Globex Corporation Newsletter

From November 19th 1988 to September 22nd 1991, I was married to what I thought was a wonderful woman. In all actuality, we were married for 23 months longer than that, but it was just paper at that point. The number I quote of 1046 days comes from those dates. Counting anything after those dates as being married is something the state may recognize, but I most certainly don't.

Of those 1046 days, the first 650 to 700 were great. At least I thought they were great. When I look back on them now, I can see that there were problems from the start. Little shit, of course. Always doing things her way.

Here's where I'll admit a lot of fault in that relationship. If she gave me two options on something, and both options were fine with me, I'd tell her so. She'd choose one and we'd go from there. If she gave me two options and I preferred one over the other, I would tell her so and we'd discuss it. Sometimes we'd go my way, sometimes we'd go her way. Usually we'd go her way. The problem was that I was keeping score. I would make a little mental mark next to her name when we chose to do something she wanted to do. I also made a little mark next to her name when I didn't care which option she chose. That was wrong, and put the already heavily scewed tally decidedly in her favor.

But I was not the only one at fault. I remember when she asked me if I wanted ham or turkey for Christmas dinner one year. I like turkey a lot, but I love ham. I had a preference, and I expressed it. She said, "OK we'll have turkey."

Now, whether I had ham or turkey for Christmas wasn't the issue. Hell, she was cooking it, I was happy with whatever I got. But then why ask me? And why cook the opposite of what I wanted? And this is the way it was. I was allowed to have an opinion, but it was never taken into consideration.

The stupidest thing, the most absolutely ridiculous thing we ever argued about, the thing that makes this a Pointless Shit post is clothes hangers. After we had moved to Sioux Falls, she would drive to Vermillion once a week to be in the office. She would generally go on Friday, I had Fridays off and I would do laundry. Now, I've never minded doing laundry, kind of like it actually, you can do other things while you're doing laundry, set a timer, stop what you're doing and move the laundry from the washer to the dryer when the timer goes off. Low impact. I can handle that.

We had large closets in our apartment and hung most of our clothes. She had a lot of clothes, wore a lot of clothes in any given week. When it came time to hang clothes, I would search through the closet, looking for free hangers to hang clothes on. This could be time consuming, especially since her closet was completely packed with clothing (the bar on her side of the closet actually broke once from all of the weight).

I had an idea thouugh. I figured that when you take something out of the closet, that you'd take the hanger and put it with other free hangers at one end of the closet. I tried this on my side of the closet and it worked really well. So I asked the wife if she could do that.

"No." She replied.

"Why not?" I asked.

"It takes too much time."

Too much time? To take the hanger that is already in your hand and put it somewhere else, generally less that four feet away?

"No, it doesn't take too much time." I answered sweetly, trying to stay out of an argument. "Every time you take some clothes out of the closet, just take the empty hanger and put it next to the other empty hangers. It won't take any extra time."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't want to."

And that was the end of the argument. She didn't want to, so God damnit, she wasn't going to do the simplest little fucking thing to help me out when I did her fucking laundry every week.

Yeah, this shit still bothers me. Yes I still do this in my own closet, all of my free hangers are in one place and I don't have to hunt for them. I still put the toilet seat down too, even though I haven't lived with a woman in 16 years. The toilet seat story is pretty much the same story, just replace the word "toilet seat" in the previous story every time you see "clothes hanger."

BOJ