Cute. Very cute.

So I'm at work, right, and I'm calculating occupational taxes for the month, and you don't have to know what that is or how it's done, just that it's stupid and complicated and in the year-and-a-half or so I've been doing it, there's always something that doesn't add up right and I have to spend a couple of hours figuring out what it is.

So I've got all my figures and I check them against what the computer came up with and lo, they match. And as I'm marveling at this fact and reaching over my head for the stapler to staple all the papers I've been filling out, I say to myself out loud, "Did something just go smoothly?"

At this exact moment, the stapler catches on the jar of paper clips that's sitting next to it, knocking it off the shelf and narrowly missing my head. It bounces off the desk, the lid comes off the jar, and paper clips go flying in a 10-foot arc across the office.

As if in answer to my question.

GASP

Is Big League Chew supposed to be some kind of candy chewing tobacco?

Because I'm sure everyone in the whole world already knew that, but it has only just now occurred to me.

Moved

I tend not to use this blog in the typical way. I write only when I feel like it and while I may occasionally feel a twinge of guilt about not keeping it current, I never intended for it to be a chronicle of important events or a daily journal or anything like that. Okay, so maybe I should blog at least once a month if I expect anyone to read it, but I actually DON'T expect anyone to read it and am consistently amazed that they do. So there ya go.

My point being, for some reason, I feel the need to chronicle this particular event, the closing of Chapter One of The Woodlayson Chronicles, the chapter we shall call "The Dreamplex." We lived in the Dreamplex for three years and one month, and we turn in the keys this afternoon.

I remember when I first set foot in there, literally. Chris and I had been looking for a place, but we figured the duplex would be a little small, plus both sides were more or less spoken for. Jaimie had formally laid claim to the A side, and Nathan had dibs on B. I think we'd been in Jaimie's side before, but we'd never seen the other side, which was in slightly rougher shape (some little matter of a fire in the front room), so we asked Kris and Laura if we could poke around, for curiosity's sake. The moment I stepped over the threshhold, I looked at Chris and said, "This is ours."

No joke. And if you'd seen the place then, you would've been pretty perplexed why the prospect of living there would be at all enticing. Did I mention the lovely charcoal ceiling? We just knew we were supposed to be there. Later on that day, Nathan called Kris and told him something had come up and he needed to stay put. The rest is history, which somehow brings us to today. After weeks of late nights, packing and sorting and storing and moving a little at a time, it's time for Chris and I to turn the lights out and lock the door on our first three years together. There hasn't been much in my life I was sure of, but I was sure about Chris, and Dreamplex, I was sure about you.

A recent conversation between spouses

"I never said that."

"Oh-ho-ho, yes. Yes, you did."

"I did not say that."

"I remember these things."

Smirkish stare.

"I said I remember these things. I remember anything tied to a strong emotion, like hurt and betrayal."

"Great. Now if only we could get your keys and cell phone to offend you in some way."

Text message from Chris after an hour inside the East Gadsden Walmart

"All hope is lost. No sign of help. Had to eat the crew. God help me! What have I done... What have I done?

Fin."

I think it was the "fin" that summoned silent film images of a French mime bailing water emphatically while discordant violins saw in the background. Who knew buying toilet paper could be so DRAMATIC.

Why can't it be more like Cheers?

The Weepies are musical heroin. Thanks, K&L. I've been listening to them at work, at home, even leaving the CD on repeat overnight. I don't think they're all that weepy, really. Some of their songs are even...smiley. Chris took the CD to work and played it while they were setting up for an event, and the old guy Chris works with, Ted, liked it. I thought it was cool that a 70+ year-old liked "our" music, but then again, Ted's a pretty cool old guy.

In other reviews, Sam Adams Cream Stout gets two enthusiastic thumbs up.

I sang with the jazz band at Blackstone last night, like I do two Tuesdays a month, and I realized that I hug more people during those three hours every other week than I do during the 13 days in between. Or rather, they hug me. At first, I wasn't comfortable with it. It's not smarmy or anything, not usually anyway, because we generally don't attract the smarmy crowd. I'm just not used to it. I wanna be all, "Look, dude, I don't hug people I've known for ten years. I don't kiss my momma with this mouth, or any other mouth, 'cause I don't kiss my momma. I don't know you from Adam so the thing to do here if you must touch me would be a firm handshake."

I've been forced to give this attitude a lot of thought and decided that, at least in this particular setting, I need to loosen the hell up. After all, everyone else in the room has come to this social gathering place for fun, because they want to be there. I've come because they're paying me. I didn't come to meet new people or socialize or have a good time, but everybody else there did, so I might as well come prepared to be met, be socialized with, and pretend to have a good time. Who knows, maybe someday I actually will.

Psharight.

Shit and Plumbing

I don't know if Chris's poo is especially dense or if I eat cork in my sleep, but he and I have had countless conversations about the differences in the properties of our poops, namely their seaworthiness. My poo tends to float, you see, and his sinks like some mammoth overladen barge that can be seen from space. Somehow, I come away from these conversations feeling like I'm some kind of freak for having buoyant shit. Chris has a knack for putting his opponent on the defensive and even though my rational mind tells me that lots of people have floating poo, when Chris points and laughs, the world is laughing with him.

Chris isn't really mean to me, of course, but the point is that even though I technically score as many debate points as he does around the Woodlayson house, he probably wins more subconscious battles. Why else would I be convinced that there's something wrong with the way I poop? Well, it also has to do with why it ever gets brought up in the first place. Chris goes to the bathroom, flips open the seat, and there's a perfect floating turd smiling up at him.

"Liz, your freaky floating poo didn't flush again."

"So re-flush, whiner."

"What for? It'll just escape and climb back out into the bowl."

"Are you honestly berating my shit for its survival instincts?"

So yeah, maybe my poo's floatiness causes some aggravation. On the other hand, Chris's shits are the only ones that ever clog the toilet. Maybe once in my life has anything that has ever come from my body been too much for a toilet to handle. Chris, however, has a sixth sense about it. He knows when not to even try to flush. Just leave the fan on, shut the door, and come back in an hour, because anything else will end in tears.

I'm not sure how we got started on Saturday talking about what I would do if I ever had to unclog the toilet, but for me it was a simple question to answer.

"That'll never happen."

"Why not? You'll never be responsible for clogging the toilet?"

"Oh, I get it. You think that because it's always you who clogs the toilet, it follows that that's why you always UNclog it. No, that's not it at all. It's because you're the dude. Shit is your domain. Shit and plumbing. Toilet clogs consist of shit AND plumbing, therefore falling indisputably in your realm."

"So you're telling me that if YOU clogged the toilet, you'd come get ME to fix it for you."

"Yes. Absolutely."

"Could this be because you don't know how to unclog a toilet?"

"Firstly, no, I don't know how to unclog a toilet...at least not in practice. Secondly, even if I did know how to unclog a toilet, which is admittedly a simple mechanical process, I would somehow make a horrific mess resembling the prom scene from Carrie out of the whole thing."

"Are you trying to tell me that girls are less capable of unclogging toilets than guys are?"

"No. All I'm saying is that there's no reason for me to be dealing with shit when I can get you to deal with the shit. Anyway, you should be thankful. I mean, it's the 21st Century. What other reason do women have to get married anymore? Shit and plumbing."

"Call me naive. I thought love had something to do with it."

"Sure it does. Love, shit, and plumbing. There. It's like the holy trinity of modern marriage."

"Can we at least say that the greatest of these is love?"

"Sure. Okay."

Hobbyist

I'm going to knitting class tonight. I've become a bit of a "hobby person" lately. What with the Dungeons & Dragons, knitting, yoga, jazz singing, and most recently, late-night online gaming (if Myst: Uru Live counts as online gaming to you respectable gamers out there), I can now hold up my end of some of the most random conversations you'll ever overhear. After all, who else is going to reach out to the forgotten population of octogenarian hippie nerds? Who else, if not I?

It's probably good that I have several pastimes, because I'm one of those people who is highly susceptible to burnout. And I take my burnout seriously. When I get tired of something, I move right past disinterest and straight on into disgust. This is not something I particularly like about myself, especially since I didn't seem to inherit that free-spirited, devil-may-care personality that flaky people usually have to balance out the annoying bits.

I did meet a hobby once that I could've fallen in love with, but it got away. I was too young, then, and I didn't know what I had until it was gone. Spelunking. Isn't that a beautiful name? Except, it doesn't sound a damn thing like what it means. That always bothered me. Maybe that's what tore us apart.

Very Small Slices

Just recently, I've started writing things down a lot. I used to keep journals in high school and college, never very consistently, but it was something I had an interest in doing. Archiving life. I haven't had that interest in a long time, but it's started back in little practical ways. For the past couple of weeks, I've taken notes at church, which I've always thought would be a good idea because it usually takes me all of ten minutes to forget about those interesting tidbits I was going to delve into later. Also, I bought this diet journal, because I've got these random physical ailments I've been wanting to keep up with. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it's come to my attention that I'm exceptionally bad at being aware of what's going on in my own body. I always knew that I was generally not a very observant person, but Chris was wondering if I had a brain tumor before I noticed my headaches were kinda frequent.

So far, I haven't had an impulse to do any real journaling. But I've missed this little pseudo-record and I'm flirting with the idea of bringing it back. We'll see.