Seriously, we’re stupid like weirdos here sometimes. Sunday afternoon, Dirk’s mother calls because she wants him to come over and help her remove the license plate on her van. She’d finally sold it to some suckers, and they wanted the tags and plates off by the time they picked it up. As she is a million years old, and as the license plate hadn’t been removed since the early 90’s, she needed her strapping son to help. Ideally, this help would take place before 8 o’clock the next morning, when they were due.
Dirk’s mother tells me all this while Dirk’s in DC, shopping at Smash and hanging out with Nik. I wasn’t invited along, although I’m sure they’d have been happy to have me along. I tell her that I’ll have her son call when he gets home. He comes home, having spent stupid money on shirts and nothing for me(!), I tell him to call his mom, end of story for me, right? Only in bizarro-land, apparently.
I sat there, typing up Sunday’s entry, while Dirk talked to his mom. I wasn’t paying attention to the conversation because it didn’t interest me at all. At most, I vaguely got the notion that he wasn’t at all psyched to go out again right after coming back from DC, he was claiming he could do it in the morning, and I heard the word “seven”. Remember that, because it becomes important later.
I got ready to go over to my parents, as I do every Sunday night, and Dirk looked like he was about to pass out on the couch. I asked him if he’d be asleep when I got home and he said, “probably not.” That’s it. Nothing else. All he said.
Since he didn’t have to go to work, I decided to take the opportunity to not rush home like I do every Sunday night – I would go home at 8:30 instead of 8:00. Surely, since he spent umpty-bazillion hours in DC, I don’t need to clear an extra half-hour with my folks, right? I looked through old pictures for evidence of my mother dressing me like a clown, talked to her about which cats she was going to bring when she moved out, and talked to my dad about his secret government work. When I came home, Dirk was seemingly undressed, in bed, and fast asleep. I felt sort of sorry for myself because he hadn’t spent much time with me, so I jiggled his foot a little and asked if he wanted to wake up. He shook his head, so I left him alone and spent a few hours online.
When the alarm went off the next morning, Dirk opened his eyes and asked, “What time is it?”
I pointed out that it was five-thirty in the morning, quite cheerfully, and that was the end of that happy morning. Jesus fucking Christ, he was pissed and in a rush. Apparently, he’d planned to go over to his mom’s the night before, after I got back from my parents, but I was “out until forever at your parents’ house.” I pointed out that he could go over there after he dropped me off at the commuter lot, but he sneered, “That won’t give me much time.” Like he was performing fucking brain surgery on the car?
I was completely mystified at this point, and still deeply groggy. He hadn’t said a word to me about going over to his mom’s the night before. In fact, he hadn’t discussed going to his mom’s at all with me; I’d only known from talking to his mother before he spoke with her. I’m not a mind reader. Also, to my way of thinking, if he’d thought I should be getting home, he could have called me at my parents. He had the number, he’s done it before. The right answer is not that he should have gone to bed and expected me to somehow know to wake him up and get him over to his mom’s. Also, explain this to me: how is 8:30 unforgivably later than 8:00?
Well, he goes over to his mom’s without really saying anything to me, at 5:30 in the morning. I slowly get up and get ready for work. At 7:15 (mind you, he knows I’m supposed to shoot for a 7:00 work departure time), he calls and asks if I’m going to work, because it is snowing. Now, the phone was cutting in and out, so I only had a chance to ask him if they’d declared liberal leave for gov’t employees before the phone cut out. Since I was dressed, I made myself a sammich and turned on the TV to check for myself while I waited for him to get back. No liberal leave, there are fat white snowflakes plopping heavily on top of the remnants of snow from Friday, and Dirk is taking his sweet-ass time getting back. At 7:35, he gets home, shrugs off his jacket, and immediately starts making grits. I warn him that I need to get to work, and he sort of cheerfully agrees.
Five minutes later, he is still making grits and it is 7:40, so I make him stop making grits and take me to the commuter lot. He’s still sort of quiet, so I ask him what’s wrong, and he lays into me again, except this time claiming that we’d discussed him going over to his mom’s when I got back from my parents. After I vetoed that with a big “whatever”, he then tried to say that I should somehow have known from listening in to his conversation with his mother, which I’ll remind you I didn’t do. Buh. My brain was trying to ooze out of my ears to escape the stupid, and I was getting really pissed off, because it seemed like he was always pissed at me over something-or-other. Also, he wasn’t listening, just making it my fault that his crazy mother was super-pissed at him. So, right before I got out, I told him off but good. Then I slammed the car door for emphasis and walked to the slug line.
I got to work, still pissed off, and signed on to AIM. Dirk pop’s up and is immediately being a poop noddy. “Why can’t you just apologize?” He asked, snottily.
Hmm. How about because I’m not wrong? Then I think, but I must have apologized at some point, right? That’s what I do; I take other people’s problems and make them my own. So I try that, but no, I guess I didn’t apologize even though I wasn’t wrong, and Dirk is gonna hold me to it. So, I just get snarky and refuse to apologize because I now think he’s being an super-ass, instead of the just an ass he’d been all morning. I mean, really, trying to get me to apologize so he can feel like he’s right when he clearly isn’t? Forget that shit.
He got pissed and signed off. I tried calling, mostly because he had my damn car and I could see him being petty and not picking me up at the commuter lot even though he was wrong, dammit!, but there was no answer. And no answer, and no answer, and no answer. I even tried leaving a message on his mother’s answering machine, even though I knew she might have been tainted by her son and hang up on me. Still, no answer from anywhere. I finally had to go home, not knowing if I would have a ride from the commuter lot or have to walk home in the fucking ice/snow bullshit. I vowed that if I did have to walk home, I would strip the keys from Dirk and he’d have to walk to work in the evil freezing cold.
Happily, he picked me up, and he seemed contrite, and he had a book shelf from Ikea along with a set of glasses to replace the gas-station glasses we got when we moved in. Do gas stations still give out glasses with a tank of gas? I always go to Wawa these days, because gas is super-expensive, and they aren’t much on frills. We spent the evening putting together the bookshelf, eating food, and watching The Craft.
At one point, when she’s on the first date with the football guy, I put my fingers in my ears and started looking away from the television.
Dirk: What are you doing?
Me: Isn’t it obvious? I’ve got my fingers stuck in my ears.
Dirk: (perplexed)Why? Why are you doing that?
Me: Because I feel bad for her. He’s going to say bad things about her and I can’t bear it.
Dirk: (pulls my fingers out of my ears) Evil. Don’t do that. It isn’t that bad.
Me: Yes it is!Eventually, I was so agitated that I had to leave the room on the pretense of a bathroom break. By the time I’d gotten back, he’d already told everyone what a ‘ho she was, and it was all better then.
Dirk’s still wrong, though.