Chris is the best at talking to irrational people. I think its because he’s had lots of practice. After all, we’ve been together almost 10 years. That is sort of an admission that at times – very, very rare times – I have been known to act in somewhat irrational ways. I don’t know why I do it. But sometimes I just feel the need to shake things up and I have found the most effective way to do that is with an irrational demand or irrational argument. Both are equally fulfilling to me.
This weekend I made an irrational demand which led to an irrational argument, so bonus points to me for thoroughness.
A few weeks ago, Chris read somewhere that Mystic, CT (one of my favorite places) was having a Labor Day Festival. I was surprised that he mentioned this to me because usually it is me dragging him to these kinds of things, so I was really excited. Sunday morning, I woke up at the crack of dawn all pumped up about our Mystic Adventure. But when I poked Chris in the ribs to get him up, too, he just kind of whined about driving so far. Undeterred, I made him get up and we headed out.
Almost four hours later, we arrive in scenic Mystic and I’m ready to go. But Chris is mopey. He doesn’t want to actually go into the Festival. Trying not to panic and call him all kinds of names in public, I ask him what HE would like to DO now that we are in MYSTIC, dear. And he compromises and says we can go to this arts festival up the street. Great!
Lets talk about art for a minute. Chris and I both appreciate the arts – him because he works in them and me because I want to be artistic more than anything (though sadly, I have the artistic abilities of a chimp). But we are not the art-buying type. We’ve never owned anything original and its never been a big priority in our lives. When we bought our new house though, we decided to try and only use original artwork. Nothing expensive, really, just things from student artists or street venders, sketches from our travels, etc. This is the extent of our interaction with art.
As we are looking through the stands at the arts festival, we are both immediately drawn to this one vendor’s tent. There are the most beautiful paintings inside. Vibrant, colorful, passionate. The kind of art that even I can appreciate. Really breathtaking. And Chris felt the same way. So, I call over the artist and ask him about two paintings that we particularly liked. He described them with such love that I almost asked if he would come home with us. After his explanation and once I closed my mouth and wiped the dribble off my chin, I asked him how much one of them cost.
$650
Now, to some people, this might be a steal. Especially for a piece of art that is as beautiful as the one we were looking at. But we recently put our entire piggy banks into our down payment on our house and since then we’ve been making decisions like whether we should buy laundry detergent or toothpaste. So, $650 on a piece of art is a little much right now.
Chris (the rational one in this situation) takes the guy’s card and politely says we’ll think about it. And I (the irrational one in this situation) demand to know why Chris won’t let me buy the piece of art. Why? Why will you not let me spend our grocery money on a painting, Chris? Why? So what if we can’t pay our electric bill? So what if we can’t put gas in the car? Light a candle and hitchhike to work!
But instead of immediately arguing with me, Chris says that we should walk through the rest of the festival and think about it. Sure, think about it. I’ve heard that before. I’m still waiting for my mom to get back to me on thinking about extending my high school curfew. Everyone knows a thinking about it is just the lazy way of saying no.
And I go into a rage. I want the art. I want the colorful, happy, vibrant art! I want it on my wall! I want it now! BUY ME THE ART, DAMMIT! (This would be the irrational demanding part…)
Now, Chris knows that the best thing to do in these situations is to remove me from the scene. Much like a 3 year old. Just take me somewhere else and distract me with candy and shiny things. So, he takes me down the street and buys me an ice cream cone. And that’s when I go into the irrational arguing part.
“You’re so boring, Chris! You never want to just be spontaneous! You just want to do the same things over and over again!” (Which is a strikingly similar comparison to my Dad, if you want to go all Freudian on me…)
“Okay,” Chris says. “Other than buying that painting, what do you want to do that is more spontaneous?”
“Like travel. Why don’t we ever go anywhere on the spur of the moment? Why don’t we just go away for a weekend every now and then? Just up and go?” (Side note: The answer to this question is because of the previously stated laundry detergint vs. toothpaste issue…)
“Okay,” he says. “We could do that more. Maybe on Columbus Day we could go to Montreal for a long weekend. How does that sound?”
“Okay,” I say, thoroughly enjoying my ice cream cone. “That’d be fun. Do you want some of my Chunky Monkey?”
And that, my friends, is how you talk to an irrational person. You talk them around the real issue until they are so distracted that they are happy again. It works every time for me. But you know, only Chris can really do it right. Somehow when I’m irrational, he just has a way of talking me around in circles until I’m happy again, and by the time I’ve realized what has happened I’m already enjoying myself too much to complain. He’s a sneaky guy…
We did not buy the $650 piece of art. And even though there is still a huge empty space on my living room wall, I don’t really mind. I hear Montreal is beautiful this time of year…
03Sep
Tonight we had a roast for dinner. A big roast. Enough roast for both of us to eat tonight and take for lunch for two days. It was a beautiful roast. Chris cooked it with carrots and potatoes and celery, basted it with luuuve, and then sliced it up for dinner. We fixed our plates and went to eat in the basement (where we eat like animals while we watch Everybody Loves Raymond).
About a half hour later, I take my plate upstairs and there is the plate with the sliced roast – but its empty. Nothing’s there.
I come back downstairs, laughing.
“Oh my gosh, Chris. Were you hungry, honey?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you ate that whole roast.”
“What roast?”
“That 5 pound roast that was on the counter.”
“I didn’t eat that. I had two little slices.”
Silence.
So we kind of exchange looks like we’re crazy and the go back up to the kitchen together to investigate. And this is what we find:
Bad Molly
Our 70 pound lab ate a 5 pound roast. And then she got her hiney spanked.
05Sep
My aunt has one of the greatest jobs in the world. She is an accountant for Delta, and while I understand that accounting can be less than exhilerating, her job comes with the perk of flying anywhere in the world Delta flies for free. Consequently, she and her family have pretty much been anywhere in the world that Delta flies for free. I love visiting their house because it is full of treasures from their travels. Little pieces of street art from Rome, carved wooden figures from an Indian tribe somewhere in South America, beads from some exotic island in the South Pacific. Being in their home in Atlanta makes you feel like you could be anywhere else in the world.
One of the perks of being related to this globe-trotting family is that occasionally we get Friends and Family tickets. And this year, they gave me and Chris two tickets to anywhere we want to go for our graduation gifts. Originally, we said we would go to Rome. Hands down, no discussion – Rome all the way. Neither of us have ever been, and its just one of those historical places you should see if you get the chance.
But last weekend, after the whole you-never-want-to-do-anything-fun debacle, Chris and I started really brainstorming about where in the world we could go. Rome I’m sure is fantastic but there is a pretty good chance we could get there at some point. What if we used these tickets to truly take a once in a lifetime trip. We started by looking at the Fiji Islands, but Delta doesn’t fly there. But even considering somewhere like Fiji sent us off like kids in a candy store. There were endless possibilities!
Last night, I talked to my Aunt and Uncle about our struggle to find somewhere to visit and my Uncle gave us his top 10 list of places they had been. It was an amazing list, and after every place he described I said, “Oh, that’s where we need to go!” I got off the phone and immediately relayed the list to Chris. From there we narrowed it down to our top 4 choices (in today’s order of preference):
1. Machu Picchu, Peru – is an Incan village nestled in the mountainous jungles of Peru and is supposed to be one of the greatest places on earth to see the sunrise. Apparently you fly into Lima, Peru, then take a puddle jumper plane to Cusco, and then take a train up the mountain to Machu Picchu.
2. Barcelona, Spain – We would fly into Barcelona, then rent a car and drive down the coast. For this trip, we would only need a road map, which is just our kind of vacation. Also, from Barcelona we could take a day trip to Moracco, a place I have always wanted to go.
3. Paris, France – Though I have been to Paris before, I think it might be worth going again with Chris. Nothing says romantic getaway like the Eiffel Tower and a Parisian cafe.
4. Hawaii – Originally this was our back up plan since Fiji was out, but the more we think about it the further down the list this goes. If we decide we want to go somewhere strictly for the beach, the Hawaii could move up the list a bit. But today at least, we are looking for something with a little more va-va-voom. Of course, that could all change depending on what mood we’re in tomorrow!
5. Nice, France - This sleepy seaside town on the French Riviera has a little bit of everything. Sunshine, beaches, cafes, seafood, markets. It could be a nice place to spend a week together. And a quick day trip up to Monte Carlo would be a definite. But something about it just doesn’t scream “ONCE IN A LIFETIME!!!” to us. But, again, tomorrow this might be the only city we can imagine visiting!
So there you have it. Our top 5 places to visit. We put them on our chalkboard in the kitchen and are going to just knock them off the list as we narrow our preferences down (Athens, Greece came off the list last night…).
This brings me to my question today:
Where in the world would you escape to?
There are lots of things I love about being a new homeowner, namely anything that doesn’t cost me money. But sadly, those things are few and far between when you buy your first house. I am learning quickly that owning a home is, financially speaking, like being pecked to death by ducks – $50 here, $500 there, $250 for this, $75 for that. It sneaks up on you and before you know it, you’re having to take out a second mortgage to pay for the Orkin Man.
I think the reason this is more of an issue for new (and young) homeowners is because you don’t want to mess up. Its like when I buy a new pair of expensive shoes (something else that has been few and far between these days). I probably don’t have to keep them wrapped in tissue paper, in their correctly labeled shoe box on the very top shelf in a closet that is under lock and key, but why risk something messing them up? They’re brand new! That’s how I feel about my house. We don’t know yet what is a necessity and what we can really live without, so to keep our shiny new house safe, we just buy it all.
Take, for example, the tree service company. A few weeks ago I got a phone call from a tree treatment company who said they had treated the trees in our yard for years under the previous owners, and would we like to continue service? I asked the guy to hold on one minute and I covered the phone,
“Chris!” I whispered. “What’s a tree treatment company?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “Ask them what they do.”
So I get back on the phone and ask the man what kind of treatment they do on the trees.
“Chris!” I whispered. “They protect the trees from ticks with lyme disease! The trees might rot and die without the treatment! This sounds really important!”
“Okay,” he whispers back. “Ask them to send us an estimate.”
So for the next day or two, we Google the crap out of tree treatment services. And I ask everyone over 30 in my office if they have a tree treatment service. I ask my neighbor if they use a tree treatment service. I talk to the grocery cashier about her tree treatment service. And I discover that no one has a tree treatment service. So I felt confident a few weeks later when the estimate arrived in the mail and I ripped it in half and threw it in the trash.
Now, imagine going through that for every service you may or may not need for a house. Its exhausting, and its getting expensive. We’ve had the Cable Man out here, the Terminex Man out here, the Central A/C Man out here, and today we’ll have the Orkin Man out here. And every one of these people sends us a bill when they leave! And even more frustrating is that everyone who comes out finds more things that need to be “updated” or “improved” or “fixed before your house falls down.” Now, we didn’t buy a junker of a house. We have a nice, clean, taken care of house so I know that there can’t be as many problems as they lead us to believe. So after every one of them leaves us with a list of things we need to take care of (“we can bill you later…”), Chris and I have to go into crisis mode until we can sort through to the real problems and cut out all the crap we don’t actually need.
Like being pecked to death by ducks. Ducks with meter readers and bug spray and cable wires and insulation. Expensive ducks.
Peck, peck, peck…
