The Male Ability to Selectively See
On Saturday, I had my first wedding shower at my mom’s house in Hometown. I returned to Portland late that evening excited to show GTB all the good stuff I/we got: sets of flatware, cookie sheets, sexy jammies, etc. After show and tell, I collapsed on the couch, exhausted from all the festivities and lugging about of new treasures.
15 minutes later, breath caught, I started getting itchy about the mess around me. Boxes, gift bags, tissue paper, and ribbons adorned our entire living room along with the gifts they used to enclose. Though GTB pleaded with me to just sit still for a few minutes, I had to at least tidy it up some. So I put away new dishes and bakeware. I placed in the appropriate part of the house new nightgowns and afghans. And I threw all the unable-to-reuse boxes and paper inside the largest box and put it by the front door so I could take it to the garbage next time I left the house.
Fast forward to Sunday night…the box full of paper and other boxes was still sitting there. It had been a hectic day and I realized early that morning that about half of what was inside the big box of garbage was recyclable. So there it sat, taunting me, keeping my otherwise neat living room cluttered. Our house isn’t that large so a 3′ x 4′ box overflowing with paper and streamers and other boxes is pretty obnoxious.
As I finished folding the last load of laundry before we went to bed last night, I decided I needed to do something about that box. The box that had been torturing me all day but that I hadn’t been able to muster the energy to do anything about. The large pile of half garbage, half recycling chaos that I couldn’t motivte myself to get rid of but was allowing to make me crazy. The box we’d both been tripping over for the past 24 hours. I took one last look at it and said to GTB, “I’m gonna go take that box out to the garbage now.”
His completely sincere response, I’m not even kidding: “What box?”
And the thing is, I wasn’t angry or annoyed. I was, no shit, jealous. How I WISH that kind of stuff didn’t make me nuts. How I LONG to be the kind of person who can just leave that shit strewn about.
But I’m not. So GTB helped me determine which pieces should go in the little yellow recycling bin and which should go in the garbage can. Together, we hauled it outside and I was again able to take full breaths.