Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Subtlty is in the eye of the beholder

My dear and wonderful husband has a lot great qualities.  He is smart, kind, friendly, has a great sense of humor, and likes to help others, to name a few.  However, sometimes he operates on a completely different wavelength than "normal" people.  Think radio, AM vs. FM.  He thinks he's being abundantly clear explaining some concept or antoher, but in reality leaves the other person completly mystified.  The problem mostly lies in the fact that his explanations will typically start on on step 6, rather than step 1 (or, in his mind, step -3,024) because he assumes everyone else knows what he knows.  The other part of the problem is that he has no patience for people who don't know what he knows, so he gives up and just finishes the task himself.

One memorable example of this occurred when he was trying to teach his parents how to use a computer several years ago.  I should have known this was a bad idea from the start because a) Pavel is a technophile and loves all things computer, and b) his parents were/are completely computer illiterate.  I can't remember all of the details, but I do remember walking by the room hearing something along the lines of "Click the red X, click the red X. No, the red X. CLICK THE RED X, DAMMIT!"  They emerged hours later looking like they all needed a stiff drink.

As Pavel's wife, I have learned to live with this aspect of his personality, having been forced to learn the art of mind-reading, and if the situation involves other people, know that I must sometimes translate for others, if necessary.  However, I can 't say I'm batting 1000 just yet.  Case-in-point: Valentine's Day 2011.  I should probably preface by saying that for years and years (and years and years) I'd been subjected to the "Valentine's Day is bullshit invented by flower/chocolate/lingerie/jewelery companies to rake in the dough" diatribe leading up to the holiday, and while I can't say V-Day was always a complete nonevent in our house, it usually manifested in Pavel buying a bouquet of flowers and/or making a nice dinner, but only grudgingly.  Nothing to sneeze at, I know, but combined with the fact that our children had not let us sleep more than six or so fractured hours a night for weeks straight, I wasn't expecting anything out of the ordinary this year.

The day began like any other, with a crying baby at 5:15 a.m. and a whiny preschooler shortly thereafter, but since I had been up multiple times that night with Matěj, Pavel let me sleep in.  We were all severely sleep deprived and every single one of us was grumpy, making for a slightly surly breakfast mood, ending the morning rituals with a fight with an increasingly independent 3.5 year old who insisted on wearing two different shoes to school that day.  I finally got into the shower at around 9:00 a.m., where I was surprised to see the letter "F" written in one of Jakub's bathtub markers on the shower tile.  In my exhausted delirium, I at first wondered how Jakub could reach so high, but then realized that he probably can't actually write the letter F, and even if he could, it wouldn't be that neat.  My second thought was if I was in the right house because I couldn't imagine what would possess Pavel to write an "F," or anything else, for that matter, on the shower wall, not to mention the fact that I didn't realize that he had actually registered the fact that we owned bathtub markers in the first place.  My THIRD thought--going back to the grumpy mood the past several days--was that Pavel had started to write the f-bomb out of frustration, but then decided against it.  However, hearing a loud bang from outside the shower curtain and deducing Matěj had flung the cellphone I gave him to keep him occupied clear across the bathroom put the thought of "F" out of my mind entirely.

Nothing more of interest happened until about a half hour later, when I got a text message from Pavel that said, and I quote, "Pavel."  Some people would have been bewildered by this, but I knew that when Pavel doesn't know what to write in the "Subject:" heading of an email, he writes "Pavel," and just assumed it was a cellphone email gone awry.  Not long after this I was checking my email and saw that Pavel had posted something on my wall, so I hurriedly clicked to open the email, expecting some sort of proclamation of love or link to a romantic song only to find, and I quote (again), "vd."

Now, some of you may wonder why I didn't realize there was something afoot, but when you've got a toddler fussing and climbing up your leg all morning while you're trying to clear the table, load the dishwasher, wash dishes, clean up, get dressed, in addition to one dog barking to come in, the other barking to go out, etc., etc., I just didn't string these events together until Pavel called me:

Pavel: "So, did you get it?"
Me (thinking): What the hell are you talking about?
Me (speaking): "What?"
Pavel: "Your Valentine's present."
Me (thinking): What the hell are you talking about?
Me (speaking): "What?"
Pavel: "Did you get the hints?"
Me: "What hints?"
Pavel: "I left you some hints."
Me: "You mean the text message and the facebook post?"
Pavel: "Yes, and one more."
Me (uncertain): "You mean the F in the shower?  What kind of hints are they?"
Pavel: "I don't know, you figure it out and call me later."
[Naturally I had no idea what "F," "Pavel," and "vd" are supposed to mean on their own, or together and, thankfully, I didn't make the connection that "vd" also stands for "venereal disease," or this Valentine's Day could have taken a nasty turn.]
Me (wracking my brain furiously): "Wait, F could mean F drive on the computer, but do we even have an F drive on the computer?"
Pavel: "I don't know, try it."

The ONLY, and I truly mean the SOLE reason I was able to figure out what the hell it all meant was because, for a few nights previous, I could hear Pavel playing Bruno Mars' "Just the Way You Are," over and over on the computer, and I knew that it wasn't one of his favorites, but it was one of mine.  So after this huge stab in the dark, it turned out that the clues, put together were, F:Pavel/vd (which, it turns out, was supposed to stand for Valentine's Day, not venereal disease), folders on the computer, which contained:

{Sorry, I had trouble embedding it, so you'll have to click on the link}

I'm glad I was finally able to tune my radio to his wavelength. :)

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