Goofy, Marriage & Mermaid Sex

Warning: a) this is a long, pointless ramble and b) it's a clumsy tribute to Will. If this doesn't interest you, may I direct you to this excellent site: Paperdoll Heaven. When we got home from a paint party, Will and I spent half an hour squabbling over an incredibly stupid question [what animal is Goofy?], which evolved into a squabble over the definition of 'humanoid', and then we fell into a squabble over whether it'd be possible to have sex with a mermaid. I don't quite remember what started this off, but somewhere along the line Will said Goofy is a "humanoid", not a dog as I thought it may be. I pointed out that he's basically agreed with me. That Goofy is a dog. He insisted that a humanoid is not what I think it means. He likes to think he is the Genius of this House, but I'm the Queen of Dictionaries in this house. Granted, I can't spell to save my life and I'm not an intellectual, but I understand the majority of what I read. I may be stupid enough not to be able to recall my birthdate and not being able to tell left from right, but by fuck, words are my world. He just wouldn't agree that a humanoid is basically a creature with human appearance and tendancies. Not even when I shoved a dictionary under his nose. It was painfully obvious that he was refusing to go down without a fight [he says it's the American way; huh, in Will's world, everything is the American way], so he clung on his [mistaken] belief like a woman on a good bargain during a January sale. Still, it ended without either of us mopping up blood, which is good. During this pointless exercise, I couldn't shake off this feeling that we were not behaving like a proper married couple. I don't really know why. I think it was because earlier one of our friends moaned about her husband's inability to be a - in her eyes - Good Husband, e.g. he won't share his activities with her. She has this idea that a married couple should share everything together, and her husband wasn't that prepared to go that far. She felt that a marriage is - and should be - a, basically, merger of two lives. Half of the room agreed with her, and another half of the room disagreed. That was when I realised Will and I don't share many activities together. I admit the idea of sharing everything with Will makes me feel uncomfortable. Is this unhealthy? Wrong? I love his company, yet there are times I need breathing space. I think Will feels the same way. I think I like having three levels in our lives: one for him, one for me, and one for us together. When we get together, it's usually sharing senseless conversations, bouts of comfortable silence, days of lazing around, travels around the country while squabbling over the control of the steering wheel, and a lot of silly bets. Sometimes, I admit, I thought that I should be in the kitchen doing the washing up or slaving over an oven and he should be in the living room, snoring in his chair while he has a beer can in one hand and a well-thumbed remote control in another. An ordinary scene of a marriage. That scene rarely appears in our lives. Usually, Will is off to sailing and I'm cackling over a hilarious blog post. Or him at home with his friends while I do my best not to crash his car into a car as my friend next to me does her best not to scream in terror. When we are home together, I think we don't behave like a proper married couple. We do stupid things, such as dealing with his shouting at me for screwing up the alphabetical order of his record collection; me throwing his dirty socks out of a window [I threatened to do this for weeks, so he expected it. Sort of.]; discussing Tom Cruise's height [he said 5' 6" and I said 5' 8", but IMDB.com says it's 5' 7"]; trying to spell xenodocheionology, and on it goes. I don't know what a marriage is supposed to be. Or should be. Is it supposed to be the kind a couple shares everything together - cook together, smile at each other every day, shag every night, socialise together, sleep at same time always, and the like? What does it means when a marriage goes through phases, ups, downs and bouts of a flatline? When I was growing up, I had this fixed idea that there were only three types of marriage: Hilariously Happy, Screamingly Miserable, and Achingly Dull. My marriage doesn't fit any of those three things, yet did experience all three at least once. Then it came to me that Will's developed a habit of putting a Post It note on my mobile phone, every year on my birthday, to remind me how old I am, in case anyone would ask for my age. He never complains when I get him to type numbers in a spam filter box, and he doesn't mock me when I ask a stupid question, such as whether Goofy is a dog. He doesn't give me the Look when I spent too long on a AIM conversation, and he knows how to cheer me up when I'm down. No matter how far away he is, he'll come home if I asked. Granted, I fight with Will now and then, usually over stupid issues, such as whose turn is it to do the washing up, his tendency to leave his dirty socks all over the house, and his hatred for my habit of leaving the top off our toothpaste tube. I admit I have a bad habit of forgetting to take washing out of our washing machine. To the point where Will would put a Post It note on our bathroom mirror to remind me. Once he was so annoyed that I woke up to a Post It note stuck on my forehead. But there was a time when I crashed his precious car into back of a neighbour's electric wheelchair, I had flash visions of Will falling onto his knees to sob over his now-wrecked car and then kill me. His actual reaction took me by surprise; he didn't run to the car as I expected. He ran to check if I was all right. If you knew Will, you'd know this is incredible. He loves his car. So much that it sometimes felt like his car was the Other Woman. It's good to know that when when it comes to the worst, that precious car loses. He is quite phobic of hospitals [he blamed it on Coma] yet he spent every minute at hospital when I had an operation to chop a massive ovarian cyst out of my body and spent ages assuring me that my war scar [the surgical scar from that operation] won't have him running for the hills. I may have no idea what makes a good marriage, but I've decided that Will's my idea of a Very Good Husband. OK, he pulled a few stupid stunts, but overall, he's fabulous. I realised this earlier when we were in the back garden, picking teal-coloured paint dots off our hands, forearms and hair, and having our discussion about physical possibilies of shagging a mermaid while doing our best to ignore our cat who, with his hind leg sticking straight in the air, licked his nether regions in presence of a fanged dog next door. Will is likely to kill me when he read this post in the morning. I hope not. If he comes to me with a murderous gleam in his eye, I will ask him to wait until I read Angie's copy of Tara Janzen's Crazy Hot. I know he'd not let me go to my grave without reading Crazy Hot. Heck, he knows 'Tara Janzen' is an anagram of Tarzen and Jane. Give him a pop quiz on romance novels and the like, he'd ace it. Not that he'd admit this to his friends, but I chewed his ear long enough to make him a Mr. KnowItAll when comes to the romance genre. Oh, that is another reason why he's a Good Husband. OK, I'll shut up as I've rambled long enough. If you don't hear from me this week, this could mean:

a) Will went Rochester and locked me in the attic for writing this blog post b) we've left for Scotland to be roasted alive in Hell, a.k.a. Dundee c) I'm lost in the internet jungle, trying to remember where I found that photo of a dog with its hair comb-over because I want to answer Robin's question. d) aliens took me out for a tour in their galaxy ore) a bunch of authors kidnapped me to brainwash me into believing that Scottish historical romances are the greatest thing since sliced bread.

If I were a betting woman, I'd bet on e). Be good, be bad & be safe.