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13

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#13. I started dating my wife on Friday the 13th.

Okay, so technically, by the time we’d actually started dating, the clock had rolled over to Saturday the 14th, but still! We spent most of Friday night chatting — getting to know each other and such. We were in college at the time; I was a junior, and my eventual-wife-to-be a newly-minted freshman. (Well, okay, so two-month-minted. That’s still new, if you’re talking about a car or a house or something. I suppose it’s less new if it’s a cheeseburger or a haircut you have in mind, but I tend to think that freshmen are more like Hummers than Whoppers. I’m old-fashioned that way.)

Anyway, we talked for hours. I think it was after two in the morning when we finally said good night, and by that time we had our first date planned. (Our first two, actually. Since I’m a big fat chicken, I waited for her to ask me to the girls-ask-the-guys dance scheduled for a couple weekends later before I got up the nerve to ask her on a pre-dance date. Yes, I was quite the budding Casanova. Quite.)

And the rest is history. Or damned near it, anyway, because that was a long-ass time ago. Whole wars have been fought since then. Presidents have come and gone. The McRib came, went, came again, left, came back, and then vanished again. Chevy Chase was still funny back then. Seriously. This was a long time ago.

We still celebrate the 13th as our first anniversary. Of course, we’ve been together for nearly thirteen years now. ‘Celebrate’ often means a bottle of wine with the tuna casserole we’re having for dinner, and an extra long hug when we get home from work. Sure, we get up for the big events — birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Christmas — but we have so many things we could celebrate that a few get lost in the shuffle. It happens — important days accumulate as you go through life together, until there’s something worth woo-hoo-ing about just about every week. Or so it seems. The people at Hallmark must have a damned field day with this shit.

Still, there’s something special about the first tentative steps in a relationship. One way or another, that first night of a new love is memorable, and ours is no different. Of course, we moved slowly, cautiously even, into our couplehood. Our first night was more ‘Breakfast Club‘ than ‘Debbie Does Dallas‘. (Hey, at least it wasn’t ‘Weekend at Bernie’s‘, right?)

And from our humble, halting beginnings on that chilly November night way back when, we’ve grown together, and grown up together. We recently bought a house, so we owe more money than we could have imagined existed back then. We’ve earned degrees, and held down steady jobs. (Okay, so there was never much question that she was going to carve a good life out for herself; I was the shaky one. But I probably don’t have to tell you that, if you’re reading this…)

So now it’s sort of a novelty. We were brought together under the sign of the black cat. The first Friday the 13th after Hallowe’en, too! Spoooo-oooky. But it’s cool. She didn’t turn out to be a zombie or a vampire or anything, so I think we did all right. Of course, she did own a black cat when I first met her. And she did pick up another one along the way, which her mom still has. And there’s that whole not-casting-a-reflection thing. She told me she lost it in a bike accident when she was a kid, but now I’m starting to wonder. I’ll have to keep an eye on that. Sure, I’m the one who looks like Frankenstein in the morning, but you can never tell with these things. Look at that chick from the Munsters. It can happen.

12

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#12. My wife and I have been together for twelve years.

Actually, it’s closer to thirteen at this point, but who’s counting? (Well, okay, me, apparently. Hush up now.)

I’m not sure what else to tell you, except that the voodoo spell apparently hasn’t worn off, and that’s why she’s still with me. (Thank you, Haitian mail-order catalog!) We met way back in college, which seems like a lifetime ago. We’ve been together through five moves, eleven jobs, and several dozen adventures. We’ve been to New Orleans, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, New York City, Saint Louis, and Paris, France. And of course, Boston, Pittsburgh, and the seedy underbelly of humanity that is rural central Kentucky. And we’ve never had a fight.

Oh, we’ve had misunderstandings. And we’ve had annoyances, and the occasional snippiness. Certainly, I’ve been in the wrong, more than once. Forgetful, lazy, distracted, and inconsiderate, despite my best intentions. And she may have even been unreasonable, or hassled me undeservedly somewhere along the way. Once. Maybe twice, but I usually deserve what she dishes, and a whole lot more.

But in all this time, we’ve never had a fight. A knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling ‘he said, she said’ kind of spat. One of those things that starts over something stupid and escalates into name-calling and finger-pointing and ‘boy, did your mother do a number on you‘-saying. (Though it’s true for both of us, of course. We just don’t bring it up very often.)

So, one of two things is going on. Either we’re beautifully matched, highly reasonable people who like to avoid confrontation and settle things rationally. The kind of folks who sit on their hotheaded feelings until they can find the root of the problem, and then discuss the issue logically and calmly, reaching a satisfactory conclusion without raising our voices or boiling over in misplaced anger. In other words, two well-adjusted, cool-tempered lovebirds who adore each other and take every opportunity to smooth the way for a rich, fulfilling life together. Romeo and Juliet without all the killing and crap.

Of course, we might be just really good at glossing over our little differences and annoyances, filing them away in the back of our minds until they become uncontrollable, seething balls of rage that will one day erupt with explosive violent force. And one day we’ll end up bellowing and shrieking at each other in the kitchen, or the bedroom, foaming at the mouth and chittering in high-pitched chimpanzee gibberish, gnashing our teeth and rending our clothes in pain and fury. Maybe we’ll shove and push and claw, using every word in the book and inventing many, many more in an insane blind rage built from twelve-plus years of forgetting to bring an ID, or leaving the toilet seat up. We’ll probably go at it for hours, in an angry inferno of pent-up frustration and guilt and fear, until we collapse in an exhausted heap on the floor, still bapping at each other’s cheeks with rubbery-armed hands. It’ll be unlike any fight ever had on the history of the planet. A lovers’ spat to end all others.

And then we’ll sleep it off, and never speak of it again. Until it happens again in another thirteen years, or fifteen, or however long these things take to bubble over.

So, either way, the next dozen years or so are gonna be pretty fucking cool. It’s just a matter of whether we have that big blip in the middle or not. My guess is ‘not’, but you’ll have to ask my wife what she thinks of the whole thing. She may have other ideas. Maybe I’ll just start leaving the toilet seat up, and get the damned thing over with. It might be worth it, just for the makeup sex. Woo hoo!

11

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#11. I competed in a regional Spelling Bee when I was eleven years old.

Actually, I made it to the local regional twice, in the fourth grade and fifth. But I bowed out pretty early the first time around. So when I went back, I was ready to rumble. I was gonna kick some ass, and spell some names.

I studied for weeks leading up to the big bee.

Hey, why is that that ‘spelling’ and ‘quilting’ are the only kinds of ‘bees’ that we have? What’s so special about these get-togethers, and what the hell is similar enough about them to lead us to call them by the same name? Really, I don’t see it. One’s for English students, the other’s for the ‘home ec’ crowd. You use your brain in one, and your fingers in the other. In one, you talk only when asked to step forward, and if you say the wrong thing, you’re loudly buzzed and asked to leave. In the other, the yakking and gossipmongering is constant and varied. You need snot-nosed kids for one, and blue-haired old ladies for the other. Come on. Somebody tell me what I’m missing here. This is gonna keep me up at night.)

Anyway, the studying. After winning the school spelling bee to qualify for regionals, they gave me a ‘speller’s dictionary’. I guess it had only hard words, but not the very most hardest. (Hey, I said I could spell. I make no guarantees about grammar around here.) So, I studied from the list of words in the book; I think they were mainly words used in previous bees, so as to give a realistic idea of what ridiculous obscure shit they might throw at you.

And ridiculous obscure shit it was. I hadn’t heard of a lot of the words. I could spell some of the mystery terms, just from sounding them out, but others were just too oddball. But I worked hard — when my mother made me, anyway — and learned a new trick or two from the funky book of words. Most of the time, she’d take the book, and give me the word to spell. (See, it didn’t work so well when I had the book, and looked at the words I needed to spell. Though, sadly, doing it that way didn’t work quite as badly as you’d probably think. Have I mentioned that my short-term memory is about as short as a… um, a… er, huh. What was I talking about?)

But these words! Who the hell uses these words, anyway? I mean, there are big words, and there are fancy words, and then there are fiddy cent words. But these — these were like five dollar words, and most of them had definitions to match. Some of these bitches meant things that maybe four people on the planet would ever need to know — the name for the second thoracic segment of a rare Bolivian caterpillar. The local term for the garnish used to decorate the feast held by some pygmy African tribe every three hundred years. The name of Soupy Sales’ agent. Really, I mean ridiculously useless crap, here.

It got so bad that the few common words in the book would blend into the sea of obfuscation and confusion. I remember — because I’m never going to let my mother forget — having the following conversation:

Her: No, it’s c-a-t. You’ll have to work on that one. Okay, next word. ‘Mill-duh-wed.’

Me: What?

Her: ‘Mill. Duh. Wed.’ That’s what it says.

Me: ‘Mill-duh-wed’? What the hell is that?

Her: Um, I don’t know. And don’t curse at your mother, you little shit.

Me: Hmmmm. ‘Mill-duh-wed’. You sure that’s it?

Her: Yes, ‘Mill-duh-wed’. I’m sure.

Me: Okay. You’re positive? ‘Cause that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard of.

Her: Yes, I’m positive. You don’t know lots of these words. Now quit stalling. Spell it.

Me: All right. Um, M. I. L. L?

Her: Nope.

Me: Damn. D?

Her: Yep.

Me: Okay. M. I. L. D. U?

Her: No. Not U.

Me: Oh. I?

Her: Nope. E.

Me: E?

Her: E.

Me: M. I. L. D. E. (…) Are you sure this isn’t ‘mildewed’?

Her: Hurmph. No, it’s not mildewed, smartypants. I think I know what ‘mildewed‘ looks like.

Me: Um, okay. M. I. L. D. E. W?

Her: Yep.

Me: Yep? W’s right? Is it w-e-d?

Her: Yeah! You got it! ‘Mill-duh-wed’.

Me: Mom, that’s ‘mildewed’. I just spelled mildewed.

Her: No, it’s not. ‘Mildewed’ has a ‘w’ in… oh, yes. It is. Shit.

I remind her of that every once in a while, just for kicks. Yeah, she loves that.

So, back to the bee. I spelled a few words, and the field thinned down to a dozen kids or so. That’s when they got me. I walked up to the microphone, and they gave me my word. ‘Horde’. Or ‘hoard’, I really can’t remember. Fuck. Now, I knew there were two words that sounded like that. And I was just fucking positive that I’d pick the wrong one. Especially since I didn’t really know what either of them meant. I asked for a definition, and an example sentence, without really listening to what the proctor’s responses. It wasn’t gonna help me, anyway. I was just stalling. But eventually, I ran out of questions to ask, and gave it a go.

‘H. O. A. R. D.‘

I paused. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d successfully spelled a word. Maybe even the right word; I honestly don’t remember. I could have stopped right there and had a fifty-fifty chance. But no. I panicked.

‘E. Hoarde.‘

*BZZZZZZZZZZZZ*

The proctor gave the correct spelling. Again, I wasn’t really listening. Stupid, stupid, stupid. If I just could have kept my big mouth shut with that damned ‘E’, I might’ve had a chance. Bitches!

Hell, I might have even won the whole thing, and gone on to nationals, where I could get beaten by one of those creepy home-schooled kids. That’s fine. They’re freaks of nature, some of those kids. There’s honor in losing to a socially-stunted spelling savant. They live for that shit. But to go out the way I did, wide-eyed and stuttering and guessing on a five-letter word? Pitiful.

And then the next year — my last chance at redemption — I was sick on the day our school had it’s bee. Some other moron won, and went to regionals instead of me. He spelled ‘food’ with a ‘q’ or some shit like that, and got himself buzzed out before the kids even started sweating on their chairs. Dumb bastard. It should have been me up there, experienced and confident, and with a score to settle. I would have spelled anything, too. I was ready to kick ass, but I never got the chance. All because I was sick. Rotten stinking luck. It was probably an allergic reaction or something — mold from our shower that was all mill-duh-wed. *snicker* Yeah, I guess some good did come out of the experience. Hoo boy, that gets me every time.

10

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#10. My brain wakes up at around ten each morning, regardless of when I get out of bed.

It’s always been this way. I can go to bed at five am, and function on just three or four hours of sleep (insofar as I really function at all). But get me up at seven, and you get nothing from me. It doesn’t matter what time I went to bed, or how much sleep I got. I can turn in after the six o’clock news, get twelve hours of sleep, and I’d still be a drooling moron if I woke up at seven the next morning. (Yeah, yeah — ‘So what would be different?‘ Man, with friends like you…)

Anyway, I’m steadfastly a night person. I have been for as long as I can remember. I just hate that groggy, fuzzy, Dan Quayle-y feeling I have when the alarm wakes me up. My brain’s even gone so far as to stage boycotts — more than once, I’ve slept through an entire hour of blaring music, and I mean loud blaring music, only to wake up afterwards and say, ‘Wha?‘ This makes me later, of course, but infinitely happier that I got those extra sixty-five minutes or so of sleep. Even if I usually do dream of rock concerts during that time.

Luckily, I’m a software programmer. We’re usually not asked to be in the office at the crack of dawn, or anything near it, so it’s often okay to wake up at eight-ish, or even later. I also live pretty close to work, and can therefore wait until the very last minute before rushing into the office. Like around ten, ten-thirty. It’s sweet; no traffic, no honking. Just a smoooooth ride all the way in. Very peaceful. I think everyone should start their day that way.

On the other hand, if everyone did, then I’d be stuck with all the honking and traffic that I’m trying to avoid. So forget that. Keep getting up and in to work before the damned sun comes up, and encourage your friends to do the same. I mean, I love you — I really do — but I don’t want to have the first damned thing to do with you before ten o’clock, and I don’t want you cutting me off in traffic until at least noon. Otherwise, I won’t be able to think of anything clever to say when I’m cursing at your back bumper. And it’s all about the comebacks, folks. A snappy automotive repartee is the only thing separating us Bostonians from the hoodlums in New York and LA, where they just get out of their cars and beat the living shit out of each other. Or shoot the living shit out of each other. And before ten, I can understand how they feel. So watch it out there, would ya? Don’t mess with me until my brain’s kicked in, or I’ll have to use other parts of my body to deal with you. And nobody wants that.

9

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#9. I have had nine different positions since college.

No, not sexual positions, you freak! What am I, the Charlie frickin’ Sutra? I mean jobs, people. The kind you get paid for. Oh, wait — yeah, when I say it that way, I can see how you might confuse it with sex. My bad.

Anyway, I’ve had nine employers since I got out of school, how’s that, ya perv? I was in grad school once, then I was a lab tech, back in a different grad school program, then I worked for a hospital, helped to found a startup company, worked for a consulting firm, telecommuted for a healthcare lab, hooked up with a temporary staffing company, and then worked for a pharmaceutical firm. Nine jobs in eleven years. Throw in a couple of contracts I did on the side for the government, and another start-up I dabbled in for a while, and I’ve averaged a new name on the paychecks every year.

Not bad for a guy they said nobody would hire, eh? Hell, everybody’s hired me. I’ve had more jobs than Peter North. More offices than Saddam Hussein. More business cards than the ‘Win a Jell-O Rubdown’ jar at Scores. Why, I’ve stolen enough printer paper and Post-Its to light a bonfire under Delaware. Called in ‘sick’ for a years’ worth of Sundays. And had enough three-hour, four-martini lunches to make the Kennedys blush.

Hmmm. Maybe there’s a reason that I haven’t kept a job for more than a couple of years. Eh. Nah! Must be the economy, right? Um, hello? Right? Right?

Oh, poop.