Unappreciated Genius

Jeremy is so pessimistic. Any time I come up with an ingenious idea, he just stomps it flat. As former Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen said, "Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius." Obviously, as you will see, he is just jealous of my ideas, wishing he would have thought of them first.

For example, my latest idea was grilled pizza. I have the crusts and all the ingredients, but running the oven means heating up the kitchen to the point where it feels we are residing in one of Dante's rings of hell (I think it's the one for greed--we are coveting our neighbor's air conditioning). So I had a brilliant idea--grill the pizza!

"No," Jeremy said as soon as I vocalized my ingenious plan.
"Why not? I could just put the grill on low, pop the pizza on a pan, and in 10 minutes, viola! Pizza and no hot kitchen!" I'm very thrilled about this prospect, but what do I get?
"No. Don't do it."
"Why not?"
"It won't work." Mr. pessimistic jealous man again.
"Why not?"
"Have you ever heard of anyone grilling anything in layers before?"
I ponder this a moment. Hmmm. "Well, no. Wait! I did grill eggplant parmesan in a pan before!" At least I think I did.
"Don't do it."
"But--" He cut me off.
"Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it." Great. He has a new mantra.
"You know, when you tell me not to do something, it just makes me want to do it more."
Jeremy sighed. "If you're going to do it, wait til sometime when I'm gone. Wait til I have to go back to Winston so I don't have to eat the thing."
But I know I won't do that. If I do, then I can't share my pizza grilling success and rub it in his face (I know this will work, just like most of my other ideas--well, they worked in my head anyway). So, at some point within the next week or so, I know I will be trying to grill a pizza, despite Jeremy's pessimistic view that it won't work. You never know until you try, right?

Granted, some ideas do not work out so well. Like the other night. I needed to get the sprayer back on a running hose. I looked at it, figured I'd get a little wet, but how hard could it really be? Jeremy immediately looked at me and said, "Do you need me to go back and turn the water off?"

"No," I replied. "I can get it." Now, part of this was his own fault. Whenever we work on projects together, no matter how small, he usually ends up irritated with me. This time, we were trying to fit a hose through a little spot in the foundation, and run it under the house and back to the faucet. This meant that Jeremy had to crawl under the house in the back, crawl through tons of spiders and who knows what all else, in the heat, grab the hose, and pull it to the back of the house.

Now, I'm not the greatest with following even the smallest verbal project directions. I try, but somehow what he tells me and what I hear are two, completely different things. I think this time Jeremy was using to many vague pronouns (at least that's what I told him). So when he told me I needed to unattatch everything from "this hose," I assumed he meant I needed to take the sprayer off the hose. That was my first mistake. "This hose" did not refer to the entire clump of hoses, but rather to one, particular hose. So, in reality, all he wanted me to do was detatch one hose from the other (I don't know why he just didn't say this). In the end, my messup ended up meaning he had to crawl back under the house a second time, and that pretty much fried any patience he had. (We won't even get into me trying to tell him something while he was already under the house and couldn't hear me.)

So, that brings us back to reattaching the sprayer. Looking at my irritable husband, I decided it was a far better idea just to put the sprayer back on (the sprayer that never needed to come off in the first place) while it was running, instead of sending him all the way to the backyard to turn the water off.

This was a mistake. The next thing I know, I am soaked from head to foot and the sprayer is still not back on the hose. I just stand there for a little bit, dripping and look at him. He's now laughing his butt off, so at least he's no longer irritated. "I think maybe you need to shut the water off," I told him.

"Really?" Mr. Smartass replied. But, as you can see, this particular idea, the one that didn't work, was entirely his fault anyway, so it should not reflect badly, whatsoever, on my own genius.

But, it's not just the grilled pizza idea he's dumped on, but tons of other brilliant ideas that I've had over the years. For example, my idea for a self washing car. It would just have little wiper type things with cloth, instead of blades, mounted at various places on the car. Then, when you push a button, they come out, run along little tracks or something, and clean the car. Did he think this was a good idea? No, of course not.

Then there was my idea for saving cities money on electricity. Paint companies would just design special, glow in the dark, outdoor paint. People would paint their houses, they would glow in the dark, and suddenly, you no longer need all those big street lights! Genius! Again, he found this idea flawed. The same with the clap on faucet, the net hung under the pecan tree branches that would collect all the nuts and keep them from dropping on our head if we wanted a seating area there, and . . .

The other night, we were sitting on the front porch, talking about doing something to the outside of the house. I had another genius idea!
"We could--" I started excitedly.
"No." Jeremy said. He didn't even give me a chance to say what my idea was, and, sadly, I seem to have lost the idea. It's all his fault. I know it was good, and, eventually, it will come back, but for now, he might have cost me my most valuable idea yet!