Adventures in Domesticity
This post was originally a part of the now defunct Somnaplegic blog.
Marriage is hard. That’s what people say. You have to work at it, they say.
Is it?
How often do you hear people say, “Friendship is hard. You have to work at it.” Friendship is hard. You do have to work at it. The difference between friendship and marriage are 1) living together and 2) financial interdependence. How many friendships have gone heads up in roommate situations? Lots, that’s how many, because: living together and financial interdependence. Marriage, has nothing to do with it. People are pains in the ass all over.
The BFF who knows your deepest darkest secrets and is always there for you can go from “Ride or Die,” to “I’m going to gouge out your f@cking eyes,” after she has been exposed to your proclivity for leaving hair sculptures on the shower walls and you midnight Enya fueled vacuuming sessions. The fact that you came home with a new 12 piece socket set embossed with Hello Kitty, all the way from Tokyo, but still haven’t given her the rent check doesn’t help the situation either.
Living together and financial interdependence.
Sure you can argue that kids [1], and sex, and “personal growth” are all parts of sustaining a marriage. Meh, I says it’s socks, clocks, confronting the patriarchy, and a shared judgmental aesthetic. Husband and I agree on all the following:
Truck nuts – tacky
People who call the Earth “Our Mother” – to twee to live
People who push their leaves into the street instead of hauling them away – assholes
Potato salad - disgusting
Salmon – overrated
Extended family – best in small doses
Socks
My husband and I were college roommates along with his best friend and my now ex (whole other story), so we already had a good sense of our domestic compatibility before we were a couple. We forged an early alliance in that household as the two who knew how to use exotic tools like “brooms” and “mops” and didn’t think of cleaning as “depressing.”
My husband has many habits I find annoying and some ideas that are downright bizarre. I won’t bore you with his two stage theory of dish washing or his elaborate explanation as to why the local pancake house MUST be the origin point of the entire chain of restaurants, despite the fact that it clearly says on the menus that the original location was 120 miles north of our home [2].
Socks, however, have been a major sticking point in our relationship. My husband wears heavy boots to work each day. His workplace has lots of metal shavings and grease and the boots are a necessity, even though his job is primarily office-based. In the winter he wears two pairs of socks for warmth as people are constantly coming in and out of his office from the cold shop. In the summer, he wears two pairs of socks to absorb the sweat, as AC is practically non-existent in the building.
In the evenings he would come home, extract his feet from the hermetically sealed swamp that is his boots, and peel off his disgusting socks. He would then drop those socks on the floor by his chair and promptly forgot about them. Oh yes, he would eventually collect them up, if for no other reason than needing to wash them so he had new socks. Mostly though, they’d get swept up during laundry round ups, so it seemed perfectly reasonable to him to accumulate 3-5 pairs of socks on the floor that would, from his perspective, disappear on their own given enough time. Husband is not a particularly messy or disorganized individual, he is however, a provocateur, and once he discovered how much his little sock pile annoyed me, he was not about to stop.
Once it was clear we were in an aggravation stand-off, I of course, doubled down. I made sure that the socks would NOT be rounded up with the laundry, instructing the toddler who often assisted with sorting our great piles of clothing and towels to ignore Socktopia. It was a bit confusing for him though, because we sort all the laundry in the living room. Sometimes a legitimate man-sock that has made it into the laundry would fall near Socktopia. Being the problem solver that I am, I took blue painters tape and delineated a circle around the spot, even going so far as to spell out “Socks Here” with an arrow in front of the circle in little torn up bits of tape.
Husband took to making sure to only drop socks inside the circle.
We had both now officially invested far more effort into sustaining the sock pile than it would have taken to simply throw the socks in the wash. But I wasn’t done.
Next, I arranged the socks in a basket weave pattern, carefully folding the edges to make a perfect circle. Do you know how many mens crew top socks it takes to fill in a 1 foot diameter circle using a basket weaver pattern? I do.
Husband took to placing new socks on top of the weave rotating the pattern 45 degrees with each new layer. I thought he would have to break soon and need to wash at least some of them, but it turned out he had a whole unopened package in the back of his sock drawer. I had bought those socks, and now he used them against me to sustain and grow Socktopia.
I had him on the ropes though. He forgot one crucial thing. He may have a higher tolerance for filth, but *I* have a MUCH higher tolerance for airing dirty laundry (in this case quite literally) in public. We had invited friends over for board games and Socktopia was the first thing anyone would see upon entering our small house.
The day of the gathering I came downstairs to find all the socks gone and the tape carefully peeled away. Sadly, Socktopia never recovered. Socktopia is dead. Long live Socktopia.
Not that husband actually put his dirty socks in the laundry, he just took to making our son do it for him. The only thing he likes more than annoying me, is using his Spawn to perform ridiculous tasks. Once in a meeting with the director of Spawn’s daycare he showed off this trick by having the 2 year old year carry a his empty soda cup to the trash. “I also have him refill my soda in the fridge,” he said proudly.
“That’s a real expensive toy you got there,” she said in an unimpressed deadpan, while I snorted.
Clocks
Twice a year we experience the daylight saving time changeover. Thanks to modern devices, you don’t have to worry about being late (or excessively early) to work. Most alarm clocks and all electronic devices automatically update themselves. I am typically the first one awake in our household on the weekends and change over the appliance and analog clocks. Often, my family completely fail to notice the change for days until they finally figure out why they are so tired or awake so early. There is one place however, where this system falls down and it is the clock in the car. As you know if I you read my controversial post on coffee, I ride a bicycle most days. Typically, I only use a motor vehicle on the weekends. My husband drives to work every day. So when, on say a Saturday morning I get into the car (because I NEED 3 green pens, 2 yards of marine vinyl, smoked Hungarian paprika, and a stuffed moose) and see that the clock has not been adjusted, I get annoyed. For years, I would grit my teeth and update the clock until finally, I’d had enough [1]. So I didn’t do it.
Recreation of dash clock
Neither did he. You’re probably seeing a pattern here.
For months the clock was just wrong. I harassed, I harangued, but he would point out that you cannot change the clock when the car is in “on” only in accessory mode, and he was always in a rush to get to work or get home. Finally, I gave in and reset the clock.
A few months later, lather rinse, repeat.
Finally, I decided the following.
1) I can’t stand the clock being an hour off
2) It is not in any way remotely my responsibility to change the situation
3) He is abusing his higher threshold for non-conformance to extract extra, petty work out of me
4) Therefore instead of just letting it go, I must escalate.
So I changed the clock, making it 37 minutes fast and for good measure I changed the speed indicator to kilometers per hour.
By the time the next weekend rolled around the clock was properly set.
Did I expend the same amount of effort as just reseting the clock? No, it actually took a bit longer. Was the result the same. Yes, the clock did get reset. Was it worth making my husband think for just a moment that he was grossly late to work and speeding. Yes, yes it was.
It’s November now and while my computer says it 3:10pm PST, the car is currently in Mountain time. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking up YouTube videos on how to turn off the entire dash display. I guess its a good thing Husband does not read this blog.
Patriarchy
The upstairs toilet in my home is sexist. I have multiple data points to support this assertion.
1) It clogs a lot
We used to believe that the clogging was due to bad geometry in the drain pipe, but nothing changed after we replumbed the whole thing 10+ years ago while installing a shower. The toilet is an asshole.
2) It takes me several thrusts and sometimes special maneuvering to get it to drain, even with a high quality plunger.
You’re going to say I just don’t know how to plunge a toilet properly. Let me stop you right there, chief. I am a home improvement goddess and I bloody well know how to plunge a toilet. Only THIS toilet gives me trouble.
3) When a man plunges it, the toilet rolls over and shows it’s belly like an affectionate cat.
“Oh, you want me to drain, good sir? For you, anything.”
Think I’m exaggerating? I bought the house with my ex and got it in the divorce. So, I have TWO cases to support my claim. Both men experienced zero difficulty in bringing the toilet into line. Where my husband is extremely handy an competent in the realm of home maintenance, my ex was not. And YET. I literally watched him once lazily swirl the plunger in the toilet as though he were blessing it and then like Moses parting the red sea the damned thing just drained.
Sexist Toilet.
4) The toilet also only clogs after *I* use it.
Now it IS possible that the toilet isn’t so much sexist, as it just hates me personally. As an experimental researcher I have decided that further exploration of the phenomena is required. I have proposed inviting friends over to use the toilet and documenting frequency of clogging by gender as well as plunging results by gender. My husband is opposed to this plan on many levels. He says it’s, “Not OK to invite people over for the sole purpose of pooping in your toilet.” He also objects to letting people into our bedroom. First, I would never invite people over just to poop. We’d play board games and eat high fiber foods first. Also, I think he has wildly overblown notions of how transgressive our bedroom is. No one will be scandalized by the roving pile of flannel sheets and a desk with half painted Totoro figurines. If he doesn’t want people to see a stack of his clean underwear, he could just put them in the drawer.
He continues to draw the line at expanding my toilet clogging data set, but over time he has conceded that he believes the toilet is sexist. In the end, having a partner who believes you when you accuse inanimate objects of personal animus is really what it’s all about.
~~~
[1] By the way, the secret to parenting is this: Always remember it is US against HER/HIM/THEM. That adorable infant you brought home wants only one thing, your absolute and complete annihilation. Maintain unity as a couple and never be fooled by your offsprings’s adorable charms. Once you let the kid divide you, you are screwed. They will seek out every means possible to crush your soul and destroy your marriage. Constant Vigilance.
[2] It has something to do with his father’s high school graduation date, childhood car trips, and a family with a big trampoline.
[3] I would also like to note that one of husband’s favorite tricks is to bring the car home on a Friday night all but empty of gas, knowing there’s a 50/50 chance I will be the next one to drive it and thereby get stuck putting gas in the car. Also, he never changes the bloody oil!
*This post was originally a part of the now defunct Somnaplegic blog.
