After a particularly difficult day, I was in the living room playing video games when I suddenly wanted to get up and look up something on Wikipedia. My wife was on the computer in the bedroom and I had no desire to leave my video game, so I called out to her and asked, “Hey Sam? Can you look up something for me?”
“Sure. What’s that?”
“Can you see if the TV show ‘the Marriage Ref’ is still on the air?”
Silence. Then, “Um . . . okay. Why?”
“Well, Jerry Seinfeld created the show to replace Jay Leno’s show so Jay can take Conan’s spot, so it would be nice if that show got cancelled for betraying Conan.”
Typing sounds. Finally, my wife (the dictionary) asks, “Wait . . . how do you spell ‘marriage?’”
“What do you mean how do you spell ‘marriage’? How do you not know how to spell ‘marriage?’”
“Look, you’re the one who wants the damn answer to this question.”
I spell the word for her and then she asks, “Where would I find that info?”
“I don’t care! Google it or look it up on Wiki!” I said in a little too cranky of a voice.
After a few moments, she replied, “The show has been renewed for a second season.”
“Dammit! That really pisses me off!”
“It got really bad reviews though, so NBC can just be stupid and leave it on the air for as long as they want and they’ll lose a lot of money and ratings. Look at it that way.”
My wife is so kind to me when she tries to put a positive spin on my hatred. She then went on to read some of the really harsh reviews from a few magazines. Pleased with the venom the media was spewing towards Jerry Seinfeld and NBC, I said, “Can you read a few more of those?”
“That’s all the article has,” Sam replied.
“Can you just make some up then?” I asked in a slightly pleading voice. Without waiting for an answer, I said, “What did the San Francisco Tribune say?”
“They said that . . . um . . . Jerry Seinfeld’s show was pee pee doo doo.”
“My, how eloquent of them.”
“I thought so.”
“What did the National Enquirer say?”
Without hesitation, she said, “The National Enquirer says that Jerry Seinfeld was impregnated with alien babies and the aliens came to Earth because the Marriage Ref sucks so much.”
To me, this is conversation defines our lives so perfectly. I’m always looking for the answer to some inane and unimportant pop culture question which is usually fueled by my hatred of someone who has made me mad because they have wronged another pop culture item that I enjoy. My wife is helpful even with my ridiculous questions. We have a quick fight that really comes down to semantics and then we laugh about something ridiculous.
Few people can authentically make me laugh, but Samantha is the one who has consistently been able to since day one. She’s genuinely kind, but she can be incredibly stubborn and rude, but I can be too, so we’re either a lethal combination or perfect for one another because no one else could be able to put up with our crap. We both want someone to take care of us, so we end up taking care of one another. She’s a vociferous reader (perhaps my only chance in life to use that phrase to describe someone) and she knows more about vampires than anyone else in the world. I’m getting sappy now, so I’ll stop.
