Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Mush-y Stuff, Inc.

A quick glance up to the upper right corner of my screen tells me that the V-day is rapidly approaching. Yes, troops, Valentine’s Day is upon us. A time of candy hearts, red roses and sweet chocolate.

I hate Valentine’s Day.

OK, that’s not true, really. I used to hate Valentine’s Day. I used to call it a “manufactured” holiday and I was adamant in not celebrating it. It was something some marketing wonk at Hallmark dreamed up in order to buff up 1st quarter sales after the Christmas holidays and before Mother’s Day. And I hated the notion that someone, (especially the perception that some faceless corporation) was going to tell me that NOW was the time to tell some significant other in my life how much I cared about them, and especially in the form of a greeting card dripping with fake sentimentality. As you can probably suspect, I had similar feelings toward Christmas and all its pageantry and glorification of hedonistic materialism.

Quite the militant little twerp I was.

Plus, there’s all that pink and red and I’ve never looked good in pink. The rest of me is pink and pale and pasty and adding more pink just clashes something fierce.

Now I still don’t particularly like Valentine’s Day, but I have pretty much come— if not full circle, then at least 270° around on such things. I still feel a little pushed and grumpy about it, but I acknowledge the date and fully participate now.

So I’m going to tell a little story about how I feel.

Reha and have been married for a while now. It’ll be seventeen years this August. As is the case in most marriages, there have been high and low points for both of us, but trending nicely upward for the past while, which is a delight; somewhat surprising, but just a sheer delight. And though I know her pretty well, and she probably understands me better, and you’d think I’d be able to rub together a couple of brain cells and spark out something acceptable, it’s quite difficult for me to express how I feel about her. We’ve been together long enough that I’m comfortable with her. Not like a grody, nasty old shoe sort of comfortable, but the kind where I’m happy and content and given comfort by having her in my life. Which, given my general state of uncomfortableness with intimacy in general, is quite a remarkable thing. Astonishing, in fact. That she chooses to hang out with me speaks volumes not only to her patience, but possibly points to a lurking mental illness of some kind.

Language doesn’t really help me here. It’s a simple phrase, “I love Reha” but it hardly does the object of that sentence justice. I say that I love lots of things. I love the salad they make me at Boston Deli. I love Photoshop and am enthralled by the pad thai from Pei Wei. I love hot showers and the smell of clean laundry and am very fond of my Jetta. And I love Reha.

But it seems cheap and somehow shallow and unworthy that “I love Reha” gets smooshed in with Photoshop’s pixels and the Deli’s croutons. Because, though my life would be worse without twiddling pixels and crunchy croutons (what would I do for work and what would I have for lunch, ack!?), I’d somehow get by in the end. I’d muddle through. The pixels can stay un-fiddled with and croutons are just three day old bread after all. Easy to imagine a life with croutons. Poof! and they are gone and life marches on, unbothered, the salad will still be crunchy after all.

But no Reha? Smack me in the head with a large halibut and perish the thought! Why even bother having pixels or croutons in the first place if you aren’t going to have a Reha around? What’s the point?

So what it comes down to is depth, I guess. And sadly, love is on an unquantifiable, but sliding scale. On the one end of the measuring stick, there’s how I feel about the healing brush and layer masks in Photoshop and on the other there is the person who shares my bed and knows in which closet I keep all the skeletons. Though I do very much think the healing brush and layers masks are a wonderful bits of code from the masters at Adobe, they can’t hold a candle to her.

Forgive me if I delve into my bottomless sack of cliches and pull out the Jerry Maguire line about someone “completing me,” but goodness gracious with churro on the side, I like being with her. I like listening to her talk and hold forth. I love making her laugh and the warmth and depth of her caring soul. And I love the way she smells. How does she do that anyway? Some trick of her-ness turns an ordinary odor from Estée Lauder into something absolutely other. And I’m amazed and relieved and elated at how we fit together and I can say with absolute and tragic certainly that my life is better with her in it, than without it.

Happy Valentine’s Day.
“Sure do love ya, babe.”

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

 

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

©2005-2010 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. All comments belong to the respective commenters.