• Get a gym membership. OH YES. We’re going to stand around in black and white, draped over each other, wearing only underwear and looking hungover and stoned. Like Calvin Klein models!
• Cook at home way, way more. We’re both so sick of eating out all the time. Oh no, you may be saying, what does this mean for your blogging? More womanly pictures of food and recipes? FUCK YES. Delete my blog from your feed readers now, friends, lest you get hungry.
• IKEA furniture! I have gotten manfriend to the point of indifference, which is a hell of an achievement, since his normal reaction to furniture is malice. Chairs tremble in fear of him. I got some plates the other night and made him eat food off of them. On purpose. And, it’s starting to look mighty fancy in here.
• Fiscal responsibility. Dun dun dun… You know why?
• Because we want to go on trips. Aruba, Bahama, Minnesota… wait, what?
• And visiting my relatives in the midwest is on the docket, too.

If you want to start a fight between me and manfriend, simply pull out an IKEA catalog, or ask me how I plan to decorate our house in the future. Bring up the subject of replacing our couch, and pause to observe the pained expression that will slowly spread across his poor face.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, upsets him like the threat of stuff. Yes, stuff. I realize it sounds terribly vague, but he walks through our home at times, as if expecting all of the things we have accumulated over the years to spontaneously rise up in a furious whirlwind and seize him, ripping him out of time and space and casting him into some unknowable and awful place. keep reading »

We recently got a new tv as an early Christmas present, and I’m looking online for a dvi to hdmi cable to hook up my laptop and stream online video.

“Go to monoprice.com,” says manfriend. “That’s where we’re buying all our cables from now on.” Really, he said that verbatim, just like that. Suggesting two things, one, that we’re going to be buying a shitload of cables and we need an exclusive retailer, and two, that he’s going to lay down the cable law here and now. I had previously been looking on Amazon.com, where I found the cable we need for $1.40. Being the thrifty shopper I am, I point out that monocable can’t really compare to that price. keep reading »

It was about one in the morning last night, and we were lying in bed, our glasses on the night stand. I’d just recovered from a fit of that late-night laughter, the kind that’s infectious and life-affirming. We do this just about every night, and it seems like regardless of what time it is, we have to laugh first. I paused and looked solemnly at the man I share my life with and said, “I’m going to start writing short stories again.”

I said this, because for a fleeting moment, I had had a really good idea for a short story anthology. Of course, this morning, I only have the faintest thread of what that is, and I’m afraid if I pull on it too hard, that thread will snap. After settling into a dark funk over the past few days, weeks, possibly months, I feel like I’m finally coming out of it. Slowly rising out of icy water, the kind that makes it hard to move or feel your own fingers, like trying to punch someone in a dream – suddenly your body remembers that you’re lying in a bed covered in blankets, but your mind doesn’t. keep reading »

Edit: Manfriend is concerned that this reads like a list of things he’s done. In actuality, it’s split perfectly fifty-fifty, but I’ll let you figure out who did what.

Apparently, two years into a serious relationship, the goal shifts from trying to definitively figure out why you love each other so much, to figuring out new ways to confound and bewilder one another. I expect in a few more years, we’ll be back to figuring out how it’s possible to love people who do the following. keep reading »