A Frustrating Lesson

My husband and I have a problem with frustration.  I'll share his experience first.  He doesn't like it when I leave dirty knives in the sink.  He's the kind of person that would shove his hand into a sink of water without looking and believes that he's going to be injured by my carelessness.  So he comes running into the bathroom while I'm in the shower, holding paper to his finger and tells me he's cut his finger and it won't stop bleeding.  I asked how he cut himself and he said that he was washing dishes and saw a huge knife in the sink.  He left it there and picked up a paring knife to clean instead and brooded on my lack of consideration.  While he was cleaning the paring knife, he stabbed himself in the finger. I pointed out that if he hadn't been so annoyed at me about the knife, he wouldn't have stabbed himself. 
That's the back story for me to learn my own lesson.  This morning, he complained that his computer was running slow and that something that I'm doing was messing up his computer.  I retorted that I am the one who maintains the computer and it's more likely something he is doing that is messing up his computer.  Shortly thereafter I left for work. (Without kissing my husband goodbye) I go into my car, checked the street and backed up in order to clear some debris ahead of me, to pull out into the street.  While in reverse, I felt a jolt and heard a crunch.  I hit the front of my husband's car!  And I have a back-up camera!  There was no reason for it, except that I was distracted by my husband's accusation and brooding on the situation and not paying attention to what I was doing.  Needless to say, I felt like an idiot all day.  I cried the whole way in to work.  And teared up a couple of times at work.  I realized that I was guilty of the same thing I had accused my husband of not two weeks earlier.  I was brooding and annoyed and as a consequence of not letting the situation go, I smooshed my car.  Both cars are fine.  Hubby's car got the license plate squished a bit and I have two screw head shaped impressions on my rear bumper. 
This has been a pattern in our marriage.  We get annoyed at eachother and instead of letting things go, we feed the frustration and let it fester and as a consequence, something else frustrating happens.  How much agrivation could we have avoided if we would just have charity toward eachother and let little disagreements pass and forgive more readily.  Let's hope the lesson sticks this time!

Dragonfly

I had another bug experience today.  I was driving through a parking lot, maybe 10 miles an hour. A dragonfly ended up bouncing off my windshield and kept flying right in front of my windshield.  I made a left turn, expecting to say goodbye to the bug, but he turned as well, still hovering just 4-6 inches from my windshield and certain death.  I made a right, and sure enough, he followed my turn as well.  I hit a straightaway and accelerated a bit, just enough that the dragonfly could not keep up and was forced by the wind up over the top of my car.  It's been about 7 hours since I had this encounter with my winged friend and I'm still thinking about it.  Everything I know about physics tells me that what the dragonfly was doing was dangerous and offered no benefit, aerodynamically, to it's flight.  It wasn't like drafting a semi tractor trailer, which cuts the wind sheer on your vehicle but puts you in a dangerous position for rear-ending a semi!  That bug was fighting all the same wind sheer that my car was, plus the turbulence of the air passing over my car trying to push the bug up and over the vehicle.  I'm still baffled by the bugs behavior.  Why would it play such a dangerous game?  I'll do some more aerodynamics research and see if I can figure it out.  But until then, I'll just have to believe that God wanted me to think about a bug for a half a day!

History Repeating

I was out with my husband yesterday at a religious service.  I used the restroom and met him outside to make our way toward the exit.  A lady stopped me on the way out to inform me that my dress was tucked up inside my slip! I righted myself and thanked her profusely.  As we headed toward the car, I remembered a story that my grandmother had told me.  She'd been at a funeral many many years ago and had used the restroom.  When she came out, she mingled a bit with the other mourners without realizing that she had her skirt tucked up in her underwear!  I realized today how lucky I am to have heard stories from my grandmother about her life, that I was able to make this small connection between her and me. 

Laundry Day

Today is my most dreaded day.  Laundry day.  It amazes me how perfect strangers can make something as mundane as laundry a fearful event.  I have no particular dislike of doing laundry.  To the contrary, I love the way my clothes and towels feel when I pull them warm and soft from the dryer.  Unfortunately, my personal washer and dryer are in a storage unit.  We moved into a tiny house with no hook-ups while my husband is in school, so I drive out of my way to a coin op facility in a nice part of town.  But the niceness of the area is deceptive as to the clientele of this laundromat.  I had learned my lesson a while ago. I am a normally chatty and friendly person, but you get some crazies at the laundromat.  So I've developed a habit of using machines directly in front of the entrance so that I can sit in my car and watch the machines. Last time, I re-entered the laundromat prematurely to change over my loads to the dryer.  I had 3 minutes to kill. So I pull out the ole smart phone and jump on facebook to see what's happening.  Immediately, a guy sitting on a bench in front of my machine starts freaking out about me taking his picture! He insists that people keep taking his picture and that he has an attorney and will sue me if he sees his picture show up on facebook (like I'd friend him!) After insisting adamantly that I did not want to nor would I ever take his picture, I finally just put my cellphone away and said "There. It's gone. Now no one can enjoy themselves here." He continued to mutter about it to no one in particular for the next 10 minutes and then retreated to his car, which happened to be parked next to mine, to watch me for another 5 minutes before taking off.  That's one of my least favorite adventures in laundry. Sigh. I miss my machines.  Wish me luck! I'm off to the freak-show.

My Theory of Relativity

I was at my little mexican grocery store again today.  I always find something interesting at that store.  At the checkstand, where you find all the impulse purchase items, I saw a blister packed 4oz can of shaving cream and a plastic razor.  It wasn't even a name brand like Bic or anything.  Just a blue plastic single blade razor.  The package was labeled "Deluxe Shaving Kit". I cracked up to myself and then I got sad.   Perhaps to someone else, this is a Deluxe Shaving Kit.  I need to remember to not judge when I go to the market in the more destitute parts of town.

Love and Marriage

I'm seeing an unsettling trend in my own social circle.  I had a friend call me this morning looking for a babysitter to watch her kids while she went to see a divorce attorney.  This broke my heart.  It seems like a lot of my friends are having the divorce conversation these days.  Is this a commentary on our society? Have we reached the point where it is more common to be divorced than married to the same person your whole life?  My marriage is by no means perfect.  The D-word has come up once or twice in the past 7 years, but I had good advice from reliable sources to help me make good decisions.  I have tried to be that for my friends, but there's really no one on earth that knows exactly what you are going through.  I don't know what their daily conversations are like.  I don't know if they are hostile toward eachother.  All I know is that if there is love, then it's worth the fight to fix the marriage. 
I've seen so many cases of dysfunctional relationships caused by pride or misunderstanding.  It's caused by things that can be fixed with communication and therapy. (I'm a HUGE supporter of therapy.) People who are unwilling to change are going to keep having the same relationship problems with every new person they get involved with unless there is some self-improvement happening.  So I tell my friends that if the significant other is not going to therapy, or church, or a guru or something, there's no reason to stay with them.  It's asking for history to repeat itself, which is more painful the second or third time around.  It makes you feel like an even bigger fool for having trusted the person again.  It is possible to forgive someone and not trust them or allow them to continue to hurt you.  The efforts to save the marriage cannot be either one sided or half hearted.  If both are willing to try, there is always hope.  If something can be fixed, it is worth the effort. But if one or both of you are miserable, you're not doing anything for the children by staying together.  I saw my parents fight so many times and how miserable my mother was and I prayed for them to divorce.  They have since repaired a lot of their relationship and I'm glad they stuck it out, but there was a time that their bad relationship made me miserable as well. 
On a related topic, I had a lady come into my work and start airing her life story to me.  She had been divorced in January and had started seeing a man a couple of months ago who had already proposed to her!  I thought it was crazy that she even kept the ring.  You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else fully and freely.  You have to know your own value.  You cannot derive your value from what other people think about you. 
On a vaguely related note, today I learned that all three of Tom Cruise's wives filed for divorce when they were 33 years old.  What a strange coincidence!  Maybe all the glamour of being married to Tom has worn off by that point and they realized what is really important in a relationship.