Tuesday, February 14, 2012

It's Valentine's Day, Let's Watch The Notebook! HA HA! Also, I'm A Unicorn And You're A T-Rex.

It's Valentine's Day. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

When we were still dating dating (not married dating), I made the then-future-hubby mixed cds and bought him lots of presents, which I wrapped in wrapping paper that I made myself that highlighted all our inside jokes. Once, I ink-jet-printed out a thousand Battlestar Gallactica scenes and then made speech bubbles for all the characters and glued it to the insides of this really cool clear gift bag. All the characters said all the stuff that we'd joked about while watching the show. It took forever. We still have that bag. We store all our owner's manuals in it for all our appliances and stuff. When I see it now, I laugh and roll my eyes at myself for being such a dork. At the time, I thought I was such a genius girlfriend.

Anywho, I bought the hubby-of-the-future multiple Valentine's Day cards because so many cards expressed all my different feelings every year that I couldn't buy just one. I bought him so many cards that sometimes I'd buy a card and use parts of it to make the mixed cd liners. I remember this one pink card that had a cartoon unicorn and cartoon T-Rex on it and the T-Rex was all, "I'm extinct and you're mythological" and the unicorn was all "We'll make it work." You know, because on paper, my husband and I are super different and in theory, it shouldn't work, but love and all that. That's funny since now sometimes I'm like, "How are we different people?! I mean, really? Isn't it crazy to think about how you and I are two separate people?"

This was back when to make a mixed cd,  you had to use actual songs from actual cds that you actually owned. Oh, the labor.

We got engaged, then married. I bought him more functional Valentine's Day presents like socks. Essentially, the first 4 years together were a slow and steady replacement of all the weary and worn clothes that man owned. Is it a holiday? Look! Undershirts! Merry Christmas! Happy Birthday! This (*holds up tee shirt with holes in the armpits*) is going away! Forever!

I read somewhere once that a guy knows he's in a serious relationship when he no longer has to buy underwear. Ever. Because his girlfriend/wife does all that stuff. And that sh*t is so true. A woman comes in and sees what that guy's been wearing and after the shock's worn off, she kindly replaces everything that he owns so that what is elastic is still stretchy and everything that is supposed to be white is actually white and every hole in every garment was put there by the people who actually made the garments. I mean, the armpit holes I just mentioned? Not just undershirts, no. They were many, they were vast, and they haunt my dreams. I don't know how he left the house before he met me.

I made him romantic Valentine's Day meals. I made his beloved corn muffins in a heart shaped muffin pan. I bought airplane cookie cutters months earlier, then used them to cut out homemade brownies in airplane-software-engineer shapes to end his favorite meal of the time. Usually, I had problems. Set off the smoke alarms, watched half of each corn muffin stick in the pan, had to explain that the brownie was in the shape of an airplane since it looked like a frosted insect of some kind. I cooked a lot the first 3 years of our marriage. I was always trying new things. Which sounds nice but isn't. My husband has always been the kind of person to say everything I've ever cooked was delicious. I've cooked for an afternoon, given him a plate, washed the dishes, then finally tasted the inedible meal myself. I'd have to go find him wherever he was eating in the house and take his half eaten plate from him so that I could toss it all into the garbage before making a frozen pizza. Eff you, Rachel Ray. I have maybe 3 meals still in rotation out of a thousand and those 3 were after a lot of editing.

My point is I used to try a lot harder. Which I know he appreciated but I also think he doesn't really need. Or expect. He's not a holiday guy. If there's something he wants or I want, we usually just talk about it and make it happen. If it's anywhere near a birthday or a holiday, we add, "Happy birthday!" or whatever. Valentine's commercials started coming on the television pretty quick this year. After some swearing on my part about the whole "individually bought beads on a bracelet" thing that is happening right now (REALLY? REALLY? REALLY?), I told him, "You're getting me some chocolate this year" and it's been in the cupboard since Saturday. Actually, he perturbed me yesterday so I ate all the good pieces out of the box and he brought home another, better, more Happy-Wife flavored box last night. No dark chocolate and lots of caramels.

He even bought himself a box of candy full of candy I don't like.

Does that count as his V-day gift? I am saying yes. Since every birthday and Christmas present he's gotten me has been stuff I've bought myself and then said, "Guess what you got me for my birthday!"

Actually, we had a weird day yesterday, hence the extra box of chocolate. I'd voiced my concern over the weekend about the forecast of freezing rain, bad roads, and snow for Monday. The forecast eventually said yesterday morning was supposed to be okay, so instead of working from home like I wanted, the husband, he went in and promised to come home early in the day.

I could tell when I woke up that the husband's brain wasn't functioning properly, and/or he was trying to drive me insane.

He does this thing sometimes where he brings up his empty cans and bottles from downstairs. The recycling is downstairs. If he leaves his recycling out downstairs, I can walk it over into the next room, where I keep the recycling before taking it out. It doesn't bother me too much to carry his damn Pepsi can into the next room. Although why he can't do this is outside my realm of imagination. What does bother me is when he carries that can back upstairs. Which is when he sets it on the kitchen counter. So that I can pick it up and carry it back downstairs. Not a huge deal so I tried to let it go. One day, he did it like 3 times. It drove me so crazy that I grabbed the cans from the kitchen and whirled myself around the house until I found him and then sort of accosted him. My brain just couldn't take it anymore. I needed him to walk me through the thought process that led him to do this. I knew he wasn't doing it on purpose and that there was no thought process but still. Sure enough, it was just one of those "I wasn't thinking" situations that we all have, but my reaction to it was nuts enough for both of us that I didn't get through two sentences before we both collapsed into uncontrollable laughter.

Well, yesterday morning, he left out his dirty breakfast dishes all over the house. A coffee cup here, a bowl with oatmeal residue there. It was like every room I walked into, there were some of his dishes.

He also threw his dirty clothes on the bed I was sleeping in before leaving for work.

On the bed I was sleeping in.

On the bed I was sleeping in.

*Slow exhale, slow exhale, slow exhale* I'm cool. I'm cool. I'm cool. Calm and collected.

Mmmmm-hmmmmm.

I thought he had also thrown a blanket and cat bed off of a shelf in order to put his laptop there (turns out a cat had done the clearing of the shelf and the hubby just took advantage of it).  I was left with a heap of blanket and a cat bed thrown on my desk and my husband's laptop sitting all suspicious right there on the empty shelf.

I was like, okay, I'm gonna ignore this and go watch The Vampire Diaries on Netflix and pretend this didn't happen. He'll be home soon anyway. Right?

The hours ticked by and still, no call that he was coming home from work. He always calls. Every day, when he's done with work, to let me know he's coming home.

Finally, after pausing during appropriate Elena/Stefan/Damon lulls in storyline and checking in with the KSDK weather team a little too often, I called him at work.

Oh, oh, oh. He had meetings all of a sudden. Late day meetings. Oh. Ooooooh. Ooooooooh.

I was all, "Pack it up!" and the weather guy was all, "The evening commute is going to be terrible" and the schools were all "let's send the kids home early" and my husband was all, "But I have a 3 o'clock."

So I said, "If you do not come home soon, you will be taking me to see The Vow tomorrow."

That's the movie with the guy from Step Up and the only girl they seem able to cast in terrible romantic movies. They are in love and they get married and there's an accident and she has selective amnesia (cue every woman who's ever had a bad relationship: What kind of accident exactly was that?) where it seems she remembers everything but her husband so he has to make her fall in love with him all over again. Based on a true story. Of course. So I'm both rolling-my-eyes annoyed while completely aware that it will make me do the ugly snot-factory cry.

The threat of seeing this movie has been incredibly helpful the past couple weeks. My husband has an actual physical, vomit-y, shudder-y sort of reaction whenever I mention it.

"And the later you are, the more inclined I will be to make you watch The Notebook as a nice sort of pre-The-Vow movie when you get home tonight, since I'm pretty sure I own that movie somewhere." I think. I don't know. Probably.

My husband has never seen that movie. So it is excellent nagging ammunition. He likes to talk smack about The Notebook but doesn't even really understand the basic plot of that movie, which actually makes his smack-talking really entertaining for me.

My husband called and came home before the evening commute but after I had eaten all the good chocolates out of the box to make me less angsty waiting for his call. He brought supper and more chocolate.

So I didn't get out any old DVDs. We watched Friday Night Lights and ate Chinese food and laughed as I outlined what I thought his thought process was this morning when he left out all his dishes and used my sleeping silhouette as the dirty clothes hamper.

This Valentine's Day, I'm waiting for my favorite person in the world to call and come home. We'll eat and laugh and have some of our separate chocolates and sit on the couch wrapped in a blanket, dog and cats burrowing into any open spaces around us. We'll watch something on tv that we both can stand. He won't have to learn anything about the Salvatore brothers and I won't have to learn How It's Made. And it will be a perfect Valentine's Day, a day not that different than yesterday and hopefully pretty damn similar to tomorrow. The cats would eat roses. We'd end up with a lobster as a pet if we tried to make a fancy dinner. And I think my husband's closet is full. So, we're good. It's our best Valentine's Day yet.

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