Category: Love

My wife and I disagree on the fundamental nature of our bed. I think of it as a comfortable place to sleep, or have sex, or maybe read a book when more than two cats have evicted me from the couch. She thinks of it as a glorious retreat for nourishing the spirit in a harsh and callous world. If we each described our bed as a kitchen appliance, she would say it’s a variable-speed immersion blender trimmed in ermine, while I’d say it’s a spatula. I don’t mean a colorful, heat-resistant plastic spatula. I mean a steel spatula with a black handle that your granny might use to cook potato pancakes that taste like paste.

Our house has a big linen closet. If I lived alone, that closet would contain one set of white sheets and 72 cubic feet of unused computer components dating back to 1996. The other set of white sheets would be on the bed, along with a mattress pad and a green woolen blanket that some Marine slept under during the Korean War.

Instead, I live with my wife, which is a good thing for me. But it means that my linen closet contains 27 fitted sheets and 36 flat sheets in colors ranging from periwinkle to russet. They come in solid, striped, and flower patterns, plus flannel sheets with jumping sheep on them. Not one of those sheets is white. We also have over 40 pillow cases, some of which aren’t the same color as any of the sheets, so we can have contrast. The linen closet population is rounded out by three mattress pads, nine blankets, four spare pillows, and a duvet that makes a wonderful nest for cats.

This staggering mass of linen is arranged so that you can locate any item within five seconds. That’s because the linen closet was organized by my wife.

When we change the sheets, after the mattress-flipping ritual, my wife generally spends a minute or two picking out the two different colored sheets (top and bottom) that will form the foundation of our bed environment for the next week or two. A bright, cheery color combination will make her happy to be in bed, so I’m glad she takes her time. Sometimes she asks me to pick out sheets, which can be a problem. By reflex I look in the linen closet for white sheets. When I don’t find them, I peer into the closet as if considering which video card to buy for my computer, while I wonder whether brown and purple go together. I’ve never admitted it to her, but I often just pick the colors of a professional football team. The Cleveland Browns’ team colors—brown and orange—might not be the most popular combination at my house, but they work.

My wife likes to sleep, and maybe that’s what this boils down to. She wants to adorn the bed so she’ll be happy spending time there. Eight hours of sleep makes her optimistic and productive. Seven hours of sleep makes her stoic and determined. Six hours of sleep makes her grumpy, and five hours of sleep makes her act like me. I hate sleep. I resent having to give up so much of my life to sleep, and if I could get away with 30 seconds of sleep a night I would. Sleeping is like being sent to the corner of your mom’s kitchen and then waiting to be released back to your life. When you’re sitting in the kitchen corner, between the refrigerator and a dusty sack of potatoes, you don’t care if the place is dressed up like Disneyland.

In the end, I understand why our bed is decorated like a sultan’s bathrobe. I don’t grasp it on an emotional level, but I understand that it makes my wife happy. That’s worth a lot, especially when I’m searching for a place to stash two dozen worthless motherboards and audio cards, and the pantry is looking pretty good.

Orange, yellow, blue, white with brown pinstripes, five cats, and a teddy bear. A bed that will make my wife extra happy.

 

 

One of my oldest friends told me, “You giving advice on romance is like me giving advice on how to be a lady.” I took her meaning right away, for while I love her a lot, she is to ladies what Chewbacca is to bunnies. I felt surprised though. My wife loves me, and I don’t remember blackmailing her or making her lick a hallucinogenic frog for her to marry me. I must have been a little romantic. I recall buying flowers a couple of times, and I replaced the kitchen faucet with a shiny one she liked. I think that’s pretty good for an eight year courtship.

But my friend got me wondering about romance and my understanding of it. I’m confident it has something to do with love, and greeting cards, and jewelry I can’t afford. And there seems to be a gargantuan commercial industry built around romance—maybe bigger than Halloween, which I find a bit chilling. It makes me feel that if I’m insufficiently romantic then I may be hurting the economy and destroying jobs.

I was my most romantic when I was still dating. Maybe I should call it courting. Courting sounds romantic, while dating sounds like a couple of tough t-bones and a Julia Roberts movie. Regardless, I tried to be romantic when I wanted a woman to like me a lot, or at least like me enough to consider having sex with me someday. Romance is about convincing a person that you cherish them and want them more than you want air. Which of course is a ridiculous lie, but underneath it sits a corresponding truth—you want them more than you want anyone else currently in the room with you.

Romance traditionally includes a lot of trappings and strategies, and maybe my friend meant that I’m not good with those. I don’t plan romantic dinners well, with fat guys playing violins by the table. I’m hopeless with jewelry. I didn’t even buy my wife a diamond for our engagement, although to be honest she didn’t want one—which just proves that I won the marriage derby. My love poetry is rather pedestrian, although it wouldn’t make a jackal barf. I do remember anniversaries and birthdays, so that’s in my favor, although my gifts lack panache. I don’t recommend giving your sweetheart a new garbage disposal for your 15th wedding anniversary.

I’m not a complete disaster. I show up with flowers now and then. I really shine when we pass a store window and my wife stops to look at something. I point to a random spot in the display and grunt, “Wow!” That encourages her to tell me what she really likes, which I could never have guessed even with a chainsaw poised over my privates. My best moment comes when my wife refuses to let me buy whatever she’s fallen in love with, and then I buy it anyway when she’s not looking. There are no mysteries there, and I can follow the logic. I just hope she remembers that when my mid-life crisis hits high gear and I tell her not to buy me that Ferrari.

However, I can tell the romance story from the man’s side. Somewhere on a holy wall in the Orient is written, “Guys don’t care about romance. They just care about sex.” I guarantee that this is a half-truth. Of course guys care about sex. But they do care about romance, just not about the romantic trappings like dinners and poetry. For guys, romance consists of certain things not happening. For example, when a woman dates a man just so he’ll pay her house payment, that sucks out the romance for him. When she only accompanies him to the prom in order to hit on his best friend, that’s a romance killer. When a woman marries a man only to break him of his bad habits and fix his obsession with fantasy football, the man can find no romance there. And so what if guys care about sex? Sex can be romantic if you take your shoes off. So for guys, romance may blow to a different point on the compass, but it still blows.

Although my friend says that I’m romance-defective, I have noticed one odd thing about love and romance. I can’t know what my wife wants unless she tells me. I have poor mind-reading skills, as I’ve demonstrated hundreds of times. On the other hand, I’m tasked with paying attention to what she wants and likes and so forth, so I can make a pretty good guess about what she wants in some future situation. This is the same skill that lets me stick my hand into a fire one time and then know that sticking my hand into other fires would not be good—except that it’s harder to do because I don’t have a burned up hand to motivate me. I have to think about it to do it. I have to be thoughtful, which means I have to be full of thought. I admit that throughout my romance career I may have been full of shit more often than I’ve been full of thought, but at least I recognize that I should be doing something here.

In the end, I agree that I’m not ready for any fancy romance maneuvers. So, I’ll stick to the basics. If I want to be romantic, I have to do some things to show you that I want her. Just saying it or thinking it really loud won’t cut it. These have to be things that she’ll like, and I have to do them in a way that she’ll enjoy. That means I must have some idea of what she likes, so I’d better pay attention and occasionally think about something besides my fantasy football draft. I hope all this will convince her to want me so much she’ll forget every dumb thing I’ve ever done. That’s up to her in the end I guess, unless I break out the hallucinogenic frogs.

I still don’t understand why my wife thought this was more romantic than paintball.

When something says, “All Guys Need to Read This,” I pay attention. I figure it may be critical information about prostate health, or maybe a TV show where they blow stuff up. So when I read a post titled “All Guys Need to Read This” and found it full of advice on dealing with women, I felt perplexed. I was pretty sure that guys who prefer other guys don’t need to read it. But beyond that, it’s full of lousy advice written by some well meaning fool.

The post laid down 14 points regarding manly devotion to a woman, and I am not making any of them up. I don’t want to dismiss all of them. A few seem solid, whether you’re dealing with a woman or a man. Some even seem solid when you’re dealing with a child, or a cocker spaniel. The solid ones include:

  • “When she says that she loves you she really does mean it”
  • “When she tells you a secret keep it safe and untold”
  • “When you see her start crying just hold her and don’t say a word”
  • “Kiss her in the pouring rain”
  • “When she steals your favorite hoodie let her wear it”

I support every one of these. For example, if she says she loves you, and you think she’s lying about it, why are you even talking to her? Send her to the movies and change the locks while she’s gone. If you intend to share someone else’s secrets, you’re just a jerk. When someone you love starts crying, don’t try talking them out of it. That’s like walking into a fire and tossing around a few nuclear bombs. Kissing in the rain is always good in movies, so we know it has to be good in real life. And if someone you love wants to wear your hoodie, are you going to fight her for it? Hit her in the knee with a golf club?

The problem with all of that wisdom is that the only advice here worth uttering is the warning about shutting up when someone cries. I wasted 15 seconds of my life reading the others, and that’s time I could have used to eat one of those little bags of potato chips.

Let’s look at the rest of this instruction manual for people with penises.

  • “When she pulls away pull her back”

Maybe this guy intends to express his love, but he’s expressing assault in my book. When a woman pulls back, she probably wants to get away from your annoying words, behavior, or smell. Let go already.

  • “When you see her walking sneak up and hug her waist from behind”

This one seems problematic. I can see it being romantic under certain circumstances, like walking around the house with nothing much going on. But if she’s doing something interesting or important to her, snatching her around the waist is kind of like saying that what she’s doing doesn’t mean crap compared to your interest in a quick grope. Use with discretion.

  • “When she’s scared protect her”

What are you protecting her from—a jaguar that jumped through your living room window all of a sudden? You may get disemboweled in a pretty snappy fashion then, but okay. However, fear can be good. It tells us we’d better do something, and that thing is usually good for us. Don’t prevent her from doing that good stuff for herself because you were protecting the hell out of her.

  • “When she grabs at your hands hold hers and play with her fingers”

If that’s what she likes, sure, but as general advice this is just weird.

  • “When she looks at you in your eyes don’t look away until she does”

Maybe this is supposed to be romantic, but it sounds like a prelude to a gunfight to me. So you hung in there and stared her down until she looked away first. Is that a good thing, or is it like trying to establish dominance with a Rottweiler?

  • “When she’s mad hug her tight and don’t let go”

I’m sorry, but this is the stupidest advice ever. When she gets mad, it’s for a reason, and being restrained like that guy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest will solve the problem in only a tiny percentage of the cases. I don’t advocate doing this unless you want to get bitten on the face.

  • “When she says she’s ok don’t believe it”

I was wrong, this is the stupidest advice ever. If you both want to go insane trying to figure who’s sending what secret signals and who’s playing what game today, this is the ideal thing to do. If you’d prefer not to sit in divorce court arguing over who gets the chipped plates from JC Penny, then cut this crap out.

  • “Treat her like she’s all that matters to you”

She’s the only thing that matters to you, huh? I guess that means she’s responsible for your entire happiness then. That’s no pressure on her, though. After a few years she’ll leave you or stab you in your sleep.

  • “When she runs up to you crying, the first thing you say is, ‘Whose butt am I kicking baby?’”

Because when she’s upset the most important thing to do is threaten violence. That will make her feel better right away. Bonus points for using the word “baby” in the context of a felony.

Thanks for hearing me out on this. These are just my opinions, but I think there’s a chance that I’m right, and the possibility of it approaches 100%. Now I’m going to spend the evening with my wife, without assuming that she doesn’t mean what she’s saying, without treating her like a kid I need to take care of, and without the risk of my nose being bitten off.

This young lady is practicing the facial expression that precedes leaving a man forever, or possibly stabbing him in his sleep. You were warned. Photo from photobucket.com.

 

My first girlfriend threatened to break up with me if I didn’t go to church with her. I almost felt sick. I was in the 17-year-old equivalent of love with her. I thought my brain would explode if I didn’t see her every day, I was addicted to our naïve and frankly pathetic hanky-panky, and I always had a date without thinking about it too hard. Enduring two hours a week of hellfire and ladies’ fellowship bake sales didn’t seem like that big a price.

And yet the ultimatum tore at me. It wasn’t that I disliked church so much. I just disliked my girlfriend using love like a club to chase me into the pews. I didn’t know what to do. So I didn’t do anything, and in the end my sweet little flower of femininity broke up with me in a spectacular brush-off, in the school auditorium with all our friends watching. That was my reward for being unable to deal with an ultimatum.

I wandered through the next several years in befuddled incompetence where ultimatums were concerned. I mismanaged girlfriend ultimatums, which landed me in places like the Flower Show and theaters playing Annie Hall. I botched some friend ultimatums that led to all the fixtures torn off my bathroom walls and a singularly unwise loan to purchase a tenor saxophone. I made disasters out of ultimatums at work and at school. I don’t even want to talk about ultimatums that take place in bars.

This misery continued for six years. Then my nephew turned five years old and began educating me in the ways of ultimatums. He learned to master them because he was always in the middle of one. Most of us try to avoid the things, but he courted them. If he wanted a thing to be true, then some triviality like the opinion of the rest of the human race could not deter him. And he handled ultimatums with a tactical brilliance that would have sent Hannibal fleeing back to Carthage to live out his days as a turnip farmer.

As an example, say my nephew wants to play with his grandmother’s antique cigarette box shaped like an elephant, and he picks it up. His mother, knowing that within two minutes he will annihilate the thing like Hiroshima, takes it away from him and tells him no. He considers her opinion on the subject to be without merit, so he picks it up again. She once more takes it away from him and then issues her ultimatum: “Leave the elephant alone, or you’ll be punished.”

I recall seeing my nephew assess such situations as carefully as Tiger Woods on the 17th green. In those days we had no such thing as “time out.” We did have “sitting in the corner,” which was the same thing except for the beating you got on the way from the cigarette box to the corner. So he knew the stakes. He could avoid punishment and forever be denied playing with, and possibly destroying, that cool elephant cigarette box. I would probably have done something stupid like waiting until mom was in the kitchen before playing with the cigarette box. Then when I smashed it into splinters I’d receive punishment that was worse by an order of magnitude. My five-year-old nephew was fortunately smarter than me.

Let us return to my example. My nephew now stands there gazing at the cigarette box, while his mom hovers above him, a thundercloud of menace. He knows that the ultimatum game is a war, not a battle. If he gives in now, he turns himself into a slave, owned by the threat of being sent to the corner. He’ll never get to play with that elephant cigarette box. And his mom may try the same ultimatum trick to keep him away from the grandfather clock, the tacky ceramic lamp in the hall, and the M&Ms in the top of the pantry that he can reach by using a kitchen chair and a broom handle. That’s nothing but the crassest sort of defeatism.

By once more laying his sticky fingers on that elephant he gets a trip to the corner, augmented by some frustrated whacks from his mom. But he’s also declaring that punishment will not deter him, and that he will poke any ultimatum in the eye. Maybe he can’t play with the elephant cigarette box today, but at least he can accept punishment on his terms. And he may be punished tomorrow. But this is war, and tomorrow is another battle over that stupid elephant. He’ll probably lose that one too, but after a dozen or a hundred ultimatums his exhausted mom will lose the will to fight. She may only send him to the corner for a minute with a half-hearted swat. A few dozen more ultimatums later his mom will be completely broken and not care about the damned cigarette box as long as he doesn’t burn the house down.

That’s what my five-year-old nephew taught me. When they give you an ultimatum, poke the bastards in the eye, take the punishment on your terms, and outlast the sons of bitches. You do anything else at the risk of becoming their chattel. And at the risk of skulking out of the school auditorium with a stupid look on your face.

"Ho Chi Minh has nothing on me."

Photo from Bluebird of Bitterness, which is damn funny.

In the first three days of our romantic Jamaican holiday, my poor decision making skills nearly killed my wife and me. I blundered into buying a deep tissue massage, and we would certainly have died if I’d had enough money for the two hour session, or if our masseuses had been a bit more muscular.

Yet we survived. In celebration, we summoned the will to drag our body parts to the beach the next morning, which was the first really sunny day of our trip. Back home I’d purchased some great spray-on sun block, so we needn’t smear our entire body surfaces with goop as if we were birthday cakes. The stuff came out of the spray can shockingly cold, but we coated each other with diligence, except for our faces of course. We slathered regular, semi-gelatinous sun block on our faces.

We took it easy on the beach. We relaxed for half an hour, swam in the ocean for half an hour, relaxed another fifteen minutes, and went inside to take stock. We saw the beginnings of a nice tan. On our faces. Everywhere else our skin had achieved the color of the surface of Mars. When we returned to our room, the temperature inside went up ten degrees.

It became clear that if we wanted to get home alive I must not make any more decisions of any kind.

The next day was Valentine’s Day, which called for romantic hi-jinks, since this was a romantic vacation. My wife was empowered to select romantic hi-jinks for us. She chose zip lining. As far as I knew, zip lining was how guys with guns dropped out of black helicopters to shoot other guys who didn’t happen to be looking up. My wife informed me that was a narrow view of the term. You can also dangle from a wire stretched between two trees and let gravity hurl you across the gap, with no opportunities to shoot anyone on the other side. That too is called zip lining. Since this was Valentine’s Day, and this sounded so damned romantic, and I wasn’t allowed to make any decisions anyway, I said, “Sure.”

Our romantic zip lining rendezvous would happen in a lovely canopy jungle, which sounded pretty good. But we were at the beach, where canopy jungles were conspicuously missing. The jungle we needed lay rather closer to the middle of Jamaica. We spent two hours on a cute bus driven by a charming fellow named Chris, and I learned three things on the ride. First, it does not pay to be timid when driving in Jamaica. Second, I would refuse to be a pedestrian in Jamaica. I’d sit in a room and starve before I stepped onto the street. Third, I’ve spent about six hours on Jamaican roads, and I have had the honor of passing through the only stop light on the island, twice, and never slowing down either time.

At Zip Lining Base Camp the guides organized us, distributed equipment, and gave a detailed lecture on technique and safety procedures. We all signed a waiver, which none of us really read. I did catch some phrases like, “able to walk for 30 minutes,” “not responsible for spine injuries,” “coronary event,” and, “nausea and vomiting.” Well, I figured the lawyers probably just made them put that stuff in there. As I walked by a table one of the guides asked whether I wanted to take such a nice camera with me. I said sure, I wanted to take pictures. He warned me it would be wet, but I said I’d be okay. He persisted, saying it might rain, but I just waved and kept going.

Three guides led us ten hapless dopes to the first zip line, and a few things became apparent right away. The guides were funny, funny guys. The guide who’d warned me about my camera had a better camera than mine hanging from his neck. Since I’d brought my massive Canon along anyway, the guides named me “Paparazzi.” And when we hit the first zip line the guides just hooked us up and told us to grab on and go. It was like that lecture on technique and safety had been some sort of dream.

The zip lining itself was a hoot, especially the longer, faster lines. The guides kept us from dying, and more importantly entertained us while they did it. But I’ll tell you a secret about zip lines. The end you start on has to be higher than the end you finish on. That means to get to the next line you have to walk uphill. Actually you have to walk up rough rock steps. Steep ones. And lots of them. After a while, some of us had our heads down, gasping like an ox in Death Valley. The disclaimers about coronary events and vomiting flashed through my mind.

Despite that, we zipped down seven lines in all and had a great time. I took some pictures that didn’t suck. As our bus hurtled back toward our resort, dodging larger vehicles and intimidating anything smaller than itself, I reflected that my wife had made a good decision.

Back at the resort and drunk on successful decision making, my wife chose an oriental restaurant for our big Valentine’s Day dinner. While the food was delicious, they served us an entire trough of sushi. My wife’s bowl contained enough noodles so that placed end to end they would reach the height of the Statue of Liberty. We’d been zip lining all day. We were hungry. We ate a lot.

In our room after dinner we lay on the bed and looked at each other. Valentine’s Day would seem like the right time for some romantic hanky panky, especially on vacation. Yet we lay on our backs like chubby otters, unable to do anything but roll a bit from side to side. My wife said, “It’s like a perfect storm. The deep tissue massage, then the sunburn, then zip-lining, and now we’re stuffed full of noodles. I don’t know if we can touch each other without screaming.”

We’re so in love. We’d better be.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I must observe that my parents taught me how to break into cars. They taught me other useful stuff, like how play poker, when to over-tip, and to always buy the coolest presents I can afford. They taught me to frame walls, but for God’s sake to stay away from wallpapering. They taught me to break the rules I think are stupid, and to make it look like I was following those stupid rules all along.

However, my parents failed to teach me an important thing. They did not teach me how to get a girl. I have a great girl now, but I’m mystified about how I got her. It seems like luck. It’s as lucky as if lightning struck me 15 times, and it merely gave me a great tan and fixed my teeth.

Perplexed, I recently asked my parents how they became a couple. How did my dad get my mom? Maybe I did something right by chance, and it would be nice to know what it was. I guess my parents like me, because they told me their story.

My parents both grew up in the same town. That’s the town in which I grew up too, by the way. Their families had known each other for years. My future father was 5 years older than my future mother. His younger sister was my mom’s best friend, and my mom’s older brother was my dad’s best friend. When you’re a kid, someone 5 years older than you might as well be a thousand years older; my parents each were aware that the other existed, but they couldn’t possibly care.

At age 18 my dad joined the Marines and went to Korea. After three interesting years in Korea, he came home when he was 21. My mom was just 16 then, and he still barely noticed her. She didn’t pay much attention to his existence, either. Two more years passed in the way years tend to do. Now my dad was 23, and my mom was 18. My dad now noticed my mom and found he wanted her to be aware of his existence, and also to consider it a good thing. But my dad suffered from incredible shyness, and he couldn’t think of anything to do that would make this happen.

He asked his younger sister if she could help him, and she said, “You bet I can!” His sister asked my mom to go out Saturday night, as they often did, and my mom said sure. On Saturday my dad and his sister arrived at my mom’s house in his car. My mom thought it odd that my dad was there, but she shrugged and got in the car. Then my dad’s sister said, “Oh, I forgot I have something to do!” and she buggered off, leaving my dad and mom alone on what had just become a date.

They went to the local establishment where everyone in town gathered on Saturday nights. My mom knew everybody, and she laughed, and danced, and had a great time with her friends. My dad was slightly less outgoing. He sat in the corner all night drinking beer and saying nothing to anyone—including my mom.

The evening ended, and the time to go home arrived. In the parking lot my parents found that someone had parked their car behind my dad’s car, and he couldn’t get out. He solved this problem by picking up the back end of the offending car and dragging it out of the way so he could leave. My mom thought, “Huh.” That is exactly what she later told me she thought, word for word. During the ride back to my mom’s house, my dad still said nothing. He let her out at the curb and drove away. My mom went into the house and thought that this was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her.

On Sunday evening, with no planning or discussion, my dad pulled up in front of my mom’s house. As my mom looked out the window, she felt perplexed and unsure of what to do. She didn’t see many options, so she went outside and got in my dad’s car, and they drove away on their second date.

Six months later they were married.

I found that story to be charming, but not immediately helpful. I’m pretty sure I did speak to my wife at least once before we became a couple. I didn’t drink much beer, and I never picked up anything that weighed 10 times as much as me. Perhaps things were different in my parents’ time. Perhaps I’m different. Maybe it’s all just luck.

Then my mom mentioned that my dad did in fact speak during those six months. In fact, he and my mom both spoke quite a bit while driving around all night on a whole lot of occasions. So that was it! My dad demonstrated the ability to talk for six months without saying something fatally stupid. Now it all makes sense—I must have been lucky enough to do the same thing with my wife.

I find this all to be an enormous relief. I know how I got my girl, and I can put those doubts away. I didn’t blow it when the critical moment came. Because to be honest, I’ve never been able to drag a car out of my way, and part of me suspected that my parents taught me to break into cars so I’d be prepared when the moment arrived.

I know it seems odd to scrutinize a matchmaking service ad while sitting next to your wife. It’s especially odd when she commonly leans over to look at whatever you’re reading, on the theory that if you didn’t want her to look at it you’d read it in a locked room somewhere in Latvia. But I couldn’t help it. The ad presented such a fascinating concept in such a compelling manner that I couldn’t look away.

This all happened in seats 28E and 28F of a Boeing 737 flying at 37,000 feet towards Washington. That’s the Washington with all the elected crybabies, not the Washington with enough rain to drown a hippo. My job required that I be there for a few days. I didn’t mind too much since I might have the chance to be mean to people. My wife’s work had lulled, so we burned some of my miles for her ticket. It’s a pretty good way to get to the Smithsonian for five bucks and the cost of all the food you would have eaten at home anyway.

Lots of couples meet on Internet dating services these days. It’s no longer the province of guys who read Mein Kampf on the toilet and who have only five concert t-shirts and an Army jacket in their wardrobe. I’ve met several nice couples who connected through online services that cater to young Christians, people over 50, Democrats, and people with IQs over 145. Narrowing the field is critical. If you’re a sci-fi fan, you needn’t waste time on potential mates who don’t speak Klingon and don’t know who said, “This is my boomstick!”

(As an aside, let me observe that my wife and I have gotten along nicely for two decades, even though we have almost nothing in common other than being vertebrates.)

The in-flight magazine ad that snatched my attention targeted business executives. Presumably it was geared towards successful executives, rather than bitter managers playing Angry Birds in their office all day while vindictive customers and crappy health insurance suck out their employees’ souls. The ad described this company’s executive recruitment matchmaking model, which I expect will make the ears of single, successful executives perk right up.

Businessmen everywhere rejoice. (photo by Ambro)

This process centers around an “executive love recruiter” that searches, filters, and performs due diligence on the love of your life. I know that I’d feel confident knowing that my recruiter was out there scouting, sourcing, recruiting, screening, weeding out the inappropriate and interviewing the must-meet individuals in-person on my behalf. In the meantime, I could be earning my Six Sigma black belt and jockeying for position at the staff meeting conference table.

The person who invented this service is a genius. As their customer, once my love recruiter extended an offer to my soul mate and she accepted, I’d know that she met my requirements for age, desirability, political views, humility, and willingness to put up with my shit. As a bonus, I’d have someone at all times to make copies and fix my lousy Powerpoint slides. This is something that our Captains of Industry have needed for so many years.

The cost of executive love recruitment can be vague. For men it’s just referred to as a premium fee. For women the cost is less vague. Women may take advantage of this service for no fee at all. Is it just me, or does no charge for ladies sound like happy hour at a cheap bar? On the other hand, what do I know about the loves and losses of those holding the throttle of the capitalist engine?

I spent at least five minutes pondering this advertisement. I’d been looking in the magazine to see whether I could get a teeny bottle of Jack Daniels, and instead I found my cultural horizons expanded. After soaking in the ad’s glory for a while, I leaned over to my wife, showed it to her, and said, “You can’t make this shit up. I know what I’m writing about tomorrow.”

Last week a friend mocked me for washing a bowl before I put it in my dishwasher. She did it in a gentle way, and as I scrubbed out the dried tomato soup I admitted that I didn’t trust the dishwasher. Trust can be fragile in my world, and I can’t place full trust in a machine built by a guy who’s yearning for his break while daydreaming about his girlfriend in black stockings. Maybe I’m weird. Yet this was my friend who was asking me, so I didn’t mind sharing my mistrust with her.

A few minutes later, alone as I scoured a pot, I reflected on the romance of the mundane. Washing dishes seems about as mundane as you can get. At least it seems that way to me. But I was washing each dish as people brought them in from the den, so that my wife could visit with her friends and not have to face a Vesuvius of plates and flatware when everybody went home. It sure wasn’t dinner and dancing. It lacked passion, and nobody was getting groped in a promising way. Yet this mundane thing we shared had its own kind of romance.

Yin Yang by Nicolas Thompkins (From Chair Blog - http://www.chairblog.eu/2010/12/27/yin-yang-by-nicolas-thomkins/)

I guess this is kind of Taoist. Maybe Zen or something. I wondered if anyone else had thought about this, and I found this neat article. It even used the same words had I thought of—Romance of the Mundane. It’s all about the simple, daily tasks and events that make a shared life, and how that constitutes real romance.

I admit that I’d make a crummy Taoist. I looked into it when I was young, and while it was cool I realized it was not for me. I could give some meaningful-sounding reasons, but basically I like stuff too much, and I enjoy it too much when things get exciting. Plus, if you’ve ever heard a Taoist joke then you’d know that Taoism require a consciousness expanded beyond my capability to achieve.

A Taoist joke, courtesy of the Hog-Tao:

Accept misfortune as the human condition.
What do you mean, “accept misfortune as the human condition?”
Misfortune comes from having a body.
No body, no misfortune.
Which reminds us of a song.
Sometimes we amuse ourself at the Hog Tao.
But nobody knows.
Except Louis.
Sing it Satchmo.

Therefore, while I’m not a Taoist, I’m also not alone in my suspicion that romance of the mundane does exist, and that it’s about sharing a life. Although it’s still nice to get laid once in a while, nothing says romance like shopping for decent produce and mint chocolate chunk ice cream. Nothing says devotion like putting your lover’s clean underwear away in the proper spot in the correct drawer. Nothing says love like working together to change the sheets because the cat barfed on them.

 

My wife could be getting a remodeled bathroom with heated tile floors for Christmas. Or she could be getting a cruise down the Danube with a personal chef and her own burly Teutonic masseur. Maybe a puppy that will grow into a huge, destructive dog, or maybe a freezer and a “Tasty Animal of the Month” membership. But my sweetie will not be getting any of those things because the universe is unfair, and it requires me to pay for everything I want to give someone. Therefore, my wife will receive a squatty wooden chair on Christmas morning.

Presents were a big deal in my family, and I guess they still are. We didn’t have much money when I was a kid, but we didn’t care about spending a lot on gifts. We wanted to give a gift that was so perfectly suited to the recipient that he would go into convulsions from pure joy. It was a modest goal. Occasionally we found the perfect gift at a reasonable cost. Usually we couldn’t afford it even if we sold all the grandparents for medical experiments. So we’d buy the most nearly perfect gift we could afford without actually weeping blood from the expense.

I’ve carried this pathology with me into adulthood. My preferred gift shopping strategy is to walk into an interesting store and stride up each aisle. My goal is to shop for some loved ones whose lives I want to make ideal for one shimmering, eternally-remembered moment. So of course I don’t think about any of those people at all. I just absorb the merchandise’s aura in a consumer-zen fashion, and when my intuition smacks me in the forehead about some item I buy it. When I get home I’ll figure out who it’s perfect for. Or as close to perfect as I can afford.

Over the years, that strategy did not drip insanity, no matter how it sounds. I always employed a critical safety measure. I only went into stores that I could afford that year. If my income made it a Woolworths Five and Dime year, I did not walk into Aberdeen’s Custom Jewelry and Furs Worth Going to Hell For. I could set limits. I indulged my neurotic gift giving compulsion and still remained fiscally responsible. The universe made sense, at least through the skewed lens of my childhood.

Then came the internet.

The internet blew away my safety interlocks faster than a reckless starship captain in a David Hasselhoff movie. Suddenly the world was one big store, with nose hair clippers on one aisle and matching Ferraris on the next aisle over. My strategy would lead only to wailing frustration, immediate bankruptcy, or catatonia induced by irreconcilable psychic and moral conflict. In other words, bad strategy.

I turned to my wife for guidance. She has always adopted a more reflective approach than I to gift giving. She follows the, “Give them something nice and move the hell on,” philosophy. She doesn’t give crappy gifts. She doesn’t shop at the gas station for presents. I’ve never received from her a 5 Hour Energy Drink and a Zagnut Bar in a used Arby’s sack for my birthday. She even dares to ask people what they’d like to get as a gift, which I kind of consider to be cheating. If they don’t tell her what they want, then she gives them something modest and charming, and if they don’t like it then it’s their own damned fault for not telling her what they wanted. It all seems like insanity to me, but I don’t see my wife obsessively scratching furrows into the back of her hand because her brother wanted the blue jacket instead of the brown one she gave him.

So under my wife’s tutelage I’ve developed a new strategy. First I ask people what they want. If they want something too lavish, I just ignore whatever they said. Then I count up the rest of the money I can spend and divide it by the remaining gift recipients. Hopefully it comes out to at least seven dollars per person. If not, I decide which family members and friends I want to offend and maybe never speak to again. Then I find something that I can give to everyone, making sure it’s the nicest thing I can buy for seven dollars. I buy the gifts, bestow them as appropriate, and drink some Christmas tequila to smother my sense of having violated some natural law. Simple.    

My wife's current squatty wooden chair, complete with bungee cord structural support

This is how I know that my wife will receive a squatty wooden chair for Christmas. She got me started on my new strategy by flat out telling me what she wants. She wants this chair so she can sit on it while she applies makeup. She had a nice chair for that purpose, but I crushed it when I sat down to talk to her about weather stripping the front door. She coaxed the chair back into cohesion using a bungee cord and some profanity, so she can sit on it for now if she doesn’t mind risking permanent spinal injury whenever she applies blush. So, she wants a chair, I understand why she wants it, and I even feel responsible for her needing it. I will buy her the best squatty wooden chair I can find.

I wonder if they come inlaid with sapphires and ivory from extinct animals?

 

I have failed my greatest tests of character. I admit that doesn’t look good on a t–shirt. I suppose I could try to equivocate, or even slip out of this admission entirely. I might say that a test of character is “an instance in which one is faced with a situation that challenges the social norms of one’s culture.” That half-assed sociology student’s definition would enable me to meet any challenge with buckets of character to spare. But hell, I can barely understand what it says. My people didn’t define a test of character that way. For them it was, “you want to do a thing you know ain’t right.”

Like everyone, I’ve demonstrated my tarnished character many times in my life, maybe two or three times a day since I turned three years old. Mostly the small things defeat me. Watching Popeye smack the fool out of Bluto while I should have been cleaning my room. Drinking beer at school when someone was around to take my picture as evidence. Blowing off Biology because English was more fun. By the way, if they don’t want that to happen then they shouldn’t make you collect bugs for Biology while they let you make movies for English. These were small tests, but I’ve failed many thousands of them, and they add up. They add up to exactly not a damn thing, in my opinion. They’re just the price of having bigger frontal lobes than the other primates. That’s right, I jumped off the house to impress a girl because my lobes are big.

But bigger challenges have often annihilated me. And I don’t remember anyone walking behind me dangling a carrot in front of my face. I embraced character corrosion all on my own. For example, my heart told me that dropping out of college was the wrong move. My brain, gut, gall bladder, and pancreas did too. I didn’t listen or even care. Later on, I knew with mathematical certainty that when I walked into the totally nude bar with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red in my right hand and a bottle of Gatorade in my left, it would result in me starting a fight and waking up the next morning in a pool of vomit and blood. Did it anyway. I haven’t always done the most awful thing possible. I have good days. But I have faced decisions about cruel behavior, illicit substances, illegal activities, procrastination, prevarication, and degradation of the temple that is my body. I made the wrong choice pretty often. And I admit that these decisions do mean something to me when I take my character out to examine it at night.

But my most devastating character tests have involved women. I’ve chosen well at times, emphatically so in the case of my current wife. But generally, getting involved with a woman has turned my character into a pillar of salt. I’ve fallen for women who reviled me, women who ignored me, and women who thought they liked me okay until our first date. I always knew I was making the wrong choice, but I didn’t possess the character to say no. I chased women whose boyfriends rightly threatened to kill me, and I caught women only to break their hearts. I was stupid enough to fall for my best friend’s wife, and reckless enough to marry the human least suitable on the entire planet to be my spouse. Note that I included both genders in that statement to give you an idea of the real scope of my blunder. These were my greatest tests, and unfortunately I’m a sucker for women, a sucker for love, and a sucker for bad choices about both.

Thank God for my current wife. Without her I’d probably fall into every bottomless crevasse of character subversion that I walk past.

They say that suffering builds character. Well, I don’t remember a single time that shrieking agony, even the emotional kind, built my character. Not a bit, not even at the atomic level. It just pissed me off. Occasionally it made me sad, but mostly I wanted to pry off someone’s testicles, yank out their eyes, and nail the testicles into the empty sockets. I guess that’s just me. If suffering builds character, why do so many people lead wretched lives, yet you wouldn’t trust them to scrub bird shit off a statue of Yogi Bear?

I’m going to assume that at some points in my life I did build a little character. I can resist accepting a gritty crust of bread as payment to dry gulch an orphan for her lunch money and her Hello Kitty backpack. I do have a modest capacity for doing the right thing. How did I build this smidge of character? It seems like on the few occasions that my character stretched, it filled me with frustration. Regret and even nausea often followed. These disturbing symptoms appeared when I decided to do a right thing and then stick with that decision throughout the complete denial of the thing I’d rather be doing. I would think, “Ah this is what it’s like to do the right thing. I am building character, and it will make it easier to feel even more frustrated and shitty the next time I do the right thing. Goody—I’ll go ahead and start getting extra frustrated now to be sure I don’t miss it next time around.”

I guess building character’s like building a muscle. If I work to make the right decisions now, I get better at making them next time, no matter how big a frustrated dope I feel like. I can now hear the generations of my people more clearly, saying to me, “Show some character, boy. To hell with that suffering shit. Just do what you ought to, get a big dose of frustration and nausea, and learn to like it.”