Life has been weird these last few days in our house. Or maybe the weirdness is in my head. I don’t know. Something something. I made Esteban laugh and laugh the other night. He came home many hours after I had already succumbed to the siren call of my legal narcotic cough syrup, and joined me in bed. He can’t read right now because we’ve got a second tv and the Xbox set up on his bedside table (reading? Why read if you have Grand Theft Auto!? It makes no sense!), so he kissed me hello and asked if I minded if he watched television. I didn’t, because I don’t, but then he started watching some anime something or other.
‘Except anime!’ I mumbled. ‘No anime!’
‘Why not? You don’t mind the Cowboy Bebop.’
‘Because that’s not all shooom shoom talkrealfastbigeyes aaaeeeeeeyeee! Shoom shoom!’
‘You’re sleeping? Why do you even care?’
‘Freaky anime gives me nightmares.’
‘What? Why would that give you nightmares, but CSI doesn’t?’
‘I don’t KNOW! It’s happening in my head, it’s not like I can understand it.’
And then I rolled back over and tried to go to sleep but Esteban was laughing at me too hard.
One of my niece Abigail’s favorite answers when you’re trying to converse with her and she doesn’t feel like having a conversation right at that moment is ‘I don’t know, so don’t ask.’ If you ask her a more simple question, she huffs exasperatedly and says ‘Don’t know, don’t ask! Dontknowdontask!’ She makes a song of it. I love that. Not only have you just been schooled by a five year old, but your very schooling has become a breakaway pop hit single right before your very eyes. My niece is sometimes my hero. She really is.
I think the weirdness is the fault of the prednisone. I have weird eating patterns, because I don’t want to eat, can’t be bothered with the notion of eating, but at the same time, I totally have to eat something because the prednisone wants nothing better than to chew a hole in my stomach. Also, I have terrible reactions to Zithromax’s derrivitive and therefore need to sort of fake out Zithromax with lots of food and skim milk so that it doesn’t try to give me an alien baby popping out of my gut. But I don’t WANNA. And the only thing I can really even convince myself to eat are ice cream sandwiches, peanut butter and banana sandwiches and Hostess fruit pies. Which makes a well-rounded day’ a peanut butter and banana sandwich for breakfast and lunch and then an ice cream sandwich for dinner.
I am the pinnacle of good nutrition. You just know that is one of the bullet points on God’s list behind why he told Weetabix that she didn’t want to have kids.
I don’t keep Hostess fruit pies around the house because mostly I suspect that they are almost entirely made from lard. Including lard very possibly disguised in cherry costumes. And I seem to remember that they used to have ‘beef fat’ listed on the ingredients and I suspect that it’s still in there, wearing a new fancier technically correct but logistically ambiguous moniker. Kind of a Puff Daddy to Sean John conversion.
Although, as my Spoon very nicely commented, there are times when it is perfectly acceptable to eat a Hostess cherry fruit pie, and this is one of those times. Thus, I went to the store on Monday and purchased two cherry pies and a lemon pie, and then left them on the counter.
Yesterday morning, one of the cherry pies was gone. My beloved husband. Or beloved bastard. Whichever. The growling manbeast ghost of a roommate who leaves me his dirty laundry and assumes that I will take care of the details that keeps our lives running smoothly. Like care and feeding of the laundry gnomes and the dishwasher fairies, not to mention the elf that pays our bills and apparently leaves him delectable Hostess cherry pies.
So yesterday, I accompanied the digestive chemical somersault with the remaining cherry pie, figuring that hey, Esteban doesn’t LIKE lemon, and therefore, I will still have a lemon pie to eat with Wednesday’s pills.
But then last night, when Esteban came home and crawled into bed around midnight, he woke me up. ‘The truck’s dead. You need to take me to work in the morning.’
‘Oh, ok. How did you get home?’
‘Well, first I let the phone ring here for fifteen or twenty rings, and then I remembered that you are Cough Syrup Girl, so I called Eric.’
That blew me away. Normally I startle awake at the smallest sound, and with the ‘Sone in my system, sleep is a helium balloon that I bat back and forth from the hours of one and five. Apparently, however, the Vicodin trumps the ‘Sone in the first couple of hours and then wears off. Note to self: drink more cough syrup at midnight.
I groaned because I really really dislike being around Esteban in the morning. It’s not bad enough that he seems to channel Zoul while sleeping, becoming the embodiment of a complete male Id, but also, after he has woken, he is barely recognizable as the sweet Teddy bear husband I love so dearly. In fact, I very specifically wake up earlier than he does so that I don’t have to deal with the yang side of his very gentle and caring ying personality. There’s a reason that I call him the Burgermeister. There’s a reason that his friends who read this diary come up to me in real life and say ‘You know how you call Esteban a Burgermeister? Yes. He’s totally the Burgermeister.’ Because he sometimes has the personality of a cat fart and that’s just something I accept about him and move on. That’s how you make a marriage work. You learn how to survive. And one of my little survival tips includes not encountering Esteban while he is half awake and being forced to stand and be a human.
Thus, I started it easy this morning. I got up, did my things in the bathroom so that we weren’t forced to try to maneuver around each other in a room that is essentially the size of a closet. Then I wandered back into the bedroom, got back into bed, and started rubbing his back, saying ‘Sweetie’. Time to get up. Baby’ come on’ time to go.’
‘Merf.’
I stiffened. This was not his normal ‘merf’. This was a warning ‘merf’. The next ‘merf’ would possibly draw blood.
‘Bucky’ it snowed outside! Fun! It’s very pretty. And it’s time to get up. I’m going to get dressed and then start up the car so it will be all warm, ok!’
‘It is NOT time to get up. Fuck you. It is five forty five in the morning. You. Are. An. Insane. Bitch.’
Then the sound of semiautomatic gunfire. From his ass.
I threw off the covers and jumped back out of bed.
‘Whaaaaaaat? Where are you going? You were rubbing my back all nice.’ He whined.
‘You fart on me, I turn on the lights.’
‘You don’t need lights.’
‘No, I don’t normally use them because you’re still sleeping, but since it is time for you to GET UP, then I’m turning on the lights.’
‘We don’t need to be up! It’s too early!’
‘Except that I do need to be up, because today is my hell day and I have to be there as early as I can, preferably by at least quarter after seven, so you need to get moving.’
I got dressed, throwing on a white turtleneck and my very favorite red fleece half-zip because my bronchitis still sucks and I have the chills all the time. Then I slipped on my Docs (good for slippery weather) and ran outside to start the car, which was covered in three inches of snow. Then I went back inside to put on make up and finish my hair.
Esteban loomed through the bathroom, looking for all the world like a grizzly who has just had his hibernation interrupted (perhaps by the Oscar announcements’ and his anger that Legends of the Fall was totally robbed.) I ignored him and tried to figure out what I would want to eat for lunch. Then I decided it was too difficult and I would have my pie.
Esteban’s hand reached out and grabbed the solo Hostess Lemon pie off the cabinet.
‘Hey! You don’t even like lemon.’
As God as my witness, the man curled his lip and growled at me. I rolled my eyes at him and then wandered outside, directing him to take the garbage out to the curb. Then I grabbed a bag of salt and tromped through the yard to our sidewalk. We live very near a high school, which has an open campus for lunch. If something is not done on the sidewalk post-snow, a day of to school, pre- and post-lunch, and after school feet will turn it into a three-inch sheet of solid ice.
‘You’re not going to do anything with salt and that much snow! It’s useless!’ He started naysaying from the driveway. With each trip to the curb with a bag of garbage, he warned me about over salting the sidewalk and also about how I was just using up all the salt for nothing (ahem’salt that I purchased, I might add) and how I shouldn’t use too much because I would kill the grass. And how it was just stupid anyway. I endured the driveway quarterbacking without saying a word, instead just reveled in how much I love fresh snow and early morning darkness (the sun hadn’t come up yet) and how the sky was amber and the streets hadn’t been plowed yet, so they were just fluffy paths of white instead of a slushy grey slurry. And then, at the end of our walk, the bag slipped through my gloves and spilled on the ramp part of the sidewalk, but I decided that it wouldn’t really hurt anything, since it was all concrete there anyway. I shrugged, tramped back through the yard, and then proceeded to head into the garage and put the mostly empty bag of salt away. Esteban instead takes it from my hands and gasps ‘Oh my god! You used almost the entire bag for just the sidewalk!’
‘No, I didn’t. I spilled it by accident.’
‘You’re going to kill our entire lawn! It’s going to be all dead in the spring. Just one big strip of brown fried nothing.’
Witness, gentle reader, the very minute when my patience snaps.
‘That’s IT! You’ve just lost the privilege of talking to me this morning. Get in the car.’ I hopped into the driver’s seat of the M, just daring him to complain about how he wanted to drive.
‘Whaaaaat? Jeez, I didn’t say anything. You’re the one who is so touchy.’
‘No talking. None.’
‘Cripes.’
‘Don’t know don’t ask!’ I said, with the same ominous tone of his earlier ‘merf’.
Mickey fickey husbands. Won’t shovel. Doesn’t want to take care of the garbage. Steals my PIE. And confused about why he doesn’t deserve the grace of my morning conversation? Gah.
