Double Your Pleasure

My mom just left this morning; we had a fantastic weekend. I'll get back to the details of our adventures later, but first I wanted to let my four faithful readers know that I figured out some valuable things during Mom's visit. Prepare yourself for brilliance.

I realized something about all the weird little quirks, habits, and idiosyncrasies of your significant other: they are a double blessing, or at least they can be in certain circumstances. George Carlin once did a bit about the frightening, moldy leftovers he found in his refrigerator: "Leftovers make you feel good twice. Leftovers give you two separate good feelings. When you first put them away you feel really intelligent. 'I'm saving food.' And then after a month, when hair is growing out of them, and you throw them away, you feel…really intelligent! 'I'm saving my life.'" Likewise, I've figured out you can get two separate good feelings from the eccentricities of your lover. When you're happy with someone in a relationship, all of those funny little characteristics can be incredibly endearing, even if you wouldn't have necessarily found them cute in other circumstances. When you sincerely love someone, their bizarre habits and irrational beliefs can be adorable and make you love him even more. There's the first good feeling. And then later, when you're sad about breaking up with said person, you suddenly think again about a lot of those quirks and how much they annoyed the living fuck out of you.

And there's the second good feeling. :)

At one point this weekend, Mom and I took a wrong turn somewhere because of an inaccurate road sign and we were unsure where we were headed for a few minutes. It turned out just fine, but while we were lost, I kept waiting for Elliot to appear and turn into a restless, teeth-grinding, arrogant stress-case and sit next to me in the passenger's seat sighing and practicing his "long-suffering" look like our time in the car was a prison sentence. Whenever I'm alone, I drive very well, rarely have any close encounters with other cars, and can almost always find my way somewhere. When he was in the car, at times I was so stressed out I didn't know my right from my left and every five seconds we came close to death. This weekend I realized that despite this persistent sadness I feel, I'm glad to be rid of the constant feeling that I couldn't ever do anything right. Every time he knew how to do something I didn't, I had to feel like an imbecile whose pathetic attempts at helping him or learning more about it only annoyed him more.

The next incident that brightened my day was when Mom and I left the movie theater AFTER THE MOVIE ENDED. We didn't have to wait in the seats while everyone in our aisle stepped over us awkwardly, and we didn't have to sit and watch ten minutes of mindlessly boring credits until the theater was completely empty and the employees came in to clean up the trash, looking at us like we were insane. I think for at least the next year, I will bound out of the movie theater as soon as the final music begins to swell and the couple starts to kiss. I'll kick down old ladies and children if it means I'll get to the exit faster. It'll be good therapy for me, as will fastidiously avoiding watching any of the following movies: blacksploitation films, unimaginably dull films from the 70s in which the actors never change facial expressions and spend most of the movie walking or driving somewhere, mindless horror films, and Woody Allen's Sleeper. It'll be easy to avoid renting any of these movies because I won't have to walk around Blockbuster for a solid hour before I can take a movie home. I won’t even see most of them!

Okay, my hands are shaking, I think I need to stop now. That felt so good, though. Gotta love that second good feeling!