On Tuesday morning I woke up to something of a surprising email. I get quite a handful of emails to the Stranger account. Most of them are from you people telling me how good my hair looks and yelling at me for all the ways my recipes suck and asking if Skylar is single and stuff.
But this one caught my eye, because, well. Just read it.
I heard it before I saw it. It was coming from the next room over. A one-sided medical based conversation by my exhausted spouse who has been working graveyard shifts between long days.
He comes home when he can and traps himself in some corner of the house, a space heater at his feet, and he studies until he falls asleep. "I'm just so tired. I'm just so so tired," he'll say to me if ever I happen to see him.
But on this evening three nights ago he wasn't studying quietly. He was instead practicing physical exams, and he was doing it loudly.
"Now I'm going to check your heartrate," I heard him say to what I thought must be an imaginary patient. I thought it must have been imaginary because I was pretty sure we were the only two people in the house.
But then he continued: "your heart rate is about . . . uh . . . hundreds of beats per minute. That's either very alarming or completely normal."
At this point I became curious enough to put down my knitting and pause my shows, for I was engaged in equally important tasks as Skylar.
I embarked on my third sweater project in early July. I was determined to knit one Skylar would actually wear.
Skylar is not a good liar. I don't think he's really capable of lying. It's a very disappointing thing to have in a spouse. I know I know. "But Eli, why would you want your husband to be dishonest with you? Don't you want to know you can trust what he's telling you?"
Y'all, that sounds nice on paper but when I'm like "do you think I'm getting soft around my mid-section" and he responds in a high pitched "WHAT NO OF COURSE NOT WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOU'VE NEVER LOOKED MORE FIT AND YOUR HAIR DEFINITELY ISN'T THINNING" and I'm like "WHAT'S THAT ABOUT MY HAIR???"
I'm just saying, sometimes I would like for him to be a good liar.
When I had him try on the first sweater I made, which I knew was a disaster (it had like five holes in it and it was four inches longer in the front than in the back) I asked him what he thought. He did the same high-pitched voice and said something about how the sweater "really tells a story."
I haven't seen that sweater since.
I need you to solve a debate that is make or break for my marriage.
Skylar, who is wrong, thinks it's rude when I'm working or writing and he starts trying to talk to me and I very politely ignore him completely. He also thinks it's rude when I mindlessly respond with a curt "uh-uh" without ever looking at him.
Obviously he, who is wrong, would characterize this differently than I have. He would incorrectly tell you that I'm not "politely" ignoring him and that the fact that I'm ignoring him is inherently impolite, but nonetheless, I'm not doing it "politely" anyway. He would falsely say that all he's doing is trying to treasure the few seconds we have together, which his horrid schedule barely and rarely deigns to allow, and that my refusal to join him in that honorable quest in fact makes me quite rude.
Then I'd interrupt at this point (but I'd do it politely, obviously) and I'd say "no one made you go learn how to put cameras up people's butts and look at poop through a microscope" and he'd cut me off there and yell "for the last time, that is not what I do all day." And then I'd remind him that it's rude to yell and interrupt so maybe a little self-reflection would be a better use of his time than this current escapade of projection.
He'd roll his eyes at that point and say it's "useless" arguing with me, which is curious, because he would then continue to argue with me. And look, I'd suggest that if you're doing something you think is useless, that probably says a lot more about you than it ever could about me.
Meg is essentially a gay man on paper. I don't mean that she's a gay man on top of paper; I just mean that if you listed all of her qualities and interests on a piece of paper, you would assume she's a gay man named Garrett in West Hollywood. She's got all of the stereotypical interests and she tends to know celebrity hot goss that most gay men know but which I completely don't know. It's very confusing sometimes but also very impressive.
Probably the way she's the most Gay Man is her obsession with Halloween. I drove to her house recently and she had decked the place out like it was the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. She had two large skeletons sitting out on Adirondack chairs (yes, I know what those are now). I don't think it was even October yet.
When we started contemplating upcoming content for The Beehive, Meg just kept screaming into the zoom call "MORE SPOOKY." We were like "but what about people who are scared" and she just cut us off with a high-pitched cackle that went uninterrupted until the zoom call timed out.
Since she's our scary mob boss we all immediately started writing ghost stories but that wasn't enough for her so she took to social media to ask people to tell us their spooky stories. We've been recording some for Strangerville and editing written pieces and researching accounts people have been sending to us and y'all, I'm basically up to my ears in spooky this month.
This week I wrote a story for The Beehive about how hard I've tried to get my faithless husband to believe in ghosts because he's wrongly dismissive about their existence. Please do me a solid and read that piece. Whenever you click on something I've written for The Beehive they immediately give me $250,000 and a gift certificate to JOANN Fabric.
The first time Skylar came to visit Salt Lake City was especially stressful for me. It was unlikely I would be able to move any time soon due to my career, so if this relationship was going to go anywhere, I needed him to fall in love with my majestic mountains and Cafe Rio.
During These Unprecedented Times Of Uncertainty, I have run around 200 miles per month. I've mentioned this to you before. My conversion into Forrest Gump was a result of two things: Gyms being closed and extreme high energy.
When this all began in March, I looked for whatever opportunity I could find to get myself out of the house to burn off some the anxiety I was feeling. As a result, I started going on 13-mile runs about every other day, listening to mindless pop-culture and movie podcasts along the way. It's actually been a really nice escape for me and something I think I'll take with me if we ever enter precedented and certain times again.
Because I've been running so much, I have fully rubbed holes in all of my running shorts. You would think with all of this endurance activity I wouldn't have thunder thighs, but gurlfrend: my thunder thighs have basically become a hurricane in 2020. The weather people have even named them.
My thunder thighs are in full force because while I have increased my physical activity by 90%, I have also increased my ice cream consumption by 390%. I'm not very good with maths, but I believe that leaves an eleventy percent deficit, and that entire deficit has gone to Cagney and Lacey. Those are my thunder thighs. I forgot to mention their names last paragraph.
I didn't really care for a while about the holes in all of my running shorts because, like, who am I trying to impress? "Who am I trying to impress" is actually my favorite post-marriage excuse for not caring about things. Skylar hates it. "Me. You're trying to impress me." he says.
Skylar left at illegal o'clock this morning for affairs so he wasn't around when I discovered The Great Flood in our front yard.
He's in pediatrics now, which is apparently different than the rotation he just completed, which was also in pediatrics. He had panicked before starting that last one because he decided against all possible evidence to the contrary that he wasn't "good with children."
I had him watch that episode of Mr. Rogers where the kid goes to the doctor for a physical and Mr. Rogers goes with to show the viewers at home that it's not all that scary. I told Skylar he could maybe get some tips from how the physician in the episode interacted with the child. A few minutes later I found him intently watching the episode and furiously taking notes, which might be the cutest thing I've ever seen.
Apparently that did the trick because by the end of the rotation he had decided that he, in fact, liked working with children. So he was happy to start this new rotation in pediatrics that is somehow different than his last rotation in pediatrics.
The point is, he wasn't around to deal with today's disaster.
Cashier: These little t-shirts are cute! Who are they for?
Me: Oh, uh . . . my . . . uh . . . my baby. They're for my baby.
Cashier: Boy or girl?
Me: Boy.
Cashier: Wonderful! And how old is he?
Me: He's fou--uh . . . [looks at tag on shirt] he's eight to ten months.
Cashier: Hard to keep track, isn't it! Especially when you aren't getting much sleep!
Me: He actually sleeps through the night pretty well.
Cashier: Terrific! How's his appetite? At that age they can become so finnicky.
Me: Fine. He's pretty much eats the same thing for every meal.
Cashier: Is he crawling yet?
Mamma's tired but here are some pictures and a few quick distractions for your perusal.
I don't want no bunny banana frog ok no way.
 |
| Duncan and Jude taking a nap. |
