Broke
Wife, Big City
Project
Ducky Wip
By Aprill Brandon
This
past weekend, my husband left me for four
days.
Alas,
it's not what you're thinking. Although
granted, that would make for a much better column, the whole troubled
marriage
thing and "two people who love each other but grew apart and are trying
to
find their way back to each other."
But no, my stupid husband is perfect. Which
makes for very boring
writing on my part. In fact, if we ever do get divorced, it's because
he's single-handedly
killing my writing career by being nice and emptying the dishwasher
without
having to be asked.
Jerk.
Anyway,
as I was saying, my husband left for
four days to go to an Important Fancy Professional Person conference in
Cleveland. No big deal, right? Sure. Except for one very important
freaky
detail of our relationship.
Somehow,
in our entire five-year courtship and
subsequent two and half years of marriage, we have managed to never
leave me at
home all by myself. Now, this could either be because 1. my husband
doesn't
really trust me home alone since I have the common sense of a
five-year-old
child on meth ("Babe! I invented a new game! It's called Potato Fire
Ball!
Here...CATCH!") or 2. Circumstances have simply never aligned for this
particular situation.
That's
not to say we've never been apart. But
it's usually me leaving him to go to yet another friend's wedding or to
go
visit family or to spend a night in the drunk tank (kidding...that's
only
happened, like, three times, tops) while he stays behind and does
Important
Fancy Professional Person stuff.
So
naturally, I was SUPER excited to finally be
left to my own devices. And that feeling lasted for all of 45 minutes
after he
left until I realized how utterly boring it is. And how utterly boring
I had
become. It quickly dawned on me that we had become that couple that
does
everything together. And now that we're both in our 30's, everything
constitutes sitting around in sweatpants and doing activities that can
be done
mainly from the couch. Which is fun as a twosome. But just sad and
pathetic as
a onesome.
So
I passed the time as best I could. I had
numerous Netflix marathons ("iCarly" is seriously underrated, you
guys). I started reading "Wuthering Heights." I fell asleep reading
"Wuthering Heights." I tried teaching my dog to fetch beer from the
fridge. I spent a good couple of hours nursing a drunk dog, holding
back his
ears back and whatnot.
My
boredom finally got so bad that I was
reduced to taking on a PROJECT. You know what I mean. Not some
rinky-dinky
little project you do during a rainy afternoon because it will be fun.
No. An
all-caps PROJECT. An undertaking so big, only people on the brink of
insanity
caused by boredom would ever even think of taking it on. And the kind
of thing
you take on that has to be FINISHED that day in a manic flurry of
activity or
else it will never, ever be completed.
We've
all been there. It's why kitchens are
re-tiled and garages cleaned out and living rooms re-arranged.
And
my PROJECT was a suicide mission. But with
nothing much left between me re-enacting the majority of "Grey
Gardens" in my living room and me actually turning into Edie in real
life,
it had to be done.
So,
I decided it was high time to finally
organize the decades-worth of photos from childhood and beyond that
were just
lying around all willy-nilly in my closet in numerous shoeboxes.
No
big deal, right? WRONG. Cause see, I have
quite literally documented every moment of my life. Ever wonder what
you ate
before homecoming your freshmen year? Well, I don't have to. I have a
photo of
it (cheeseburger and fries). Oh, what's that? What beer was I drinking
at my
best friend's 21st birthday? Natural Light, thanks for asking. And as
for what
Geoff was wearing at my first boy-girl birthday party in 8th grade? A
striped
polo shirt and backwards baseball cap.
I
even kept all those wallet-sized school
portraits. I have three from elementary school of some girl named
Suzanne that
I don't even remember.
So,
starting out on my couch, I started going
through them, putting them into different envelops organized by event
and time
period and how good I personally looked in them. Four hours later, I
had moved
onto the floor, photos scattered all around. Four hours after that,
every
surface of my house was covered in photos. And they were never-ending.
Those
photo boxes were like clown cars. Just when you thought they couldn't
possibly
contain more, 300 from a college toga party poured out.
It
was like they were multiplying. A prom photo
of me and my ex-boyfriend mated with a photo of my college buddies Curt
and Tim
to produce a ducky-wip picture of my cousin.
It
was madness, I tell you. MADNESS!
And
to make matters worse, I also thought now
would be the opportune time to reorganize my eight (EIGHT!) photo
albums.
Sixteen
hours later, however, the PROJECT was
finally done. Every photo catalogued and filed away (or thrown away if
I
happened to have a double chin in it).
And
despite the backache that is still
bothering me from being hunched over for hours on end, the PROJECT
served its
purpose. Before I knew it, my husband was back. And our boring life
together
continued.
And
he's now never allowed to leave again.
Because I have about 10,000 photos from the past eight years stored on
our
computer in about 37 scattered, unhelpfully-named folders.
And
that's simply a PROJECT I don't think I'd
survive.
Can’t
get enough of Aprill? Can’t wait until
next week?
Check
out her website at http://aprillbrandon.com/
IN.
THE.
SAME.
SPOT.
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