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Saturday, December 11, 2004
such sticks in the mud as we are
I grew up in a household where we didn't have a lot of money and generally our houses were small, but gas was relatively cheap, and so one of our favorite ways to enjoy ourselves was to just go rambling in the car. We were a spontaneous bunch and we'd take off on a weekend trip to the Bay Area to visit my mom's sister's family with very little more than a phone call to say we were on the way. So I have this gene, strengthened by my upbringing, which makes me want to be spontaneous. Often.
However, T is different. His nature and nurture push him in the other direction. He is a big planner, and sudden changes in plans stress him out A LOT, even if the change is for the better. This means that in the past ten years my spontaneity has been squelched to the point where we have gone beyond not-spontaneous and into the realm where even fun things we've had planned for months don't happen.
OK, now I'm being unfair. We're not so bad as that, and a lot of our fun plans do come to pass. But the thing is, there's this really really high tide this weekend, see? It's a proxigean spring tide (there's your vocabulary word of the day), where the earth is close to the sun and it's a new moon and so the high tide gets really high and the low tide gets really low. This happens every few years or so, for a couple of months in a row. And ever since the summer I've wanted to drive to Morro Bay for the proxigean tide and see the ocean come clear up across the beach to the dunes. Sounds silly but I'm silly in general so that's OK, right? But now the weekend has actually arrived, and T has a really unpleasant cold so he's exhausted, and we just bought this 1969 Dart and he wants to stay home and play with it, and plus we spent seven hours in the car(s) yesterday as well as seven hours in the car the previous Friday, and blah blah blah no Morro Bay trip blah.
Grr.
I could go by myself, but honestly, I would be so lonely for ten hours in the car and all night in a hotel room (but oh! the reading! it almost sways me...) that even the tide thingie wouldn't make it worthwhile, I don't think. Oh well, there's another identical tide next month. So what if it's a Monday, and the chances of T being allowed to take a day or two off work to go over there with me are laughable, and the weather's good this weekend but who knows what it will be in 29 days, and so on and so forth. I can still pin my hopes to that. And I can also (this is the really fun part) milk my disappointment for all its worth, and imply to T that because we're not spending money on my long-planned Morro Bay trip, I have the right to buy more Christmas lights and put them up, and the right to renew my gold Diaryland membership, and to go out to dinner instead of cooking, and to also hold this over his head and use it as a bargaining chip for months to come. Oh, it takes practice to be the kind of wife I am, and after ten years, I'm beginning to really get good at it.
