The guy I’m seeing is three years younger than me. While I was either running around outside or quietly playing with toys indoors during my childhood, he was firmly planted in front of the TV. He watched the TV shows his parents liked, as well as the cartoons and sitcoms of the '80s, '90s, and beyond. He even caught some of his mom’s soap operas. I, on the other hand, can count on one hand the TV shows I regularly watched in the last decade.
He also fell in love with the music from his parents’ generation, and never got into his generation’s music to the same degree. Not counting classical music, my musical tastes don’t go back farther than 1980.
Consequently, we’ve had many conversations about TV shows and music that go:
“Have you seen [show]?”
“Nope.”
“WHAT?!”
“I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never watched it.”
and
“Have you heard [artist]?”
“Unh-uh.”
“No?!”
“I’ve heard of them, but never actually heard their music.”
All the shows and musicians he asks about were popular 20 years before he was born, yet he’s still a big fan and slightly disbelieving that I’m not familiar with them. I tell him that we were wrong before, that he’s the one who’s robbing the cradle, since he is clearly an middle-aged man in a 29-year-old’s body.
My husband is British. I’m 100% American, born and raised.
On a steaming hot day in California he will drink hot tea.
On a freezing cold day in Birmingham (England) I will drink Diet Coke. And ask for ice. And get strange looks for it.
I honestly thought **Hazel **was referring to flowers called “orc” and “goblin”, and thought **Lynn **was making up those descriptions. So I guess I don’t know jack about flowers OR whatever game you guys are talking about. But then, neither does my wife, so I don’t feel bad.
Hazel, I actually think it’s hilarious that he calls all flowers chrysanthemums. I may have to pick that up.
I’m usually reminded when I remember that I’m a small-town white midwestern boy who lives in the suburbs and she’s a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx who lives in Brooklyn.
I can spend all day on my computer reading all kinds of stuff. I have a wide range of interests and go to a long list of bookmarked websites every day. I read gossip, book reviews, movie reviews, do research on things for friends and relatives, and spend some time here at the SD. Mr. Sali has a couple of friend he exchanges e-mails with once a week, and he’s into wood carving, so he looks at pictures. Of blocks of wood.:rolleyes: So he uses the computer maybe an hour a week and can’t understand what it is I’m looking at on the Magic White Box hour after hour. (On the other hand, he knows about digital photography, how to store pictures, how to make greeting cards, and other technical stuff.)
So, everything. But a quick example:
Her car needs a brake job, and she is fretting about the cost of the repairs. She asked me how much it would cost, and I told her, “Meh, about 25 bucks and an hour or so if I take my time.”
She replies, “Oh my god you can work on a car without going to car college???”
Or clothes. I generally don’t buy clothes at all, I prefer clothes to magically appear at Christmas. If I am really desparate, I will go down to the resale store and find something without a stain on it. I don’t like clothes with logos or anything on it. Hers have to say “Abercrombie and Fitch” or “A|X” or some silly shit like that on it.
I am a free-spirited, philosophical, creative, neurotic mess (who has mastered concepts like ‘‘pragmatism’’ and ‘‘rationality’’ only to keep my life in order.) My husband is a graduate student of behavioral clinical psychology. I want to change the world, he wants to organize it. I am forever looking for my keys, he is forever making Excel spreadsheets to monitor every detail of his life. I ‘‘spend time’’ with him on a Saturday night, but he ‘‘interacts’’ with me. (I mean it. He will literally say, ‘‘I’d like to interact with you tonight.’’)
A while ago, someone posted an IMHO thread called, ‘‘Once a cheater, always a cheater?’’
I read the responses with interest, trying to think of people I have known over the years who have cheated, and whether or not they continued to cheat. I thought of the various influences that might drive a person to cheat, such as boredom or dissatisfaction with the relationship, being stuck with the wrong person, etc. I thought about how a person might feel after they cheated, and how that might impact their decisions in the future. I couldn’t really come to a conclusion.
I then asked my husband his opinion.
He replied, ‘‘Statistically speaking, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.’’
He didn’t even pause to think about it.
The last time I told him I was feeling depressed, he sat me down, shoved a pencil into my hand and made me write a list of possible activities that might improve my mood. He then made me rank them according to which would be most likely to help, choose two to three of said activities, perform them, and then record on a scale of 1 to 10 how they impacted my mood.
We just discovered today that whether or not it is in any way reasonable to choose to delay upgrading software has the weight of a major religious issue in our marriage. He is a software developer, I like my computer to keep working the way it’s been working, thank you very much, and take the staunch conservative approach that if I can’t see it’s broken, why should I be strong-armed into ‘fixing’ it?
After a small altercation, I ended up installing a bunch of patches and upgrades, and lo, shit does not work the way I liked it working. No doubt it’s ‘better’.
He thinks I’m just stubborn. Well, I am. I think he’s being deliberately obtuse if he doesn’t accept that I have my reasons, even if he doesn’t agree with them! I think we’re both at a place where we will never, ever, ever discuss it again. Different worlds is right.
Bah, he’s a lightweight. Be glad you really didn’t get into the deep end. This often involves upgrading things, then uninstalling them and installing a version older than the one you were used to, because it’s purportedly better. Now this can occasionally be good advice in some circles like drivers, but it gets a little crazy.
Never, ever watch those people get into a programming client version war “<Where 3.7 is the newest version> 1.22, you’re in the stone age! 1.24 is so superior.” “Oh, yeah, I bet it’s so shiny and nice, but they screwed up the interface <read: they moved one icon>. You like shiny things? I have some puurty keys right here, come on boy, fetch!”
May he never get a job involving SAP. Patches are completely optional. There’s parts of the main program which are completely optional. The compulsory parts are full of options (you must choose something, but there’s half a dozen choices offered, plus you can always program additional choices). 99% of the problems with that monster come from people choosing the wrong options and the other 1% are typos.
