I decided I wanted to read this article before I saw the title. I thought it was a list of good marriage habits—but no, it’s 8 Marriage Bad Habits: Is one yours? Sad to say that yes, at least one is ours. In fact, too often #1 is ours. Seems like the article’s right—just the other day, Ryan and I didn’t tell one another hardly anything about our days until we were brushing our teeth.
I’ll miss CSI and Law & Order and Without a Trace. But it’s probably worth it—if we can keep it up.
Don’t waste time catching your friends up on each minute detail of your life: just blog it. A few minutes of typing up the most salient events and thoughts of your day eliminates clutter from your social life. Yes, you, too can shave valuable seconds off your face-to-face interaction times with a simple blog.
Why, just the other day, I looked up an old friend’s blog. We were able to talk as if we’d never been apart as we easily referenced things in one another’s blogs. Had we ever mentioned these events to one another? No! We shaved seconds off our conversation time by establishing our common references with the machines in our individual homes.
With our über-efficiency, we have entire minutes extra left to discuss the more important things of life. Like how we should spend more time together. Unfortunately, we’re far too busy blogging.*
*Some or, more accurately, just about all the details in this account are fictionalized and the names have been changed to protect the innocent. But since I didn’t include names here, I changed them only in my mind. I even changed my own name, just to protect me from myself. But since today is Tuesday, it doesn’t matter in the slightest.
I used to have a really, really good memory. Tests were easy—reading through the material and my notes once or twice was sufficient for an A—even for tests where I had to recall specific dates that I hadn’t studied! I remembered friends’ (and casual acquaintances’) middle names, birthdays and e-mail addresses. I knew where Ryan left his belt, shoes or wallet.
Now I regularly spend 20 minutes looking for the shoes I took off 2 hours ago. Someone gives me a visiting teaching report, but I can’t remember whether they completed it or not. On three trips to the grocery store in a row, I buy peanut butter. (At least it’s not pasta.)
And as Hayden sleeps better at night, I lose more and more of my memory! I can’t even blame sleep deprivation anymore. Maybe I’m getting old. But I thought you’re not supposed to start losing brain cells until 30. Or did I remember that wrong?
This reminds me of an anecdote from Reader’s Digest. A three- or four-year-old got a sunburn and was peeling. An adult overheard the little girl in the bathroom, examining her skin: “Four years old and already wearing out…”
Then again, I suppose I still have a good memory. I’m just becoming more scatterbrained. I remember, as a tween and teen, being convinced that someone had taken my shoes. Well, if they did, they left them behind my door. I had an uncanny ability to lose something important and look for it multiple times in the exact place I’d find it hours later (and how hard can it be to find something on a computer desk?). Maybe I’ve just always been this crazy.
Do you ever find yourself in a situation where someone needs cheering up or knows that you could offer some insight tempered by experience—and then you say something stupid or even more discouraging?
For example, when Hayden was 6 weeks old, a friend announced she was three months pregnant. At the time, I got so little sleep and was probably suffering from some baby blues. I wrote her a long letter and tried my darndest not to let on how much I was suffering from motherhood—but I think it pretty much came across anyway. She never acknowledged it, so maybe it got lost en route. Of course, I sent it again, just in case.
It’s kind of like putting your foot in your mouth, but a little different…
I thought of myself as a domestic goddess the other day. Then I asked myself, what does it mean to be a domestic goddess?
This iVillage quiz actually tells you which domestic Greek goddess you are. I’m 45.5% Hestia (kind, open, nurturing, taking care of people, feeding them), 27.3% Penelope (technically not a goddess—creative, crafty, trying new things) and 27.3% Hera (extremely jealous—no, wait, practical, multitasking, low-maintenance style). Other options, where I scored a big ol’ 0, were Kuan Yin (obviously not Greek)(compassion, understanding), Athena (order, efficiency, perfection), Artemis (free spirit, unconventional) and Aphrodite (bedroom, garden).
But what *is* a domestic goddess? I’ve known women to describe themselves as such before, like the woman who sewed my wedding dress. Excellent job, at that. Nigella Lawson has a book named How to be a Domestic Goddess. Her take involves making comfort food. Mmm.
But there’s gotta be a difference between simply being domestic (although nobody wants to adopt that label, since it seems demeaning) and being a domestic goddess. I think the iVillage quiz has hit on something essential: there are many, many areas of domestic goddessness. I think these are the basic areas:
I’m not 100% sure what to call it, but it seems like there should be a category for child-rearing and other nurturing and possibly general healthfulness. Sorry, no categories for working—it’s just not domestic.
Have you got what it takes to make it in the domestic goddess world? That’s right—eight arms.
My sister and I looked at some pictures of an old friend of mine. She was like, “In some of these, he looks a little . . . dorky.”
“He is dorky,” I replied matter-of-factly. And then I remembered: some people think “dork” and “dorky” are mean words. I do not. To me, those words don’t mean the same thing as geek/geeky or nerd/nerdy.
Before Ryan and I even started dating, we were talking my roommate at the time, Sarah. Ryan revealed that he hadn’t really dated in high school, aside from proms and the like. Sarah and I were delighted to discover that, as we immediately exclaimed, “You were a dork!” That was actually one of the first things that endeared him to me.
So dorkiness is definitely not a bad thing—which is good news for Hayden. Hayden judging from his genes, will come by it honest. Yeah, that’s me in the picture.