I went to the gym, lifted weights, ran, and looked around with contempt at the women in their too perfect workout ensambles while I picked breakfast off of the t-shirt I slept in. When I got home, I pushed the garage door button and was met with a horrific sight. A wall, literally a wall almost as tall as me, of stacked garbage bags filled with aluminum cans loomed before me. I stumbled out of my car and stood in a woozy state of shock untill James came out of the house with a smirk on his face.
"James", I said in a raspy, desperate voice, "I can't believe this. We need to do an aluminum can intervention." We loaded the bags into the mini-van and almost completely filled up the car and yet could only get half of them in. Warren thought that sitting in a sea of recycling was awesome. The baby not so much.
So, off we went with our load to the recycling center. There a scary white overlord (nobody does scary better then caucasians) and his crew of hard working Mexican men unloaded my husband's stash. I jumped out to help, my white guilt making me intrinsically uncomfortable with the scene, but the guys chivalrously waved me away. James got out to help and they allowed that. Then came the big moment... the weighing of the cans.... 83 lbs! 83 F-ING lbs of empty soda cans! And this was only the first load... I was ready to ask one of the guys if they had any spare Mexican passports.
We went home and loaded the second half of the cans. This time our legit hoarder neighbor, Mark, came out to watch and even he was all "shock and awe" over the immense quantity of the aluminum collection. He sat on his stoop with his silly old dog and chuckled while telling us a how he used to collect cans but it never got THAT bad.
To be fair, the hoarding stared off with good intentions. David thought it would be a fun project for James. He even ordered him a wall mounted can crusher. But then it started to get out of hand. James succumbed to the teenage ailment of laziness and my husband succumbed to hoarding precious metal. I started to see trash bags of soda cans stashed in every nook and cranny of the garage and basement. The cans were even making their way home from David's office. I tried to make an ultimatum that no more cans be collected untill the ones we had were gone but all that happened was that the cans were snuck around behind my back. I in turn would try to sneak them out in the recycling bin. This caused road-side domestic disturbances with the two of us playing tug-of-war with the green bin. It was getting weird.
My husband has moderate OCD, which can translate into a lot of great qualities and some scarey ones. I tease him all the time about hoarding because he loves junk and finds usefullness in almost anything. This often leads to silly arugments about the amout of shoes I have. But please, my shoe collection is the most beautiful thing God created second only to my children. I recently asked him if he had any hoarders in his family because I heard its genetic. He answers, "I'm Pennsylvania Dutch, love, its in my blood." Crap.
I am annoying in the totally opposite direction. No OCD here! Just CDD Compulsive Disorganized Disorder (I made that up). But my scatter-brain leaves me with a lot less mental anquish... I am not a perfectionist, I don't tend to get depressed, or have trouble sleeping, housework can come and go, I don't get a lot of road rage, or have trouble throwing or giving things away, and stuff can be "good-enough". My flighty brain leaves me free of a lot of stress that many people have to live with. And I am thankfull for that. Yes, I wish I was more organized and thoughtful... but being free of depression, bi-polar disorder, post-partum depression, sleep-disorders, hoarding, OCD, etc is worth a million bucks and I think its directly related to my careless brain-type. I am slightly narcissistic and anti-social, but thats for someone else to complain about and this is my blog.
David and I are opposites in many ways. In fact, he still hasn't told me who he voted for in '08 presidential election and I stopping asking, both of us scared that his answer would cause me to divorce him. But, I don't like the term, "opposites attract" because what we find opposite about each other is hardly attractive.
I'm going to get a little Catholic on you now, but bear with me. During our Pre-Cana (for you non-Catholics, this is Church mandated pre-martial counseling) David and I took a compatiblity test and the Priest bestowed on us the honor of having the worst test results he had ever received. He married us anyway for James's sake, but I can explain the results. We have a lot of the same ideals and thoughts of how married life should be, but our brains think differently. So, we can take a simple question like, "How important is money to you?" and come up with completely different answers. David looks at that question and logically answers, "Very Important" because in David's mind, you need money to live so its very important. I read that question and answer "Not very important" because money is important for living but I'm not a "money person" and I'm not marrying a rich dude (just some engineer with a lousy Lehigh degree) so how could I say that money is "very important" to me? We both know that money is very importnant for living, but we answer the same question differently.
The most important thing I learned in Pre-Cana is the 100% rule that Father James taught us. It is an amazing way to look at marriage. You hear a lot of people say that marriage is 50/50. But Father James said that you should only look at marriage as 100%. You are both trying to get to 100%. If one person (for whatever reason) can only give 30% at a certain time or for a specific thing the other person has to give 70 to pick up the slack and get to 100%. If you go about marriage thinking you only have to give your 50% its going to fail because you'll never get to 100. So, that's what we do... try to pick up the slack for each other, work around each others idiosyncracies, be patient with our opposite brain types, laugh at each other and at ourselves, and do our best to get to 100% even if soda cans are involved.
Speaking of cans, the grand total of the aluminum can collection was 130 lbs and about $75 in our pocket. James called Dad to tell him the amazing stats. David said, "Wow! Tell your mother thank you. We will go out to dinner with the money." So with that the intervention was over. I was rid of the dreaded can collection, and my husband and I had managed to get to 100%.
No comments:
Post a Comment