Why is someone around here always getting stalked?

You guys remember Liz, right? Of course you do. You know, the nutjob who hounded me via text message for the entirety of my engagement and for the first few months of my marriage. The good news is she hasn’t contacted me since Valentine’s Day.

The bad news, though, is that it seems like we can’t go two months without someone in this household being stalked.

Hey, "nicky" (or Mike, since that is how I remember you), I will not be attending your pick-up basketball game. Nor will I ever. I just don't like pancakes enough to suspend my enmity for you & your crew.

As it goes, were I too have been at the Maryland Ave School, I would have expected you to bring me my Built to Spill & Gang of Four records that I loaned to you. (Funny, that I was listening to GoF before you. Me, the non-hipster... Guess it pays to be aware of more than just Adbusters copy & the pert rack on the "bisexual" crush-objects that call their hometowns by silly shorthands.)

(But there I go, again, mentioning Kristin, which you have apparently compartmentalized within your biography to just so little hipster jargon. Never mind that your second wife doesn't look half as good in the face, nor that your first wife/baby-mother was a bit too far on the side of doughy (where K. was only just curvy (usually, yes, I use that pejoratively, as a counter to the faaaaat people's insistence on their physical grotesquerie just being a nod to mid-century definitions of beauty, but not here, not now).)

I won't go on then, on your past... Especially considering that the simulacrum of compassion you married is exactly what you deserved, & she as well deserves precisely you.

Last laugh, homes. Last laugh.

The author of this fine piece of prose is a guy named David. David was one of Mike’s friends from high school, but had cut off all contact with everyone in their circle of friends when Mike was around 20. He thought they all had serious moral shortcomings. And yeah, in the past Mike was a music snob and went through a stupid-behavior phase, but he quickly realized he was being a jerk and put it behind him.

Which, apparently, is more than David can do. Because David has held this grudge for six long years, and has declared Mike his arch-nemesis. Seriously. And the gem above was a posting to a message board, because David thinks that another one of the users, a guy named Nicky, is actually Mike in disguise.

It is not. Poor Nicky must be so confused. Tirades like this have been happening for a long while now.

The funny thing is, David doesn’t even have all the facts straight. The Kristin he talks about in the post above never dated Mike. They were friends, and she dated another one of Mike’s friends. David thinks that Mike married this other girl he dated before me, someone named Amy, and that they had a kid together. They didn’t. Somehow he knows that Mike and I are married. However, he once referred to me as a “plain girl,” where instead he should have written, “It’s plain that this girl will beat me if she ever sees me again.”

I shouldn’t say that because he does seem to believe that Mike would attempt to fight him if they ever met. Which, if you knew Mike, you’d realize is completely untrue.

It’s all pretty harmless because David feels like he gets his jabs in by berating Nicky. So, of course, Mike isn’t hurt. I am a little concerned, however, about what might happen if David ever gets accurate contact information for Mike. But then again, someone who’s just taken internet pot-shots at their own arch-nemesis for six years has to be kind of a coward.

Actually, I’m really surprised that David has managed to keep up his outrage for six whole years, but I suppose part of it is that he has turned Mike into this symbol of everything that’s wrong. Hating that makes him right, somehow.

Although the one I really feel bad for is Nicky. Poor guy must be utterly lost.

Snow & Scares

Yesterday Dykewife asked if it really is unusual to get snow in April.

It sort of is. It's definitely not unusual to have flurries, but it is odd to have more than an inch in one storm. I'm not sure how many inches fell yesterday, because eventually it turned to rain and some of the snow melted. The weather forecasters were calling for eight inches, and while I'm not sure we got that, a storm of that size is unusual.

Today I'm wearing sandals. It's still chilly for sandals, but dammit, it's spring. Spring means sandals. Hey, I don't make the rules, I just follow them.

The other day Mike got a scare when my sister stumbled across his MySpace page. His MySpace page has a link to his LiveJournal, which has a link to my LiveJournal, which has a link to this blog, which, as we all know, my family doesn't know I have. She friended both him and me, and so after the friending he removed his LJ link from his page, and I removed my blog link from my LJ. That's the closest anyone has come to discovering my blog, and it kind of freaked me out.

Afterwards I friended her fiance, to be nice. It's a move I'm regretting since now it means I get all of the bulletins and messages that he sends to all of his friends. Some of them are crude or inappropriate, and while I'm not easily offended (I wouldn't be able to work where I do if I blushed every time the conversation got a little blue) I'm a little uncomfortable with it because it means my sister is thinking that way too. And I'm not ready for her to be thinking that way.

This also means Mike will get my sister's bulletins, which will freak him out. She's got one of those "What would you do with me?" memes up right now, and I know he won't like that. Mike is easily weirded out that way. Once I showed him a photo of my friend Meghan, who's pregnant, where she was lifting up her shirt to show off her belly. I wanted him to see how her belly button had popped out, but he immediately looked away and said that it was improper to look at my friend's bare stomach. Apparently it was too scandalous. He's going to be traumatized when he receives my sister's, "Would you kiss me? Would you sleep with me?" meme.

So yeah, there's been quite a bit of excitement around here lately. But at least the snow is melting.

SNOW!

Words cannot express my displeasure at having to make my hour-long commute in the snow in the middle of fucking April.

April!

And it's not even over yet. It's going to snow and snow and snow until tomorrow night, and then it'll finally cease. Next week will be in the fifties, but for now, we're still under a blanket of snow.

This afternoon's commute was scary. I was driving up an on-ramp to get on the freeway, when all of a sudden I saw that apparently the freeway had been plowed after the ramp, because a bunch of slushy snow had been kicked up right where the ramp meets the freeway. Unfortunately I didn't see it in time to slow down, so I hit it at about 50 miles per hour. I started to skid right into the lane, but luckily I was able to straighten my car out before I skidded into someone.

All this because of the snow. In fucking April!

I hate Wisconsin.

Easter Sunday

Yesterday Mike and I spent Easter Sunday driving all over southeastern Wisconsin trying to visit everyone. First we went to church, then it was off immediately to my parents' house. We spent a few hours there with my parents, my sister, and her (yikes) fiance. After that we went right to Mike's parents' place and stayed there for dinner.

When we arrived Mike and his dad immediately parked their vans in the driveway, tailgates facing, and started the long process of moving his parents' stuff from the old van into the new one, and transferring the stuff from his car and a few items from the garage into the old van. I sat inside the house with his mom, listening to her opinions on their new kitchen, their ham, ham in general, the new van, the old van, Mike's old car, vehicles in general, my brother-in-law, and other stuff. Mostly it was a monologue, and whenever I tried to contribute she talked over me. People in his family talk over each other quite a bit and not out of malice, but I still haven't figured out how Mike can capture his parents' attention and get multiple sentences in without interruption. It's a conversational trick I'm still learning.

I'm really trying to get along with his mom better. I like his brother and his dad a lot, but have a tougher time with his mom. During the course of our visit I figured out why...she and I have some traits in common, and the others are completely opposite. The biggest trait we share, and the one that causes the most friction, is the fact that we each believe that it's our job to take care of our little family. Unfortunately, our families overlap where Mike is concerned. Instead of just tag-teaming on the nurturing, we sort of grapple for control. I suppose my determination to take a job during the summer, and perhaps a second job during the school year to make extra money for us is no different than Mike's mom's desire to ply us with random groceries or money during every visit.

Mike's mom and I are settling into a pattern. She gives money to Mike while I'm out of the room. I do some baking and send it back with Mike's dad, who never turns down my cookies. She takes us out to eat. I bring some food to their house as a surprise, and put it in her fridge before she can protest. There's a lot of love in our family, and in the coming months and years we'll figure out whose love is winning.