Category Archives: Romance

Mmm…George Clooney

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Have you seen the movie Up in the Air? If not, I recommend you do so; it is an excellent movie. I say this with authority because I actually stayed awake through the entire film. This is notable because I’m famous – in my own small circle, anyway – for falling asleep and missing the ending of the majority of movies I see. Last weekend we watched Sherlock Holmes and I found the plot not at all engaging, and although I think Robert Downey Jr. is QUITE attractive, I fell asleep an hour before it ended. I have seen the beginning of many, many movies but I’m generally quite fuzzy on how they end, due to my movie-induced narcolepsy. Action movies are the worst. Car chases! Explosions! Special effects! They all result in me passed out on the couch.

The last movie I saw in an actual movie theatre was – hang on to your hats! – Pirates of the Caribbean Part Two, and, of course, I fell asleep probably ten minutes into the movie, waking up intermittently to scenes of scary looking pirate-y things with the arm of the seat jammed uncomfortably in my side. A friend recently asked why I didn’t go to the movie theatre more often – don’t I have babysitters – and really, my reasoning is that my couch is a much less expensive and much more comfortable place to fall asleep.

So that was a highlight of the weekend, me watching a movie from start to finish. Also happening around my house: the Masters. Do you live with a golfer? Or a golf fan? I seem to have married someone who is both of those and the Masters takes on importance even greater than the US Open. He has been following it this weekend, simultaneously wishing he himself was on the golf course – icy winds and melting snow keeping him from doing so – and frequently calling me to the television to watch a particularly good shot. Are they called shots? I’m not sure. Paying attention to the Masters, and other sporting events, is something I do to keep my marriage vital. That is my Public Service Announcement for the day: for a strong marriage, at least feign interest in sporting events. My husband’s related PSA would likely have something to do with providing crazy wife with all the wine she wants, which probably explains why the Scouts looked so excited when they arrived at our house for their bottle drive this weekend. Hooray, our camping trip is funded! A very amusing part of the Masters has been my husband repeatedly muttering expletives about Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods: spokesperson for skankiness everywhere. Speaking of which: have you seen that Nike commercial? Ew. That is all I have to say. Ew, ew, ew.

On that note, I will sign off. Here’s to a positive and happy week! Hope you all had a lovely weekend.

I don’t go out much

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You know how, when you are looking forward to going to your very favourite restaurant for weeks, and you pore over the online menu and decide what you are going to order, in extreme detail, and you think about that amazing meal and you think about it and – after all you go out for dinner only a few times a year – you obsess over it and then the day is finally here and you dress up in an actual dress, the very one you bought for your husband’s company Christmas party that you sadly did not attend and you get to the restaurant, starving and drooling a little, practically crazed with anticipation, you open the actual non-online menu and the item you have been dreaming about is no longer available? And for a few minutes you just feel completely bereft, like there are no more important issues in the world than the fact that you cannot order linguine with sundried tomatoes and olives?

But then you find that, regardless of the printed menu, the chef can accommodate you and you get exactly what you want?

It’s wonderful.

All of which is to say that our anniversary dinner was a lovely success. “Can you believe we’ve been married eight years?” I said dreamily, sipping my second cosmopolitan. “It seems longer” my husband replied somewhat less romantically. “But in a good way” he amended.

When you’ve been married a while, it’s easy to take certain things for granted: like who is going to take out the recycling or who is going to wash the dishes. When you have babies or small children your relationship can be not unlike that of fellow zookeepers or perhaps roommates with particularly difficult pets, where you cease to talk about anything not related to your shared responsibilities and their food and toileting preferences. Another thing about being married for a while is that you become predictable to each other. I can, for example, predict perfectly the two things my husband finds most irritating about me: my fondness for going to sleep before 9:30 pm, and my eating preferences. “It’s a pain in the ass being married to a vegetarian,” he mutters semi-weekly. He probably also is irritated by my baby-talking to the dog, but whatever. I can also predict that, now that golf season has begun, I will see a whole lot less of him; but on the upside, I will be able to watch NYPD Blue reruns without interference.

The beautiful thing about being married a while, the beauty of predictability, is that when you come back to the table from the ladies’ room you find your husband has talked to the waitress and ordered you a contraband linguine with sundried tomatoes and olives, plus a gorgeous glass of cabernet, and you can only smile at his probable conversation with her, “It’s a pain she’s a vegetarian,” he’d say, “I’ll have the New York striploin.” It’s just what I might have predicted.