The Po Show

How Do You Know?

It's such a fine line, between being a touchy, hormonal, get-upset-over-nothing bitch, and someone who is being put down. I'm not sure which one I am, and it's difficult to ascertain. How do you know which one you are? You certainly can't ask your husband, who has done the things that make you feel like shit, but doesn't understand why you're upset over such trivial bits of nothing.

Case 1: The other day I was relating over dinner the funny and weird story of how I was doing laundry and when I went down to put the wash in the dryer, I saw that the lid of the washing machine had somehow been lifted up, so the machine shut itself off. It was in the middle of the cycle, and had been rinsing, so there was water in the drum, and the lid was up, so it shut off. I said, Isn't that wild, somehow the wind [which was gusting over 30 MPH that day] must have blown the lid up somehow. Ross looked at me like I had grown another head and said that that was impossible, so I must have left the lid up when I put the wash in.

I know I did not, plus there was no soap in the water in the drum. The soap must have been at the bottom where I couldn't see it, he replied.

It was in the middle of the cycle on the dial, not the beginning. The dial must keep moving even if the machine isn't going, he replied.

The machine had "walked" itself over some, so perhaps that's what made the lid pop up, I say. That's impossible, he maintains, it must have walked itself over some other time and I just didn't notice it. You only notice things when something out of the ordinary occurs, and then you attribute it to whatever occurrance you believe happened.

I start to get agitated (no pun intended) because I KNOW I did not leave the lid up. He wants to know why I'm getting upset, it's no big deal. I know it's no big deal, but I KNOW I did not leave the lid up, and I don't know why he feels the need to keep coming up with reasons why the only possible explanation is that I am too lame to remember to put the lid on the washing machine down, why it's so impossible that the lid popped up on its own, or that the wind blew it up (our basement is drafty as hell and you can feel the wind blow in through the walls).

Case 2: I say yesterday evening, when he asks what I did that day, and I'm recounting the fascinating details of my day, like going to Trader Joe's and the post office, that I mailed 12 packages for my eBay sales. Instead of saying "That's great that you're selling so much!" he feels the need to say YET AGAIN, "How much do you have listed right now?" Again totally putting down my ebaying, making it seem like a negative rather than a positive that I'm listing and selling and MAKING MONEY at it. I can NEVER say anything about my ebaying without him finding something negative to say about it. I say "I had a great auction today and made X profit" and he replies "But how much did you have to pay in fees?"

Case 3: Today as we were watching the UCLA game he got the mail and there was a credit card bill. I opened it and was pissed to see that we had been charged a late fee on an account we almost never use anymore. It's a MasterCard that we've had for 11 years, and you're supposed to hang on to at least one long-term credit card, so we keep it though we almost never use it. It used to be an MBNA card, but it got bought out by Bank of America, apparently, a few months ago. Ross used it while we were in CA, and I swear I did not see a bill for the card last month, so we got charged $15 for a late fee on the $33 he charged in Jan. I told him this, and he looked at me with that LOOK that says, "What's wrong with you?" and he asked, "Didn't you check the card online? Don't you check ALL our cards every month?" Then he gets that look that says, "How fucking stupid ARE you?" and he says, "No, you don't check, do you?"

We have three credit cards we use every month, for various reasons, and I don't have to check those, because I pay them when they are due. Every single month. I didn't check the BofA card because we just got it in Dec., and we never used the account when it was an MBNA account.

I went in the kitchen and cried for 15 minutes. Then I went in the bathroom and cried some more. Then I went in the bedroom and cried some more. He watched the game all this time and didn't even notice. Total time, about 40 minutes. Finally he came back to the bedroom to turn the heater off and noticed me. He said he thought I'd gone back to the bedroom to lay down. He asked if something was wrong.

Um, yeah. I know guys hate it when we think that they should know we're upset, when they don't. I know the whole "I'm not a fucking mind reader" line. But at a certain point, I believe things should not be quite so opaque.

Tessa came in at that point and said she didn't feel good. She had a fever, which later in the evening turned into a 103 fever, so my whole deal of course took a backseat as usual. He still doesn't know what is wrong. He's sitting on the couch watching TV and laughing at Sarah Silverman, oblivious as usual.

How do I know if I have the "right" to be so pissed right now that I have to blog about it?