A Night of Relaxation

Oh, the joy of marriage. The joy of having someone to come home to. Someone with the same intellect. The same dreams. The same motivation (or lack thereof some days). The love that will always be there whenever anything comes along. But they never mentioned the little things that truly show loving all of a person:

The different tastes in music.

The different definitions of a "night in".

The different tell-tale signs of annoyance, anger, joy, etc.

The different little things that drive each other up the wall.

The sheer fact that I'm typing is driving him up the wall, I know it. So, the question is, do I type softer because I can see his hand raising to his forehead, pretending that I am slowly draining his work-ability with every stroke of the keyboard? Or do I continue, pretending to be oblivious that the spacebar has about twice the volume of the regular keys. Basically, the fact that he doesn't want to do his work right now is being channeled into being angry about the keystrokes. And I love him. I really do. I'm not doing something for work, so obviously, the lesson plans he's working on should be my main priority and I should be sitting on the couch in the other room merely reading my book I just got.

I tried to put on my new jazz CD, my one impulse buy during my $200 shopping spree at Wal-Mart the other day. With that, he turned and asked "what's that?" "It's jazz, you dumbass." No, I didn't say it outloud; I said the obligatory, "I'm sorry, does it bother you?" "Yes." And with that, he turned his back to me. Oh, because watching "Family Guy" for two hours and then saying "Whatever, I'm not doing this tonight, I'll get up early to do it" really gets in the way even more than "Moonlight Serenade".

But I do praise his motivation right now to learn grammar, albeit from an author who is 100 years old and doesn't adhere to what is the most recently accepted as correct. Whatever. Let him read a book by some pretentious grammar Nazi who was probably given a book deal to shut her up for a few weeks so she wouldn't correct everybody she came in contact with.

He just turned around to settle an argument we had weeks ago.

"By the way, [one of his favorite phrases to let me know something he just learned] it is correct to use both Joneses AND Jones' when talking plural and possessive."

I just rolled my eyes and said, "Don't get me started on what I already think of that author."

With that he turned around, confident he had some backup to his claim weeks ago.

Five minutes later, "Oh, hell no! She used an apostrophe in 1960s! I should just throw this book out the window."

"Is she talking possessively about the year 1960?"

(Scurrying to find the page again in the strewn book) "'the 1960's' One-nine-six-zero-apostrophe-'s'. No, she's an idiot."

"Someone gave her a book deal with shut her pretentious, over-correcting mouth for a few weeks," I said, proud to have what I had just written in front of me so I could get out that gem.

"Bet it didn't help."

"Probably not."

At least my typing doesn't annoy him anymore. And I understand the frustration he feels as an English teacher. Grammar and punctuation doesn't just come to people overnight; you either have a gift for it or you have to learn it step-by-step. And it's a long tedious process, for both the teacher and the student. I'm more concerned with letting him know, in teaching exclamation points, that two or more is ridiculous. Hopefully, they won't fall into the MySpace/Facebook trap of cramming their posts with excessive exclamation points.