Smith Kids MSU Tailgate

Smith Kids MSU Tailgate
Dominica, Veronica, Rebel and Miranda

Thursday, February 3, 2011

I Lied (not about TV though)

I lied and I am sorry for that.  It’s not as bad as it sounds though.   I didn’t cook up some grandiose scheme or fabricate some intricate story to share with you.  I didn’t assemble together a completely made-up, hair brained story just to make our blog more interesting.  No it was a some what smaller lie.  Not even a full blown white lie, I wouldn't say.  It was more of an embellishment really, or a slight stretching of the truth. I guess I shared it in the heat of the moment and didn’t think about the story long and hard enough.  I may not have even noticed it, if it weren’t for my addiction to the NOTV2011 blog.  I sometimes go back and reread past posts and yesterday when I was doing just that I noticed it.  The lie was right there all along and the worst part about it was that it was part of my confessions from the first month.  I lied in a confession.  I may be headed straight to hell when I leave this life.
Anyhow, I guess I have to tell you about it now.   I can’t hardly leave you without the rest of the story or you will swear off this blog altogether.  Basically, when I said that Jeff and I were “getting along better than ever” and “having sex more often than ever” that was a bit of an exaggeration.  I really made us sound like a couple of newlyweds didn’t I? And we aren’t.  I suppose people who know us well probably already realized this and had discounted my comments accordingly, but for those of you who do not, we are still no better than the average couple in both departments.  So a more accurate statement would have sounded more like this, “Jeff and I are working on our relationship and we have sex lately more often than we had in the past three years”.  I guess in my haste to make the first month sound exciting, positive and successful, I inadvertently made my relationship with Jeff sound the same.  We are really just your average everyday, married for seven years, couple. Nothing fancy about us at all except that our sheets are getting changed once a week this year!
Marriage is really tough. It is tougher than it should be.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but to me it seems like we marry the single person in this world that is able to irritate us the very most.  Why do we do that to ourselves?  Are we trying to sabotage our marriage from the very beginning by marrying someone who irritates us so naturally?  Or maybe, because we marry a person and we have to spend so much time with that person and share space with each other that is why we irritate each other so much.  I don’t know.  Either way, I irritate Jeff a lot and he does the same to me.  And regardless of what I have reported in past confessions, Jeff and I are still irritating each other at our usual rate of about two to three times a week if not more often. But the nice thing about not having TV is that we actually talk a little bit more about these irritations and about other things.  I want to make sure this is completely accurate so I emphasize the “little” in that last sentence.  We still do not have long drawn out conversations, but at least we are talking more now than we were when we just watched TV all night.
It is nice to talk to the person you marry.  I would even go so far as to say you should probably like talking to the person you marry.  Jeff is not a talker. And that is the understatement of the year. Jeff would probably be perfectly content to just coexist in our house and never have to talk to me again. I have to remind myself that it is nothing personal.  Jeff just doesn’t like to talk to anyone very much, but it is hard sometimes to not take it personally. 
I, on the other hand, I am, a natural talker.  I am long winded.  I ramble at times and sometimes not even about important stuff.  I simply love to talk and interact with others.  I guess you could say I am a social butterfly and Jeff a social idiot.  So this communication imbalance is oftentimes the root of my frustrations with our relationship and I suspect it frustrates Jeff at times too. The fact that we are forced to talk more without the TV is an added bonus in my eyes.  Although Jeff may see it differently, but if he does he doesn’t talk about it.  Enough about that marriage stuff; it’s getting a little heavy for our fun little blog.
Well one of the other enjoyable things we have been up to is playing scrabble and cribbage.  And this is a completely true story.  There are no embellishments at all.  Jeff is teaching me how to play cribbage.  About a week ago he went on Scrabble strike and refused to play anymore at least for awhile he said.  He was burned out and I couldn’t blame him. We had played a lot of scrabble and I had won all except for one game. 
I headed to the basement in search of alternative entertainment and found his old cribbage board.  I had never played cribbage, but my parents used to when I was little so I at least knew what it was.  That is where my knowledge ran dry however.  I was a cribbage idiot.  At the time, I knew none of the many rules and none of the strategies involved with this complex game.  To be honest, I didn’t even know cards were involved with it.  That is how ignorant I was.  I was, however, smart enough to recognize the potential entertainment value that this offered to us during our year of no television.  I quickly dusted it off and brought it upstairs. My eyes were filled with excitement as I asked Jeff to teach me.  I worried that he would not want to, but to his credit he jumped on board right away.  This was likely because he still is bored at times.  Jeff has patiently spent many hours as my faithful cribbage teacher.  I am finally getting a grasp of the many intricacies of this game.  I am by no means an expert, but I did actually win a game the other night.  While I could be wrong, I don’t think he let me win it either.  However, the tables have turned from our scrabble playing days, as the official cribbage score is 4 to 1 in Jeff’s favor. 
I am eternally grateful for the springboard that NOTV 2011 has offered to our family and to my marriage.  We really are interacting with each other more and having a lot of fun without our TV.  I am optimistic that by year’s end maybe my little lie will actually be true and today’s apology will have been unnecessary.  For now, I leave you with the wise words of my late great-grandfather, “Love One Another”.
    
Vern Out

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