Functionally hitched

For someone who talks a big game about not being a functional adult, I do have one impressive qualification of the mature: Husband and I have been married almost half a decade. Though it’s far more a reflection of his infinite patience than anything I do - he still puts up with me even though I’m a screwup - it’s still pretty good. Compared to, say, famous celebrities, we have been through:

• 14 Bradley Cooper / Jennifer Esposito marriages
• 16 Nicholas Cage / Lisa Marie Presley marriages
• 31 Kim Kardashian / Kris Humphries marriages
• 191 Dennis Rodman / Carmen Electra marriages
• 718 Britney Spears / Jason Alexander marriages

(thanks, Time Magazine, for this helpful information!  Way to be a serious news source covering the Issues of the Day!)

You might think comparing your marriage length to celebrities isn’t fair; it’s like laughing at a dachshund for not being able to reach something on a high shelf. But lawyers generally aren’t all that much better at lasting marriages, so I still think some credit is due - I haven’t yet nitpicked Husband to distraction, so that counts for something!

Now lest you begin to think I’m going to have to retitle my blog to Smug Mature Person Brags About Her Marriage, let me state immediately that the very fact of our marriage was seen by many as Highly Irresponsible. Because we got married young, son - not stereotypes-of-the-Deep-South young, but young enough that the minister who hitched us felt the need to comment during the ceremony that he had worried about us because we were so young.

Everyone thought we were CRAZY. Which had its upsides: none of our friends had ever been to a wedding before, so there was no wedding-planning pressure and they were all just really excited to come celebrate. (And, bless its digital heart, Pinterest hadn’t been invented yet, for which I am so thankful.)

We weren’t old enough to be ridiculously set in our ways, and we didn’t each already have a bunch of nice furniture that conflicted. The main thing we had duplicates of was spices, and somehow we have yet to shake this? Like how much dried tarragon does one household need?

Everyone was, of course, correct that we were crazy. But one great thing about getting married young is you get to work on your timing. Because my conclusion about marriage is that it’s like a comedy routine. Actually, it’s not like a comedy routine. It is a comedy routine. And the longer you’re together, the more you get your timing right.

We have a couple of routines we do, really without thinking about it. For example, there are the ones where I’m the straight man and it’s Wacky Husband Doing Wacky Things. So I roll my eyes about [Topic] and set him up for the good punch lines. This one is usually about his unending car restoration or fondness for old trains and rusty buckets or whatever. But then we’ll switch at other times: he’s the patient exasperated one and I’m the wacky linedancer/overemotional suitcase packer/ indignant moviewatcher objecting to legal inaccuracies in the film.

I think a lot of couples do this: you know each other’s stories and so you can either get bored by them or you can take the fun option and inhabit them. You learn where the slow spots are and help your esposo steer through them; you make it funnier by providing a contrast, or a pseudo-conflict, or a commentator. And you get better at it with time - we leave ‘em in stitches, Husband and me. (Sometimes we even make them laugh! Wait, no, too soon for an actual stitches joke?)

Though I wonder sometimes if unmarried people think married people spend their times alone with each other rolling their eyes at each other and exchanging barbs. Like they live in this horrible, real-life version of the parents’ marriage from Home Improvement.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll tell you this: when it’s just us, we are often just laughing at the squirrels in our yard. You guys, those squirrels are hilarious. The eye rolls are all for your benefit. Just like my inexplicable wedding-planning pins on Pinterest: just because I’m never having a wedding again doesn’t mean I won’t pin for your wedding. You’re welcome.

The Princess in Her Tower

Often when I’m at work, I’m just dying to get home. I’ll think about all of the things I need and want to get done at home and just know that if I didn’t have to be at work today, I could be so productive and pleasant, like Rapunzel in Tangled : cook, clean the whole house, paint some oil paintings, exercise, run a bunch of errands, and accomplish ten million useful and enlightening things.* Notably, I don’t dream all that big: I just want to be not in the office. I am actually daydreaming about doing the housework that Rapunzel is daydreaming about NOT doing.

But of course, the truth is that as soon as I get home at the end of the day, I have a lot more in common with Sleeping Beauty when it comes to personal productivity around the house. I share both her need to a ton of sleep (hey, sleep is good for you!) and also her sort of dumb tendency to just wander around and touch objects in the house for no apparent reason. She had the excuse of being enchanted (I think? someone back me up here) but I have the excuse of being tired after work and forgetting why . Of course, Husband and I have cleverly proofed our house to not have any fatal spinning wheels around the house, or spinning wheels of any kind. It’s best to be cautious.

And I also share some unfortunate tendencies with one Petite Sirene: instead of getting anything done, or learning an instrument such that I could jam with the band, I often find myself endlessly online shopping or browsing Pinterest. Which is obviously the equivalent of what Ariel was doing in her room full of random stuff she had collected: if that’s not a low-tech, undersea Pinboard, then I’m the Queen of the Atlantic. But of course, I’ve never made the same mistake Ariel did: I always read the fine print, always assume provisions in a contract will come back to bite me, and I never sign deals with sea witches. (You learn that day one of Contracts class.) Plus, I have to think she made a bad decision on giving up the ability to breathe both above-water and underwater: anyone with gills AND lungs would make an amazing Navy SEAL.

The truth is that if I can’t even muster the energy to clean the house, I really wouldn’t be up for, I don’t know, undergoing rigorous military training from Donny Osmond in order to defeat a large-scale invasion by one of the greatest military commanders in history. So I suppose it’s good my tower is just an office, that I can leave WHENEVER I WANT SERIOUSLY UM I JUST NEED TO SEND A FEW MORE E-MAILS, ahem, and that I’m not actually a fictional princess. Not least because if I had the power to iceify things and some expletive deleted had tried to kill Sassy and take our throne, I would put that expletive deleted’s whole kingdom (including his jerkwad, sociopathic-tendency-creating brothers) into a state of permanent popsicle. If someone tried to kill my only family, I don’t think I’d just let it go.

But just in case I am ever called to be such a princess, I took a highly scientific quiz to see which Disney princess I’m most like, because that’s a productive thing for a licensed attorney to do. And I got…. BELLE!  Who is my favorite anyway!  So I guess I’m downright regal after all - I forgot that constantly reading stuff to the detriment of real life counts as princessy if you throw some musical numbers in around it. Which, of course, I always do.



*I have never even aspired to be like Snow White. Think about it: her job was to keep house for SEVEN DUDES. I remember what Husband’s college apartment looked like, and he only shared it with two other dudes, and he and one of the other dudes were fairly clean. Snow White was living with SEVEN guys, all of whom had extremely dirty jobs, and bizarrely fixed emotional states which were extremely disparate (which could lead to fighting in the house) and do I also recall atrocious table manners?  I seem to.  #nothankyou

An Actual Functional Adult Helps Me Make a Curtain

You are all probably SO DAZZLED by my recent EXTREME, UNEQUIVOCAL SUCCESS in improving my previously uninspired home decor that you said aloud, to your computer screen, "Dear, delightful Liz, why do you not complete MORE divine projects that I may read of and revel in them?"  Oh, dear reader, I weep to tell you: if you speak aloud to your computer screen, I can't really hear you.  Also, Dad, the football team can't hear you through the TV.  Your neighbors asked me to let you know.

But while I can't really hear you, dear reader, I am so close to psychic I can divine that you must have asked your monitor for more projects!  And so I leapt, headfirst, into further DIY adventures.  By which I mean I went to visit my mom and she convinced me we should make a valance (this is a kind of curtain, minions) for my bedroom.  I was completely on board - not because I'm feeling so great about DIY but because my mom is awesome at sewing (and I knew she would do most of the sewing).

Seriously, when I was a kid, my mom could sew me anything.  Are you a female born in the 1980s or did you parent one?  Then you know about American Girl Dolls.  These were of HUGE importance.  If you are uninitiated, they are dolls and the dolls also had a backstory set somewhere in American history.  And their clothes matched the era.  Aaaaaaand the more that I think about this the less I understand why my 8-year-old self was so intensely interested in them.  Maybe reading about the Victorian Era is really fascinating when no one has given you any sci-fi books yet?

But for whatever reason, these dolls were severely important and their import was rivaled only by the cost of the doll dresses and matching 8-year-old girl-sized dresses they sold.  Most moms would have looked at the cost and either 1) sighed and ponied up; or 2) told their little girl that she can do historical reenactment on her on dime when she's older.  BUT NOT MY MOM.  She busted out her sewing machine and made the Victorian Birthday Dress for me and my spoiled doll.  And later, when I saw other girls who had the purchased version of that dress, I pitied them because mine was genuinely better.

This is why I assented to this curtain project, despite my spackle and tape related DIYPTSD.

I got even more excited when we found this frankly badass fabric:

I almost wanted to just buy a couple yards and turn it into a cape.  But instead, we bought enough for a curtain and got down to sewing.  By which I mean my mom got down to sewing.

Unfortunately, the badass textured fabric turned out to be a pain to sew on the sewing machine.  Mom did only one seam and decided we needed to hand-hem three sides of it.  Which meant I needed to get involved, as this curtain was pretty big.

As some background, I will tell you that I know how to sew on a few levels: 1) theoretical (there is fabric, thread, needles, etc.; I have watched Mom do this thing); 2) very limited practical.  On the latter, the things I have sewn are almost entirely limited to holes in jeans.  And fashion was on my team for quite a long time with the whole distressed-jeans thing, so my patch-up jobs could look pretty shoddy and only make the jeans look COOLER.  Also one time I sewed up a giant hole in Husband's backpack because he refuses to get a new one.

Anyway, with all of this jeans-patching skill at my disposal, I sat down on the couch to watch Property Brothers and Hem! This! Curtain!  I did a few inches, very slowly, before Mom looked at my progress.

Mom:  What are you doing?
Liz:  I'm sewing it!  Like you said!  Straight stitch!
Mom:  No, I said hem stitch!
Liz: Well I don't think I know what a hem stitch is!
Mom:  Did I not teach you how to hem stitch ever?  I could hem stitch when I was seven!
Liz (alarmed):  NO YOU APPARENTLY DID NOT, LOUISA MAY ALCOTT!

My mom showed me how to do it but I was terrible at it and it took me five times as long to do a section as it took her.  And my stitches looked like they had been executed by a drunk pirate chef sewing up the leg of a roaring captain during a battle.  A battle during a squall.  So it's probably good I didn't finish more than I did.

Then my mom let me try using the sewing machine on the white liner fabric for the back of the curtain.  This was the plainest fabric in the world.  It was white plain cotton.  Not that it being white makes it any easier to sew than if it had a million Mick Jaggers printed on it, but it sort of felt psychologically more straightforward. Except even on the sewing machine with the plainest fabric doing the most boring stitch, I somehow wasn't doing it right.

Mom:  You have to keep pulling the fabric along as you go.
Liz:  I am pulling it along!  But how do I do that and not have it go all crooked?  See if I... uhoh... whoops...
Mom:  Why don't I just do it?

Ultimately, my mom ended up doing waaaaay more than I did because she isn't terrible at sewing like I am.  But I did repay all my mom's effort a little bit by helping her put a vinyl wall decal in her room, which took the two of us way longer than it took the man in the YouTube video, and he was all by himself.

Another highlight from my visit with my mom:  I saw this Darth Vader ornament at Hallmark, and when you walked in front of it, it would say things like "The desire to peek is strong in this one" and other dire warnings relating to not opening presents early.

It was amazing and I stood in front of it the whole time my mom was paying for her greeting cards so I could hear all of the things he said.  The clerk was giving me dirty looks, but they were so easy to ignore?  Who is scarier, a lady who works at Hallmark (wearing the standard-issue inexplicable apron; is Hallmark worried its employees are going to spill tired birthday jokes on their civilian clothes?) or DARTH VADER IN A SANTA HAT?

(There is a right answer here.)

So obviously I kept standing there while taking pictures of Darth Vader to Husband, who was supposedly "at work" and apparently bemused by my choice of things to text him.  But the joke was on HIM, because once I got home I made him go with me to Home Depot to buy a curtain rod.

Liz:  I want one with crystal finials.
Husband:  What is a finial?  And... crystal?
Liz:  Finial is the ball-thingy at the end of a curtain rod.  And yes, crystal!  That one!
Husband:  That one is crystal only on one end.  The other end is that squiggly thing.
Liz:  I think that's just for display purposes.
Husband:  Oh.  But... crystal?  Really?

But guess who won?

And guess who made her husband hang the curtain rod for her?

The color looks weird in this photo because the photo came out all red and then I tried to fix it on my computer and now everything looks like our bedroom is brightened by some hideous alien sun.

I am in love with the curtain and still a little bit want to wear it.

If you think about it, wearing a curtain isn't really any more ridiculous than an 8-year-old determined to be a Victorian-era re-enactress.