Jesus Peanut Butter Cups!

That it is my new favorite interjection. A couple of weeks ago a guy wearing one of those shirts cut us off in traffic, so I yelled, "Jesus peanut butter cups, did you see that?!"

I started to write a post with the same title detailing all the debauchery that occurred at my school's end of year party last night, but I think it would reflect badly on many of my coworkers, and also on me for being so gossipy about their adultery, drunken grinding, arrest histories, etc. Really, if you don't know the people it would be boring to read about anyway. It warms my heart, though, to think of the reaction the parents of Rich Suburban Elementary would have, considering they have treated it as their own private Christian day school all year. I know certain parents didn't enjoy me because, in the words of one mom I strongly dislike, I come across as cold. What they don't realize is that those bubbly happy teachers the parents all seem to want because they make learning fun - those are the same ones grinding up on the loser Matthew McConaughey-esque douche bag at the lake party. And they are the same ones that let the kids color all morning because they are hungover. Jesus peanut butter cups, I am glad to be rid of that place.

I visited my new room at the ghetto school yesterday. Sadly, it has avocado green below the chalkboards, wood paneling above them, and a limey yellow color on the walls. It makes me a tad suicidal just looking at it. They are coming to do construction on one wall this summer, which means it will probably have a fourth color in the mix then. I wish I didn't know how much it sucks to paint, because otherwise I totally would. And the desks don't match. They are different colors and heights. I'm a little Bree from Desperate Housewives about all this.

Seven days from now we will be on a plane to Hawaii!

The Bliss Part

I think I am too hard on Husband on the blog. While he is indeed an asshole sometimes, and my dishwasher loading skills are far superior to his, I think this narrow view of Husband paints him in an unfair light. So here are two adorable things he did today...

1. He did a very thorough job of vacuuming the whole house in preparation for my oldest friend coming for a visit. He even put on the hose attachment and got all the cobwebs and dirt by the back door. I think his parents must have told him that if something's worth doing, it's worth doing right. Hopefully our children will get that from him, as I frequently do a half-assed job of stuff like that.

2. I called him into the hallway to dispose of a bug because, as independent as I am, I easily revert back to traditional gender roles when it's convenient for me. He hummed the Indiana Jones theme song as he valiantly came to my rescue. It was kind of cute.

Maridull Bliss: This Fall Tuesdays at 8:00

Well ladies, it appears we are not alone. I assumed it was just us girls because I can't imagine a man wanting to read about some random woman's crappy job and annoying husband. I thought this blog was just a good way to keep in touch with people whose email addresses I can't find. But some anonymous guy just posted this comment:

"Women have this ideal that everything is gonna be Camelot, with silken drapes blowing in the wind as we live on our South seas island. Someone should have told them at birth that crap only happens in the cheap dime store novels they read."

Apparently I am a delusional romance novel reader who somehow lives simultaneously in both the South Seas and King Arthur's silken-draped castle. How worldly am I! I am just excited to know that an increasing number of random strangers read the blog. (I know this is from a stranger because it is not well written enough to be from one of Husband's elitist friends. No offense to elitist friends or random dude, who punctuates quite nicely.) Hopefully this development will play into my real motivation in writing the blog, which is to have FOX pay us lots of money for the rights so they can make yet another crappy sitcom about bitter married people.

(c) 2008 Maridull Bliss Enterprises. All rights reserved.

So it's Friday night of a three day weekend and Husband is working. When I called him this afternoon and suggested we stay in and open a bottle of wine instead of going out to dinner, this is not really what I had envisioned. Since he is not paying any attention to me, I will use this free time to blog about one of the few ways in which I am vastly superior to him. Vastly.

This was on Post Secret this week. When he saw it, Husband said it's the first time he's seen a secret and really thought I might have sent it in.

It frequently happens that Husband says the dishwasher is full, and then I come along and put in four more plates. He always puts the plates in the wrong way, which allows fewer of them to fit. He takes issue with my black and white, right and wrong interpretation of dishwasher loading. He thinks it is a matter of personal preference, but he is wrong. I am right. My way all the plates fit and they all get clean. His way four plates sit in the sink unwashed for several days. There is no preference here, unless his gets some sick thrill from walking by a sink full of dirty dishes everyday.

Ooh, Letterman's on. And my evening just became complete.

Husband, can we get a baby panda?

About once a week I am inspired by Cheezburger or Cute Overload to ask Husband for a random baby animal. Tonight he said yes, but I think he is bluffing.

Also, we watched The Office season finale tonight. I think it is sad that I found greater joy in that hour of TV than I have in any part of my own life in the past year. That's messed up, no?

Three unrelated thoughts in my head...

I am very excited to receive a comment from someone I don't actually know. And even more excited to see that she found the blog by Googling "husband asshole." I tried, and it really does work. I am the number seven result for "husband asshole"! I told Husband he should write a post called "Wife Bitch" to try to even the score.

I drive by a Free Will Baptist church every day on my way to work. I don't really know anything about Free Will Baptists, but it seems like they would be pretty cool. You know, like regular Baptists but with drinkin' and dancin'. Anyway, they change the message on their sign each week. This week it says, "Eternity is a long time to be wrong." I am both impressed and a little afraid of their unabashedly narrow world view.

Husband left a bag of apples on the dining room table, which of course Dog could not resist. There is a half-eaten apple on the floor and shreds of the bag everywhere. At this point it is a battle of wills to see who will clean it up. Stay tuned!

Random thoughts...

1. I quit my job and have taken a new one for next year. The schools are about as different as two schools could be. It seems like a good idea to do something completely different, I guess, since this year totally kicked my ass. But Husband says he has never known me when I liked my job, so we'll see.

2. My period is three days late. This is what I get after the last post. But I took two pregnancy tests and they were both negative. Whew! I hope.

3. Husband and I are attempting to landscape our yard. We have decided, I think, to stay in the 'burbs till next summer. So I decided that if we are going to live here we might as well make it look like the house doesn't belong to an 80 year-old shut in on a fixed income.

4. Husband brought me cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery in NYC lat week. And now I love him a little more.

5. We are going to Hawaii in six weeks. Ack! I am not at all bikini ready (see #4).

Oh, baby! ... Oh. Baby?

This is a hot topic in the Bliss household lately. We have been married about two years, I am hurtling towards 30, and my mother makes a face kind of like this whenever I give any hint of bearing her grandchildren:

We have been back and forth about impending parenthood, Husband and I. At first it was that I wanted a baby and he wasn't sure it was the right time, but now we are both rather schizophrenic in our baby lust/fear. It seems we are incapable of ever making a simple decision, and this tendency is only amplified when we are talking about the most momentous decision of our lives. I mean, marrying Husband was kind of a big deal, but if we get sick of each other we can always get divorced with really very little social stigma. It doesn't seem to work that way with kids. I don't think you are allowed to say, "My toddler and I just kind of grew apart. I don't like who I am when we are together. I just become this naggy bitch, telling him what to do all the time, and I'll do anything to keep him happy. We want different things from life, and we both agreed it would be best if we parted ways."

Nope, once sperm meets egg you have that sucker for the rest of your life. My brother is 32 and he still shows up at my parents' house for a free meal at least once a week. Honestly, some nights I can barely feed myself. I don't think I am ready to sign up for 30+ years of someone else wanting stuff from me. And yet that sounds so selfish and immature.

Also, I am not happy about the mammalian task that lies ahead of me. I don't want to feel barfy for weeks on end, be so swollen with parasitic offspring that I literally cannot breath, and then, as Kirstie Alley says in Look Who's Talking, I have to push something to size of a watermelon out of a hole the size of a lemon. I don't think your girl parts are ever the same after that. After that you get to spend the next year lactating contstantly, like Belle the Blue Bell cow, but I would imagine much less chipper. I was really happy to hear that Oprah dug up a pregnant man until I found out he was a transsexual. Man, I wish my husband was a tranny.

All this baby talk started because I hate my current job, so I would tell Husband things like, "You have to knock me up so I can quit this horrible job!" Having a baby was kind of like a fresh career opportunity without the hassle of sending out resumes. But now that I will almost certainly have a different job next year, I'm reevaluating my options. We were both on board to start trying for a baby this summer. I even started taking prenatal vitamins and told my mom to cheer her up when my dad was in the hospital a few weeks back. Now I think the current plan is to wait another year. Apparently "next year" is always our ideal time to start a family. I am really starting to think that a broken condom will be our route to parenthood. Either that or I will be one of those women who turns 38 and realizes she forgot to have children.

Living the Effin' Dream

So I hear that certain of Husband's college friends are jealous that we own a home here in Awesome City (or close by, at least) while they are renting somewhere cold and foggy. Well, don't be.

I HATE having a house. Houses are for families with handy men with lots of time to putter, i.e. my parents and probably yours. Husband is not handy nor does he have time or the inclination to wander around fixing stuff. This is where home ownership becomes a giant, expensive pain in the ass. For example, we spent about four hours and $60 fixing our shower so our shower doesn't drip incessantly. And that was with the borrowed tools and expertise of my dad.

Also, our house smells awful. I spilled a giant bucket of water in the living room and I think it has mildewed. Now we will have to live here forever. People will walk out of our open house and say, "That was a really cute house, but what WAS that smell?"

No wonder she's so annoying...

Family ties: Candidates' ancestry makes for strange bedfellows

Turns out Hilary is French Canadian. And since the most famous French Canadian ever is Celine Dian, I will go ahead and assume that they are all just as grating.

Alanis Morrissette is the exception that proves my French Canadian rule. I still look back fondly on the period when I was 14 or 15 and Jagged Little Pill gave a voice to my young womanly angst. And then, of course, she released this last year...

Pray Hard, The Jesus Christ Story

Last week some senior citizens from the church next door to my school brought all the teachers Easter gift bags. They included some Post-its, markers, cookies, and a fingertip towel embroidered with eggs that I would put out in my guest bathroom if I were my mother-in-law. Oh yeah, they also gave us all an index card that said "God is great!" in shaky grandma handwriting and a book called Pray Big, which apparently outlines the scriptural support for making specific and large requests in prayer. I say apparently because that is what I have learned from the back cover, which is all I will ever read of the book.

I can't give a specific reason why, but it bothers me that it is acceptable to pass out a book about Christianity at a public school. So I told several friends and family about the gift to gauge their reaction. Except in doing so I kept accidentally calling the book Pray Hard, which sounds like it could be a new movie starring Will Farrell as Jesus and maybe Rachel Dratch as a skanky Mary Magdelene.

Stand by your man

Eliot Spitzer and his out of control man parts are all over the news lately. In general the story kind of bores me, as I am not nearly as interested in the seedy details as your average cable news anchor. When I saw the picture of "Kristen" on the front page of CNN.com I had the same reaction I always have to thin girls in bikinis, namely wondering why her thighs look like that and mine are all pasty and fat. I have bad thigh karma and am clearly paying for something horrible my thighs did in a former life.

Naturally, being a wife these days, I am fascinated by that poor Silda Spitzer. Here's a picture of her standing supportively a step behind her husband while he tells the world that he betrayed her.


I don't really care where old Eliot stuck it, but I am dying to know what is going on between those two right now. I've heard a lot of references to "standing by your man" in the media lately, but I think it is not accurate to assume that she is standing by her man just because she is, you know, standing right there by him. That facial expression could be interpreted a variety of ways. For example, "Where did this all go so wrong? I will do anything to save our broken marriage." Or maybe, "Eh, better her than me." My money's on, "Should I stop by the divorce lawyer's office before or after I pick up the dry cleaning?"

Really, it's not my place to judge because I don't think you can ever truly know how you would react until you are in such a situation. Except that I do. I would react just like this lady from China.



Cheating husband outed on Chinese Olympic TV

Her husband was in the middle of a news conference announcing a new Olympics network in China. She hopped on stage an announced to the world the the bastard was cheating on her. I love it! Husband would never let me near the stage if he were in the position of publicly announcing his infidelities. He knows I would channel my inner Strong Black Woman, steal the microphone, and say something like this:

"Girlfriend! Let me tell you what this fool did. He spent eighty goddamn thousand dollars on hos! Can you effin' believe it?! Me neither. And then he brings me up here like I'm just gonna smile and hold his hand. I don't owe that fool a thing. He owes me. Eighty. Thousand. Dollars."

But see, Husband knows this, and that's why he keeps it in his pants. Or maybe that's why he will never seek public office. Hopefully not just the latter.

Spring Break, Day 4 of 9

So I am four days into my nine days off from school. Here's what I have accomplished so far:

1. Mopped the kitchen and guest bathroom
2. Finally ordered our wedding album
3. Went to the gym zero times
4. Bought three pairs of shoes

Here's what I still have left on my to do list:

1. Do something about the crap growing in our shower
2. Catch up on laundry
3. Put away the laundry I did two weeks ago
4. Go to the gym everyday
5. Reorganize the office
6. Grade a file box full of papers
7. Clean out my closet, as I do not need daily access to both size 4 and size 10 pants
8. Organize our CD collection
9. Take my wedding rings to get appraised so I can renew the insurance
10. Talk to a realtor about selling the house
    
11. Spend at least two days working up at school
12. Steam the new curtains, whose wrinkles continue to taunt me
13. Spend some time with Husband
14. Take the dog to the park
15. Clean out the garage in hopes of finding whatever is living in there
16. File our taxes

Hrumph.

"We are definitely not ready for kids if we can't handle a little bit of stray poo."

That is what I just yelled at Husband as I was disposing of a warm dog turd I just found on the living room carpet. We are watching my parents' dog for a few days and she is apparently unable to scoot her but across the grass like a real dog.

It's times like these I wonder if I ever want children. It doesn't help that I just watched the Jon & Kate Plus 8 where they all got the flu. Oh barf. Literally.

Husband:Hansel :: Wife:that lady who puts Hansel in the oven

Husband has a habit of leaving a smattering of bottle caps, Kleenex, empty pretzel bags, crumpled up credit card receipts, and the like in his wake. It's like he is marking his territory except without all the peeing on vertical surfaces.

Husband has a friend who says he got married just to have someone to hand his trash to. And he is not kidding. I have seen him hand his wife the wrapper when he pops a piece of gum into his mouth on more than one occasion. Of course we were appalled by this and considered it further evidence that he is a useless asshole (in a good way, of course, if he is reading). But I'm thinking his wife is onto something. Really, the net result is the same. I still end up throwing away Husband's trash, but in the meantime it sits around cluttering up the living room and is sometimes eaten and vomited back up by Dog.

Urburbs

Since last I blogged, Husband and I have started hating the suburbs and wanting to move back to civilization. Not that we ever loved it out here. Here are the top 5 reasons we hate living where we do...

#5
No one cool lives in our neighborhood. The most interesting neighbor we have is the teenage girl across the street who is always either making out with her boyfriend in his hoopty car or trying to break up with him in the front yard. It was really awkward that time Husband and I spent the afternoon cleaning out the garage and that kid was out there in his wifebeater for two hours trying to convince her to keep letting him hit it.

#4
There was a tumbleweed in our driveway the other night. Whatever, but for some reason this troubles Husband greatly.

#3
There are no black people in the suburbs. I want our kids to know that there are black people in the world. This is an unfortunate though understandable gap in the education of students here in Suburban ISD. Most people move out here for the good schools, and they do have wonderful special programs. So we are hoping our kids are just average so the local urban school district can sufficiently educate them. If we end up with a genius or a sped case then we can always move back out here later.

#2
I have recently discovered that industrialized agriculture is killing America (more on that in a future post). The restaurants here in the 'burbs only serve prepackaged high-fructose mechanically-separated processed crap on a bun.

#1
The local HEB parking lot is smattered with "W '04" stickers and Dale Jr. sunshades. We are in the middle of NASCAR Nation. A tragic reminder that this is indeed a red state we live in.

So Husband and I have decided to move. This decision precedes action by approximately 3-15 months, but I feel better already. We acknowledge that we are not cool enough to pull off or even want a condo downtown. Our ideal 'hood is not quite urban, not quite suburban, but a happy little place in between similar to where I grew up. There are backyards and a Target AND non-white people and independent businesses. We like to call it the "urburbs." We look forward to showing you around our adorable little cottage soon(ish).

Champisky

We are blogging again! I know Husband has a blogging history reminiscent of the little boy who cried wolf. But please don't hold that against me. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I am blogging again.

Anyhoo, we went to Spec's and HEB tonight on a quest to get liquored up. Husband acquired both champagne and the goods for whiskey and Coke. So we are thinking that later on we might make some Champisky to celebrate the resurgence of the blog.

Mostly I stopped blogging because Suburban ISD, my esteemed employer, discourages its teachers from posting personal information online, such as photos involving beer bongs and bikinis. But I am old and married and would never in a million year post a picture my boobs online. And I don't really care if my students know that they drive me to drinking. A few months back when I ditched the blog I cared a lot about my job, but now it's kind of soul crushing. More on that later.

Yay blogging!