Quirks

My husband Dan, bless his heart, drives me friggin' nuts about 98% of the time.  Between his Asberger's Syndrome and the fact that he was never expected to do anything for himself before I was blessed with his presence, he literally believes that if he goes to work and collects a paycheck, he's done for the day.


We have the exact same conversations over and over and overrrr again while I beg, plead, yell, scream, threaten, and bang my head on the floor just to get him to do something as rudimentary as before he sticks his plate in the sink, empty what's left on it into the trash can because we don't have a garbage disposal.  


I've been making this request for 10 years, because we've NEVER had a garbage disposal, in ANY of the houses we've lived in.  (Yes, it makes me cry, too.  Why would someone build a house without a garbage disposal and a dishwasher?  Bastards.)  HOWEVER.  Dumping your food into the sink will not create a garbage disposal where one does not already exist, and having to remind my husband of that fact every single day for 10 years makes me feel a little stabby.  


If that were his only "quirk" I could probably live with it.  Sadly, it's a mere drop in the bucket of Dan's Fatal Flaws.


He chews gum like he's being paid to do it, which is irritating enough in itself.  (Picture Violet Beauregard, the gum chewing girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Now, replace her face with Dan's.  Kinda want to smack it, no?)  What takes it from merely irritating to I Want To Hurt Him is the fact that he seemingly forgets that there is gum in his mouth and it just... falls out.  I find gum everywhere.  In the bottom of drinking glasses, on the floor of the shower, randomly sitting at the bottom of the dishwasher, stuck to the dog's ass... And I will turn red and steam will shoot out of my ears and I will spew venom and lava and profanity (because seriously, this?  This gum thing?  DRIVES ME FREAKING INSANE) and Dan will look wounded and falsely accused and say, "What makes you think it was me?"


What makes me think that?  Is that I DON'T CHEW GUM, and I'm pretty sure that the dogs don't, either.


Dan wouldn't wash a dish if his life depended on it.  If he ran out of clean clothes, he would go buy more before he did laundry.  (When we first moved in together, he brought with him an entire Hefty bag full of socks.  That should have been a clue, but alas?  I was blinded by love and stupidity.)  He throws his clothes in the general vicinity of the hamper but if they don't make it in, it's not exactly going to keep him awake at night.  I, on the other hand, skeeve and gag at the sight of his socks and underwear lying limply on the floor, sometimes hanging over the rim of the hamper, but rarely inside.  


He lets the dogs lick his plate when he's done eating, despite my threatening to divorce him if he ever did it again.  (I first made that threat in 2002.  Apparently, my word cannot be trusted.) He has no idea where we keep the vacuum, how to turn it on, or possibly even what it's for.  


Dan rocks at delegating.  He can get a whole crew up and moving and cleaning and polishing without breaking a sweat.  He can point and issue orders and make everyone else get the job done while he sits and watches a football game.  (While Dan was staying with his parents before I came out to NY, he told me one night that he and the grandkids had cleaned the house and made dinner for his mom.  I said, "Wow, really?  That's awesome!"  He put his 12 year old niece on the phone to tell me all about it.  She told me how she and her brother and sister had cleaned this and that, put this and that away, and how they worked together to make dinner.  "What did Uncle Dan do?" I asked.  She was silent for a minute then she said, "He told us what to do.")


The other day I came completely unglued when I stepped in the lake left by Dan in the bathroom and skidded across the bathroom floor before finally crashing and burning and bruising my knee and re-injuring the same damn foot that I've broken 3 times.  


(Backstory:  I put the bathmat into the wash the day before and Dan, who never pays attention, took a shower without first putting a towel down.  When he climbed out of the shower onto bare floor, dripping water like a St. Bernard that had just stood under Niagara Falls, it didn't occur to him to clean up the rivers of water he had left behind.  Seriously, he got so much water on the floor that it had a current.  He went sailing off to work and I went sailing into the bathroom.  The rest is history.)


When he came home that night, we had a Talk.  I laid out for him all of his flaws and told him that he needed to fix them, pronto.  I'm not his mommy and I wouldn't have put up with this shit from my own kids, and I'll be damned if I'm going to suck it up and clean up after HIM.  (I get real bad-ass when I'm injured from a fall in the bathroom.)


He listened and nodded his head and then said those four fatal words:


"You're not perfect, either."


*brakes squealing*


Me:  "What do you mean, "I'm not perfect, either"?  I never said I was perfect.  We're talking about you, not me."


Dan:  "So let's talk about you, then."


Me:  "Okay, fine.  What bothers you about me?"


(Note to women everywhere:  This is the stupidest question you could ever ask.  Seriously.  It's even dumber than "Do I look fat in this?")


Dan:  "Well, let's see.  You never close the cupboard doors, you leave your fake fingernails all over the house, every time you do your hair you leave your straightening iron on, you forget to shut the windows when you turn on the AC, you watch tv with the volume off, I mean seriously, who does that? You hog the covers, you use powder and then leave powder footprints all over the bedroom, your purse weighs 15 lbs and you can never find anything in it, you have so much crap in the shower that every time I turn around I knock something over, every time you floss your teeth you wad the floss up into a little ball and leave it on the end table which is GROSS.... Want me to continue?"


Me:


Him:  "Because I can."


Me:


Him:  *looking smug*


Me:  


Asshole.