We were at the Dude’s house when I noticed that my phone was missing. This was the new phone, upon which it was easy to txt. I had been getting into the txting and the twitpicing, and so forth before I lost the new phone. Back I went to the old phone, thinking it was too bad to not have the superior txting capacity. The thing I had forgotten about the dino-phone, however, is that it is difficult to charge — in a way that is very irritating. Having just gotten the damn thing charging, I received a call from my Sweet Lady and I hoped that answering would not interfere with the slow progress the battery was making.
She had preceded us in the pilgrimage to the Great Temple, and I was already stirred up about the phone when she reported that bringing Tallulah out on the roads might not be the better part of valor. I’m all for protecting the young of the clan, but I could not help but mope about missing another ritual. Moping in this case took the form of watching the Wanda Sykes show I recorded last night while trying to fix the Windows Media Player’s issues as Tallulah surfed the PBS Kids site in the other room. For two and a half hours.
At which point I began to feel guilty for having been such a BAD FATHER and a BAD HUSBAND. This led to some marriage algebra, from which no good can come. The equation is this: mSL + laundry + child pick up = child drop off + cooking + S_D wherein mSL stands for all the random stuff my Sweet Lady does and S_D encompasses all the random stuff I do. The problem is that this equation will never be balanced. I’ll either think I’m doing more and get pissy or I’ll think I’m doing less and get pissy. To quote WOPR, “The only way to win is not to play the game.”
Knowing this is true is not as easy as following through on its implications. In “Rachel Getting Married” which we watched last night, Anne Hathaway’s character knows her attention grabbing whiny sarcasm is not going to keep working but she has a hard time letting it go. Seeing her standing in her teen angst bedroom with its black curtains and Sex Pistols stickers, I could remember snow days spent at Hickory Hollow Mall getting high and listening to the Cure. Those days involved a lot of algebra about who was right and who was wrong, most of it aimed at proving the hypothesis that it was not my fault.
Today’s hypothesis (I’m a good husband because I do so much around the house) is blessedly left without need of an answer at this point. The evidence for and against is overwhelming, but the absence of the equation also removes the anxiety. All of which is generated from within me, of course. It took the better part of the day to get here, but that’s not all bad. I put up some new shelves in the meantime. We needed those. That makes me pretty good, right?