Last night, Esteban and I slept on opposite sides of the bed and now I’m all out of sorts. You see, we have this strange sleep ritual. I generally go to bed earlier than Esteban. I’m a hot person and for reasons known only to Esteban and the Lord Almighty Himself, the heater for the waterbed is located directly beneath my bodacious hinder. Thus, I naturally gravitate toward the cooler side of the bed, which is Esteban’s side. This has the lovely side effect in that Esteban’s pillow smells like him, maybe it’s pheromones or something, I don’t know, but I have lovely drooling sleep over on his side of the bed.
When Esteban finally comes to bed, somehow he fixes the situation. I don’t know how exactly he does this because he must have a certain finesse in that he never really seems to wake me up. In the morning, all is right with the world and I am back to the right side of the bed, with Esteban slumbering on his musky left side.
Now here’s where it gets strange.
In the morning, I wake up considerably earlier than Esteban and go about my morning routine (showering, teeth brushing, reading UncleBob, etc). When I return to give him a kiss goodbye, I find that he has usually moved over into MY side of the bed and is now depositing a healthy amount of drool on my lovely down pillow.
Last night, for whatever reason, Esteban crawled directly into my side of the bed, leaving me drooling peacefully upon his ‘man grease’ covered pillow. Sometime in the middle of the night, he asked me if we could switch pillows as my down pillow was driving him crazy.
After nearly ten years of sharing a bed, you ascertain a kind of sleeping etiquette. For instance, hogging the bed is frowned upon. You subconsciously drift to the far side of the bed to avoid a clumsy knocking of shins or lying upon errant locks of hair. Esteban’s toenails have been known to draw blood, thus my feet cower in the lower right corner, usually wrapped in a protective layer of down comforter. This is all a Darwinesque means of sleep survival, really.
But when you change sides, suddenly everything is thrown awry. Esteban spent most of his sleeping hours last night rolling to the left side, crushing me up against a rail. When I asked him to move, he said, ‘It’s just like WordPad’ just use copy and paste.’
What is more, Chelsea, being the addle-brained antiquity that she is, gets confused. She knows that she doesn’t like me because I shove various medications down her gullet thrice daily. She knows she likes Esteban because he conveniently forgets to shove pills down her throat thrice daily and will ply her feline needs with furious petting for hours at end. She knows Esteban sleeps on the left side. She mounted my prone form, meowing furiously, then quizzically, then frantically! Something was awry! The sleeping body had far less hair than she was accustomed to and the general terrain was far more lumpy and curvy! She looked from Esteban to me and back again, upset and constantly meowing.
I tried putting her on Esteban but to no avail. She didn’t LIKE the person sitting on that side of the bed! That person puts pills down her throat! That person once sneezed directly into her face. Tilly likes that person which would mean that Tilly would be jealous if she lay upon that person and she didn’t LIKE Tilly when she was jealous because Tilly tended to beat the elderly snot out of her when she was jealous.
So Chelsea’s answer to this confusion was to stand on my hip and constantly meow. At 4:00 A.M.
Grrr Arggh!
I tried to get Esteban to switch sides with me. He replied ‘Mrr Awww Microsoft’.
He’s really been working too much.
This morning, I woke trapped under a sleeping feline body, balancing precariously on the side of the bed, pressed there by Esteban’s dormant form. Change is not necessarily a good thing.
Last night, I watched Jackass, having been away from it for some time. I think it’s lost the allure, although its rather funny seeing a bunch of grown men sitting around in their underwear with little red targets painted on them, elaborately ritualizing a testicular game of chicken’throwing a racquetball at each other’s crotch to see who could stand it the longest. Later, a bunch of them wrestled in their BVDs on a neighbor’s lawn. I was struck by the sheer maleness of it. I cannot imagine a group of women all sitting around in their underwear period. That’s very strange. Despite depictions in male-inspired movies such as Animal House, most women wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting naked or partially dressed around their girlfriends. There would have to be the obvious comparisons of fatty thighs, poochy tummies, stretch marks. There is no gender comparison, really.
A long while back, Esteban and I went to a doomed outdoor concert, during which monsoon type rains fell and the sound board took a lightening strike, delaying the concert two hours. What is worse, the amphitheatre was basically a hillside that turned to slippery muck with the first drop of rain. While the females and some of the men basically exerted all of their effort trying to remain upright and prevent themselves from sliding Romancing The Stone-style down the hill through the crowd, other men turned the slimy hill into a carnival ride. They whipped off their shirts and painted their chests with mud, drawing circles around their nipples.
Despite all of my friendships with men, there are some things I will never possibly understand. Or maybe when it comes down to it, some men will forever remain little boys. And I suppose there are parallels’ Tupperware parties being the inevitable allure of little girls playing house, baby showers with adorable little outfits the outcome of years of playing with dolls.
A few years back, a bunch of my guy friends went to a bachelor party at a strip club. One of the strippers would go up to the men, lift up their shirts and SLAPPPPP them hard on their guts, leaving a stinging red hand print. For this, they gave her money. One of the men apparently displeased her (or maybe he pleased her? I’m not certain)’. She lifted his shirt, gave him a huge wedgie, then ripped the elastic off his Fruit of the Looms and tied it around his neck. For that, his cronies congratulated him. And then they gave her more money.
I just don’t get it. I think she got away with it because she was naked. That would have pissed me off, personally, as my undies cost $15 a piece. One has to wonder what that man told his wife when he came home wearing the waistband from his underwear around his neck, or when he removed his jeans and his briefs fell to the floor.
Men are such a mystery sometimes. But then, there’s this new commercial for hair products, which depicts a beautiful woman walking into a restaurant and her friend sees her and starts to scream, because they’re both using the same shampoo or some such. I know that scream. I have screamed that scream. And yes, I have so very much shame for being such an illogical stereotype for my gender. And I clap and squeal manically when Buffy and Spike kiss. But I’m researching 12 step groups to fix my inane girlness and believe that someday, somehow, I will eventually make sense.
So there.
