Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

The Truth Will Out

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So as of Monday I hit 888 posts on this blog, which is just amazing to me. Go me!

So when my husband and I were connecting after work and sharing how our days had gone, I told him of my amazing accomplishment.

I didn’t quite get the excited reaction I was hoping for, so after my husband had been quiet for a minute or two I asked, “So what are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering how many fingers it would take for me to count to 888 in binary,” he replied.

So then I was quiet for a moment or two, and then said, “You know, I was gonna make fun of you for that, until I realized that I’ve spent this whole time figuring out how to turn this conversation into a blog post.”

Well, At Least I Don’t Have To Read His Mind

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So the other night my husband and I were each reading our current book while eating dinner, when suddenly he looked up at me and said, quite deliberately, “Exodus 22:18”.

So I looked up from my book and waited for him to continue, thinking that maybe he had some kind of question or comment he wanted to share with me. But no. Instead he just sat there, looking at me expectantly until I said, “I hope you don’t expect me to know that verse from memory.”

“Well, yeah,” he said, not understanding what the problem was.

When all I did was stare at him incredulously he went on.

“There are certain things I expect of you,” he said. ” I expect you to know what any and every Spanish word means. And I expect you to be able to instantly hear and translate any part of a song or conversation we hear that’s in Spanish. And I expect you to know about religious things.”

“You mean you expect me to have the entire Bible memorized,” I said, trying to clarify what I’d heard.

“Well, yeah,” he replied, grinning. And then when I made noises of “yeah, what-EVER!”, he said, “just like you expect me to be able to solve every technical problem and fix everything around the house.”

“Yeah, but you can actually DO those things,” I protested.

“Well, you can do this stuff,” he said.

I snorted, and we both went back to our reading.

He finished eating first, and after he put his dishes in the sink he started walking to his office, but caught himself and then turned back for a final word in my direction.

“Oh,” he said, “AND I expect you to know everything about entertainment and celebrities.”

“Well why didn’t you say so in the first place?” I asked, throwing my hands in the air in exasperation. “THAT I can do.”

I Really Have No Idea What To Call This. Titles Are Probably Overrated Anyway

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So the other day I was making myself a sandwich for lunch, and as I was opening up the loaf of bread it made me think about my grandparents. Apparently they had vehemently differing opinions on what exactly was the proper way to turn a twist tie in order to seal something up. One of them was adamant that it needed to be turned clockwise, and of course the other one was every single bit as convinced that counter-clockwise was the only way to go. Which really makes no sense whatsoever, I know. UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN MARRIED. And then it makes all the sense in the world.

I guess that every relationship has their own twist ties. For my parents, it’s toothpaste. My dad is a “roller”, starting at the very bottom and then methodically making his way up the tube. But my mom-she just squeezes it right out the middle, wherever the spirit happens to move her, which of course drives my dad absolutely nuts.

Now sometimes people are lucky, and they are able to find a way to resolve these kinds of conflicts. In the case of my grandparents, they got together and banned all twist ties from their house, declaring that from now on the only acceptable means of sealing up food products was to be the clothespin. And for my parents, they just started buying two tubes of toothpaste when they went to the store.

So of course that got me to thinking about my own marriage, and what our particular twist ties might be.

For a while it was the toilet seats, as it often is.  But we solved that problem by issuing a declaration stating that, “EVERYONE!-it’s just the two of us here-EVERYONE MUST PUT ALL THE SEATS DOWN ALL THE TIME.”

So we resolved that issue pretty quickly, but believe you me-that is not always the case around here.

Specifically, I’m remembering one particular Christmas when my husband and I were still in graduate school. He drove over from Atlanta to Athens to meet me, and then we were going to drive back to North Carolina together in my car. Now, don’t ask me why, but for some reason we decided that it would be a good idea to take my desktop computer-tower and monitor-home with us. Despite the fact that I only had a tiny little Mustang at the time.

Of course, that left Very Little Room for anything else to go home with us, so we were reduced to stuffing little bits in here and there, wherever we could find a little space. Eventually we were down to the last spot and, in the Spirit Of Christmas, we proceeded to get into one of the biggest fights we’ve ever had in our twenty years together over whose dirty laundry got to go home with us. Because, by God, DIRTY LAUNDRY IS A SERIOUS BUSINESS! As if we were completely deprived of laundry cleansing facilities here in Georgia, and the only hope for clean clothes lay back there in North Carolina.

You know. Because we were 20. And stupid. And so very, very firstborn. And I mean FIRST! BORN!

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Here There Be Dragons

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So last week I got my new Blackberry Flip phone, and as I’ve been figuring out what all the different buttons do, my husband has been helping me find cool applications to download. I’ve pretty much been on board with things like Facebook and Google, but then one day our honeymoon period came to an abrupt end as my husband excitedly told me, “Just wait until I show you this cool program called ‘Latitude’.” And then I began to whimper.

Now it’s not that my husband’s love of all things map-related suddenly came as a big surprise to me. I’ve known all about that since the early days of our relationship. As a matter of fact, I vividly remember one evening back when he and I had just started dating when, after a nice family dinner, he and his dad pulled out a couple of atlases and began to investigate them closely. I sat and watched for while as they carefully planned out routes from Butte, Montana to Salt Lake City, Utah, thinking that perhaps they were making plans for an upcoming trip.

But as the plotting continued between more and more random cities, cities that they could not possibly ever need to visit, it suddenly dawned on me that THIS WAS THE EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT. And that my husband and his dad were actually competing to see who could come up with the best theoretical route to get from theoretical city one to theoretical city two. And then I cried a little.

And of course, mere words cannot describe the love he has in his heart for Google Earth. So since I won’t even go NEAR his office if there’s any possibility that this program is in use, he’s forever calling up his dad and having conversations like this:

My Husband: “Hey. You know that house we lived in when I was five? Well I’m looking at it on satellite view right now. And you know that tree we had in the front yard? Yeah, they cut it down.”

By the same token, I should also add that the extent to which I break out in hives whenever I have to deal with maps and directions is also NOT ANYTHING NEW. So I was kind of worried that maybe my husband had suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury while I wasn’t looking, and then consequently had forgotten who I am, when he offered to install what sounded suspiciously like an application devoted to the love of maps on my phone.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but ever since I got sick I have completely lost all ability to pretend about my feelings. And what I was feeling now was, “Noooo0000!”

But it actually turned out to be kind of cool, something about GPS and being able to tell where the other person is at any moment. And I’m not at all thinking that the installation of this application has Anything Whatsoever  to do with the spy shows we’ve been watching lately, like “Chuck” and “MI-5”.

Although, I’m always at home these days. So it’s not like it’s really difficult to find me. And if anyone ever did have to spy on me I would feel really bad for them, because this would be The Most Boring Assignment In The Entire History Of Intelligence Work:

“Subject is wearing same green pajamas for the 87th day in a row. Dear God, please KILL ME NOW!”

So the next time you and your loved ones pull out your atlases to plan your theoretical trips, be on the lookout for the symbol on the map marking our house which indicates that, “cranky, frequenly homebound, crazy-cat lady lives HERE”. For best results, and for the winning entry in The Best Theoretical Navigational Route Competition, just go ahead and plan to pass us right on by.

The Firstborns

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Now that we have been married for thirteen years, my husband and I have gotten pretty good at working out the different roles in our relationship. Some things I’m in charge of, some things he’s in charge of, and some things we do together. It’s pretty balanced and comfortable.

But sometimes one of us gets a little funky in some area, and the other person has to step in and have a little “come-to-Jesus” meeting with the other person.

Case in point-my husband and his relationship to our rechargeable batteries. A few years ago we started buying rechargeable batteries since we both are so enamored of electrical gadgets. But lately, for  like, oh, the last year or so, the batteries have stopped holding their charge. So we’ve been having a lot of conversations like this:

Me: “So, the rechargeable batteries are losing their charge.”

My husband: “No they’re not.”

Me: “Yes, they are. Seriously-I put them in the camera, and I can take like two pictures, and then I have to replace them again.

My husband: “The batteries are fine. They work just fine for me.”

Seriously, it’s like one of those relationships where a girl is dating some scummy, lowlife guy who beats her, but she keeps on making up all these justifications for why she’s not leaving him:

“Oh, he didn’t mean it.”

“Oh, I know he loves me.”

“But I can change him.”

So last Friday  my husband got home from a business trip, and when he tried to work on his computer he saw that he needed new batteries in his mouse. And I am not kidding, he walked back and forth in front of me from the kitchen to his office THREE TIMES in the space of five minutes because, guess what? NONE OF THE BATTERIES WORKED! And as he passed me by his face dared me to say anything, which I didn’t have to, because the smug grin on my face said it all for me in that it was loudly broadcasting the message of, “SEE-I TOLD YOU SO!”

But even then he refused to admit defeat, continuing his attempts to manufacture tiny threads of hope that he could hold onto, so I had to stage an intervention.

“We are going to Fry’s this weekend, and we are buying new batteries AND a new charger!” I proclaimed.

“Oh we are, are we?” retorted my husband. But in his heart he knew that we were, because I almost never put my foot down like that, which means that when I do, he listens.

So we went, and he was all resistant and rejecting everything they sold, and I was like, “Dude-IT’S JUST BATTERIES! And we can get a charger AND a set of batteries for under twenty dollars. I don’t understand what the problem is here.”

He really didn’t have a good answer to that question, so I prevailed and we made our purchase. And so now we have two chargers plugged in in the kitchen, because apparently you can force my husband to go to the electronics store and buy new batteries, but you can’t make him use them. So now he makes a point of only using old batteries from the old charger as if to say, “I know Jenny has abandoned you, but I never will.”

It’s like these shoes he had back when we first got married. He had this pair of Docksiders which he loved, with a deep and abiding passion. Which was just fine, until the day I noticed that every time he wore them, he bled. His beloved shoes were MAIMING him, but he absolutely refused to admit what was going on.

Me: “You can’t wear those shoes anymore, because they are causing you to bleed.”

My husband: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. These shoes are just fine.”

Me: “There is blood flowing from your heels even as we speak. THEY ARE NOT FINE.”

My husband: “There is nothing wrong with these shoes. They are the best shoes ever. Go away!”

So somehow I managed to get him to throw them away, but to this day he still mourns their loss, and blames me for ruining their perfect relationship. Which I guess is just an example of tough love, when you have to step in and be the bad guy to keep a loved one from getting hurt.

And so I know that to be fair, I should include some stories now about how I am all unreasonable and in denial about things, but truly, around here it’s pretty much like, “Oh, Jenny’s being crazy again? It must be Monday. Or Tuesday. Or a day  ending in “-day”.” (See: The Having Of Fibromyalgia, And My Denial Thereof, In That I Am Not Really Sick).

But I can tell you about an area in our marriage where my husband and I are The Most Stubborn Human Beings Who Have Ever Lived.

When I was in high school my mom bought me an all-new set of bed linens, to replace the set I’d had almost since I began to sleep in a big-girl bed. The set was PEACH, to match the PEACH flowers on my wallpaper, and included a PEACH blanket. To go with all the PEACH in my PEACH room.

Well the blanket came with me when we got married, and for some reason my husband insists on referring to my CLEARLY PEACH blanket as “the pink blanket.”

For thirteen years now we’ve been having this debate, with neither side budging an inch. It’s gotten to the point now where one evening, when I was very sick and needed a blanket, I refused to ask my husband for help. Because if I asked him for the peach blanket, there was a chance he would refuse to bring it to me. And if I referred to it as the pink blanket, then he might think that he had “won”. Because we are dorks, and also, being firstborns, “I AM RIGHT. AND YOU ARE WRONG. WHY CAN’T YOU SEE THIS?!”

Don’t you wish you lived here too?

A Little Marital Love

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Given that I speak Spanish, my husband takes full advantage of this, and is always asking me to translate something he’s recently seen or heard.

So the other night he asked me to come into his office, and when I got there he turned up the music he was playing on his computer and asked, “Can you understand what they’re saying?”

As far as I could tell, there weren’t any actual words to the song, only a bunch of people singing different variations of “Oohs” and “Ahs”.

I kept waiting, desperately wanting to hear the words my husband  claimed were there so that I could give him the answer he was looking for. But wait as I might, they never came, and eventually I was going to have to respond to my husband’s waiting look.

“Eeeh, ahhh, oooh,” I offered timidly, wondering if maybe this was some sort of trick question.

Apparently it wasn’t, because the next thing I new I saw a rude gesture flung my way. (Despite the fact that during the entire time I was in his office, listening, THERE WERE NO WORDS TO BE HEARD.)

Ah, love.