Trashy Valentine

Valentine's Day is rapidly approaching--that day of love, romance, mushiness, and all that other fun stuff.  This is Jeremy and my 13th Valentine's Day together.  Does he still have that wonderful engraved zippo from our first Valentine's Day together?  Of course not.  The Sarah McLachlan cd I forced on him another Valentine's Day?  Maybe somewhere buried under the rest of my Lilith Fair input.  Some may wonder just how you keep a relationship so fresh and alive for so many years.  It's really quite simple.  You just have to make sure you stay a little trashy.

Or maybe it's just the trash talk. 

Exhibit A
We're both sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and relaxing as a fire gently crackles.
"What's that?" Jeremy asks.
"What?"
"That.  Right there."
"What are you talking about.  I have no clue what "that" is."
"THAT!  Right there.  It looks like cat yak."  I still can't see what exactly he's pointing at.  When I follow his finger, all I see is floor.
"I don't see anything at all."  At this point, I'm pretty sure he's just not awake enough and is hallucinating, well, cat yak on the floor.
"It's right there!  About 4 inches from the brick," Jeremy says, pointing again to the brick surrounding the bottom of the fireplace.  I look.  There's not a thing out there.
"What in the world are you talking about?" I scan the floor, scan the surrounding area, and finally I see something, definitely not cat yak and not 4 inches from the brick.
"That?" I ask, pointing at the spot on the floor.
"Yes!  That!  Four inches from the brick.  You have absolutely no spacial awareness whatsoever," Jeremy grumbles.  Now, this might seem like an odd thing to start a pseudo argument, except for the fact that it's a rather long-running argument.  Do I actually have no spacial awareness?  Yes.  Am I ever going to truly admit that fact?  No. 

So, I reply, "It's not cat yak.  It's a dead plant leaf.  And it's not 4 inches from the brick; it's at least 6."  Now, you might think that having determined what and where something disgusting is on your floor would simply lead to that something disgusting being cleaned up.  Nope, not in our house.  (I won't even get into what Jeremy refers to as "The Bucket of Doom" upstairs in the hallway.  I will simply say, yes, it came out of an animal; yes, Jeremy did put a bucket over it rather than clean it up; and yes, I looked and decided the bucket should stay in place until. . .one of us hasn't eaten so recently).  Therefore, instead of simply picking up said dead leaf and throwing it away, we then got into a lengthy debate about just how far away the dead leaf actually was.  Obviously, I was right, but, of course, Jeremy wouldn't cave.  So, out comes the tape measure (which took roughly 15 minutes to locate).  With precise measurements completed, the leaf was roughly 5.5 inches from the brick, meaning I was right!  Ha.  Spacial awareness my . . . I was righter.  (Yes, righter is a word.  See clause 23b under rights attained after finishing a ph.d in English [that's the one that states I can make up whatever words I want because I spent way to much money on a degree revolving around words]).

I basked in my triumph.  The measurements couldn't be denied, and, for once, I was more spacially accurate than Jeremy.  We sat there, silently sipping our coffee, both pondering my amazingness (yes, I can create that word too).  Did either of us bother picking up the dead leaf?  Nope.

Exibit B
It really was quite accidental.  We found this neat, old gumball-type machine at an antique store.  It had a black, ornate, cast iron base building up to a deep blue, metal base topped by a glass globe.  Both Jeremy and I remembered always plugging money into those things as kids--peanuts, m&m's, gumballs, sweet tarts--all the yummy childhood delicacies pouring out after a carefully begged parental quarter was inserted and twisted into the machine.  Yep, the gumball machine came home with us.

I carefully cleaned the device, and somehow decided it must be filled with nuts .  Yummy salty goodness  pouring out just like when we were kids.  I carefully filled up the thing with about 8 containers of peanuts and mixed nuts, then proudly stood back and delighted in my dispenser.  For about a week, both of us delighted in our new peanut dispenser.  Then we forgot about it.  Then something happened that pretty much ensured it will never be used as a peanut dispenser again.

"Oh, that is just digusting!" Jeremy said as he leaned over the gumball/peanut machine.
"What? What's wrong?"  I asked
"Have you looked at this thing lately?" Jeremy asked.
"No.  Why?"
"Umm, just come and look at it."  I walked over and bent down, staring into the peanut-filled globe.  "Oh.  Oh, that's gross!"  I hurried away and sat down.  I will just confirm it here.  Jeremy and I are both wimps when it comes to cleaning up disgusting stuff.  If it is something disgusting we can safely ignore, with no fear of it spreading/contaminating something else, we really can let it just sit.  Which was exactly what happened with the newly worm-infested "peanut" dispenser.  Neither of us could bring ourselves to do anything with it.  So, it just sat for a week while we debated the easiest way to dispense of our new bug habitat.

Should we have taken care of it right away?  Of course!  But, since we didn't, we discovered the next week what a joy our "habitat" really could be.  That was when 100s of teeny, tiny little moths emerged, fluttering all around our kitchen.  One moth would have been no problem, but 100s of them were not so pleasant.  Top that off with one psychotic cat chasing after every moth she saw and 2 dogs who thought the cat might have found something interesting . . .  Let's just say, for anyone considering it, a moth terrarium really is not a good idea.

Ruminations
Hopefully, I've pinpointed just how your trashy side can spice up a relationship.  And, you don't even have to spend a lot to capture that purely enticing trashiness that only a man could love (I mean really, we're talking about a gender that, no matter what the age, still loves a good fart joke).