Another day in paradise
I sometimes tend to portray my marriage in a rosier light than exists in reality. I try to be honest about the difficulties involved, but sappy positive things float atop my consciousness, so those are the things that usually wind up on this page. That leads to accusations from friends that my wife and I are a couple of Smurfs living in Smurfland singing Laaa-laaa-la-laa-laa-laa Laaa-la-laa-laa-laaa all day long. It's not true, though. We have a deeply serious argument at least once every two weeks, and more often if we're visiting family. We don't let those fights get us down or come between us, though. We almost always resolve things to the satisfaction of both of us before we go to bed.
Almost every day, we argue about something completely and absurdly inane.
We generally forget those arguments as soon as they're over. Sometimes we even
forget during the middle of the argument if something distracts us. Here are
some of the ridiculous things we've fought about:
- the proper pronunciation of the word opaque
I think that she disagrees with me no matter how I pronounce it, and she thinks I always pronounce it incorrectly. - the proper pronunciation of Ronkonkoma, a town on Long Island
This argument had her saying rahn-KAHN-kuh-muh and my answering RAHN-kahn-KOHHH-muh, with no other words in between, back and forth for 45 minutes. I found out later that she was right. - whether I'm capable of going to the grocery store and picking out a dessert less stupid than a bag of Oreos to take to a church function
- whether an Entemann's cake is less stupid than a bag of Oreos
- whether fashioning a humanoid doll out of rubber bands is possible and/or a worthwhile endeavor
- what to do with our couch as we moved from Austin to Long Island
Mrs. Happy wanted to sell it to someone who offered us $150 and then get ourselves something new in New York. I insisted that we wouldn't be able to buy something new for $150 and we might as well take it with us even though it would be more hassle than leaving it behind. We took it along, but it wouldn't fit through any doorway in the house, even with the doors off their hinges. No one in New York would buy it, and since the upholstery had been slightly frayed in the move Goodwill wouldn't even accept it as a donation. We eventually threw it away and bought something new. - which TV show is less worth watching: Star Trek Enterprise or The Gilmore Girls
- which Friend's personality more closely parallels mine: Ross or Chandler
- the appropriateness of a wife doing a happy dance upon trouncing a husband in a game of Scrabble, then painstakingly reproducing the final appearance of the game board with a pen and paper, then telling everyone she sees that she beat me 514 to 215 after fabricating a Q-word (quod) that just happened to be in the dictionary
- how a man should have better sense than to walk, speak, or breathe in the vicinity of a woman on the verge of setting a new record on her favorite video game
So maybe we do live in Smurfland, but even Smurfland had its Gargamel.
