I know I am getting better because I am really beginning to nitpick.  Not that I don’t nitpick already, I do.  I am really not the easiest person with which to live.  I’m not deranged.  I recognize that had other symptoms  not occurred with the mood swings no one would have recognized the beginnings of menopause.  Multiple personalities have always been a part of me.  I like them. They are my friends, but lately we are all getting pissed.  

My husband is the most easy going, lovable guy, anyone has ever met.  Everyone who meets him loves him.  He drives me nuts!! I love him, don’t get me wrong.  He just drives me nuts!  He is one of those people who can’t be wrong.  Just can’t…if you tell him he’s wrong he laughs at you…do you know what that does to someone who has a difficult time with their anger?  He’s lucky to be alive.  He is the only person in existence who can laugh at me when I’m angry and (maybe) I’ll laugh too.  But he has this laugh, when he’s not really laughing, that is kind of patronizing and it just makes me want to find an instrument of torture and make the laughing stop!!  Of course, I would regret it later…of course.

I have never handled anyone patronizing me well.  I don’t like being called the “little woman” or anything else that implies that I am not 100% equal to my spouse.  I am especially intolerant when this comes from the man himself.  Everything about me has been hard fought and even harder won.  I am extremely proud of the fact that I did it on my own. So nothing washes over me quite so much as someone treating as if I am not as intelligent as they are.  Now of course my husband is smart enough never to actually say that he is more intelligent than I am but he has this laugh…and that laugh makes the voices start.

After 10 days in bed, of having to give him the upper hand, the ideas are just flying through my head.  I hate being held down. I hate having to behave. (You just can’t imagine how much!!) I constantly beg for companionship, and then when I get it I start fights.  I think it’s stimulating.  Others think I’m being difficult.  Today’s argument was over Trivial Pursuit.  Did I mention that my husband is extremely intelligent?  Well he is.  He can spout trivia until the cows come home, and in the categories he is deficient I can usually take over.  We are rarely if ever allowed  to play on teams together.  So tonight we were playing against the computer, which means he had control of the computer, he was answering the questions so quickly I didn’t have a chance, and I was sitting beside him semi-reading a magazine. I heard G@#$D@#$%!!!  I looked up.  “I missed that one.”  When I asked him what the question was he told me.  I responded with the correct answer, and I got the LAUGH!!  I felt my chest go red first, then my neck, then my face, ears, and so on.  I told him to just admit he was wrong, and that is when the argument started.  “Well, I wouldn’t have been wrong if my partner would help…blah, blah, blah”…now you know I hate to argue, but this was the most action this bed has seen in awhile so I egged it on.  A lot.  It wasn’t as intense as the chili dog battle of ‘06 but it was fun. It didn’t last long enough.  It ended with him kissing me on the head and going out to bring home dinner. (Don’t you just hate that!) So now, here I am trying to vent on the computer.  I don’t expect to get a lot of sympathy.  Most women think I don’t deserve my husband, that pisses me off too.

People often ask me what I did to deserve a man like my husband (like I’m some terrible, ugly wretch that is lucky to be married at all…I ask myself what he did to deserve me) and I smile and tell them that yes I really got lucky.  And, I believe that with all my heart, nine out of ten times.  That tenth time though….that’s when the smile shows up, and the voices start, and I pretend it’s menopause that makes me want to argue when really all it is is the fact that I am a closet bitch without a closet, and I’m probably gonna be one til I’m  dead too.  It’s his fault for marrying me If he thought I would change, he was wrong! 

If you’ve been keeping up you know this is day 9 of my forced luxury.  It’s great. I would personally like to get in touch with all the clowns responsible for the programming on daytime television.  They basically have broken their daytime viewership down into three categories: mommies, babies, and the retired. I am none of the above.  Okay yes, technically I’m a mommy, but I am soooo past the nursing, changing diapers, wiping runnny noses mommy and that’s the mommy they are after so you really can’t even put me there.  Now, I say this with love, because believe me I know mommies, and babies, and retired people, and they are all quite happy with their television options.  My mother’s life would be over if she should be out past 6:30 at night and would miss The Wheel of Fortune, (which for her is just affectionately known as “the wheel”).  But lately, I have had way too many opportunities to enjoy daytime t.v. 

I love Rachel Ray.  She’s just so damn cute she makes me barf in  my mouth a little.  I record her show every morning.  Normally I watch it late night when nothing is on.  Not lately.  I have been watching it in the morning because nothing comes on a lot earlier than I thought.  There is a plethora of reality television.  You can watch babies being delivered, or life in the ER of several hospitals, or how lucky you are not to have 17+ children (luck my ass…it’s called birth control - use it!) or how to resolve legal issues with umpteen Judges.  My mom, falling into the category of retired, loves to repeat Judge Judyism’s…that never gets old.  She especially loves the one when Judge Judy told “some old girl” she was “dumber than a bag of hammers.”  Now I don’t have a law degree ( I sometimes wonder about the Judge’s on television as well) but I’ve always imagined that a courtroom would be a place with a certain amount of decorum.  I have never thought a judge would insult my intelligence in such a manner.  Until I watched an episode with my mother.  OMG!  I think you must have to pass an IQ test to be on the show, but the requirement is if you score above a 90 you’re a no-go.  Which brings me to the next section of the brain trust, those very special people who show up on the Maury Povich show, or as I like to call them who’s your baby daddy, and other shows like them.  If you have ever been so drunk that you passed out and had sex with multiple lovers and have no way of knowing who fathered your child, don’t go on national television 16 times for DNA tests to try and find out.  People will talk.  That may not bother you, but someday your child is going to grow up and that shit will be hard to get over.  ATTENTION, to all you sperm donors out there, if you get invited to be on some talk show like that because someone has a “secret” they want to reveal…don’t go.  In fact, even if you aren’t a suspected sperm donor , but maybe just some good old guy …run…do your level best never to see that person again.  No good is ever going to come out of that situation.  It may not be a baby daddy thing, but it’s bad.  No one has ever seen one of those that came out good.  If a svelte super-model has a crush on you she probably will just tell you herself.  Run, my friend, just run!!!

I suppose if you are into soap operas they are okay.  My problems with them are relatively simple.  Everyone lives in glorious houses (except for that one really nasty character that everyone hates).  No one ever wears jeans, in fact they primarily wear designer evening wear.  Their make-up is always perfect, even first thing in the morning.  No one has anything but perfect to die for jobs, and everyone is sleeping with everyone else’s spouse.  So basically if you are watching this crap with your kids what you are telling them is that ridiculous ideals of perfection are absolutely okay and all homeless or nasty people are hateful.  Well that’s fun.  Perhaps we should show soap operas in private schools.  Then all of the little princes and princesses would believe all the junk they are being forced to swallow, and they would never have to feel guily for not putting change in the cup of a street person.

Kiddie television is great for what it is for.  My grandson loves the Mickey Mouse Club.  I love that he loves it.  What I don’t love is the way that the songs stick in my head for hours after the program is over.  I know they are simple and repetative for a reason.  It works well too, as I know almost all of them by heart.  There are others, Blues Clues, Handy Manny, one with funky looking monsters that have arms that flop around in random movement as they sing songs that are as disjointed as their limbs.  The saddest part of that show is the young man that plays the puppet master to the monsters.  In my pretend mind, he has at the very least, a bachelor’s degree in early childhood development, but when he applied for a job as a teacher no one would hire him because they were thinking “pedophile”.  So after months of horrible interviews and reaching the point where he was just about to give up, he went to an employment placement agenct and they said they could place him in the entertainment industry and he was thinking “Mr. Wizard” and what he got was “Puppet Master to the Freaks.”  Don’t you know his mother just cringes when she runs into Lulu whose son the Doctor has developed some new lifesaving procedure and Lulu asks her how Franklin is doing.  “Well, he plays with puppets everyday from 2:00 - 2:30.” (crickets chirping) I’ve tried people, and this is the only way I can make children’s television fun.

Retired people want to watch the news and weather, and if they can get them both on the same channel, well God Bless.  When my Dad was alive, he could tell you the weather forecast in any area of the world.  He knew when a storm was brewing and at what time it was supposed to hit land. He knew wind speeds and barometric pressures and, thanks to modern technology, allergen levels in specific areas of the nation.  He was a meteorlogic demi-god.  He had a weather screen on his television that showed a 6 way split of weather stations.  This allowed him to keep up with local weather, tri-state weather, national weather, continental weather, European weather, and weather worldwide…and he did.  Unless there was a college ball game on.  Then we were on our own for an hour and a half or however long the game took.  Then the watchdog was back and we were all safe from the storm again.

I’ve slept alot.  Not because I’ve been particularly tired.  I think because I’ve been bored.  I don’t really like reality television (and yes I know there is more to it than what I mentioned.  I’m all about some Top Chef, Dancing with the Stars, or God help me, Project Runway, but those are night time reality television shows and I pacify myself with that knowledge) and since I can’t lift my grandson I really haven’t been tuning in to the kiddo channels lately.  I hope Franklin is surviving. I suppose I could take up weather watching and try to fill the shoes my dad left so very empty, but there is just no way in hell those shoes will ever be filled so why even try.  I wake up every day surprised by the weather…but it still happens just like it always has.  Whether we watch it or not.  So I choose not to.  It’s still to painful.  I sleep during the day and read some, play a little on the computer, and wait for the night.  That’s when television brings out the programming that will make you think.  The CSI’s, SVU’s, Criminal Minds, Lost, and other things that are really just as mind numbing as anything that is shown during the day.  Sometime life is just what you believe it is.  So if you are over educated, over read, and bored within an inch of your very life you start to pick at things.  I chose daytime television, and my IQ.  It’s fragile.  Don’t pick at it.