervention, so as to prevent me from sending a piece of our electronic equipment to its fiery doom.

However we have managed to find one area of mutual understanding and that area is, of course, the scale by which we determine The Urgency Of Our Need To Pee, as measured in Units Of Riley.

Riley is my in-laws’ little Cairn Terrier, and he is famous in the family both for the amount of pee he can contain within his tiny, canine body, as well as the intensity with which he can release it. And so being the kind of people that we are, people who notice the random, goofy crap that most people miss, people who like to bring up private, bodily functions in everyday conversation so as to horrify our mothers, we naturally took advantage of Riley’s urinary prowess and coined the phrase, “peeing like Riley”.

And so, while we may differ on which is the preferred political party, and we may disagree on whether or not women should be allowed to be priests, and we may be worlds apart when it comes to deciding whether a given song should be classified as “country” or “Southern rock”, when one or the other of us proclaims,

“Dude! I’ve gotta pee like 5 Rileys!”

Our minds are one.

Warning Signs

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The other day my husband and I were in Subway buying dinner. As we were placing our orders a couple of men joined the line, one of whom was wearing a shirt proclaiming, “Three Things You Should Never Say To Cops” (such as, “If I buy the donuts, will you let me off?”)

My husband struck up a conversation with the two men using the shirt as an icebreaker, and mentioned that we have a friend who is entering the police academy later this month.

As soon as he mentioned that this friend is a girl, one of the gentlemen piped up and asked, “Oh, is she hot? I’ll get her to pull me over!” I think he might possibly have had a mistaken perception of his own hotness, as he was sporting a wild and graying beard, a rather large belly, and might possibly have been wearing sandals with knee socks. (Important Side Note: And why is it always those people who think that the “hot people” would want to have anything to do with them?)

Yesterday we went out to dinner with the friend in question and one of her friends, who has been a police officer for the past two years. We recounted our little Subway adventure, which actually turned out to be quite tame compared to their stories (See: People Who Answer The Door Naked, People Who Attempt To Hit On Cops While In The Process Of Being Arrested, People Whose Gay Lover Wakes Them Up From A Sound Sleep By Biting Off And Eating One Of Their Fingers And Part Of Their Ear)

“You know, I’ve never been pulled over by a female police officer,” said my husband, “but if I were I don’t think my first thought would be, ‘Hm…sex’!”

“Well,” replied the veteran police officer, “that‘s how you know they’re creepy.”