you're just using me

A few weekends ago, I had some girlfriends over for a quick breakfast before volunteering for the Junior League. One girl requested peanut butter with her bagel -- an excellent choice, I might add. Yet when I opened the refrigerator and began to search, I realized I was unable to find the peanut butter anywhere. I noticed N was trying to be inconspicuous at his corner desk in the living room. I asked him if he knew the location of our peanut butter, when I already knew, full well, what the answer would be.

"Well, see, I needed it for school, so, um, I brought it to school, and, gee, I guess I left it there."

N is a lucky, lucky man. He never needs to plan ahead for supplies, for either his work or his personal life. A typical day in the life of N: Peanut butter and jelly for an experiment? Ah, I'll just take J's Skippy and her expensive-yet-delectable blueberry jam. Hmmm, I could go to the store and get plastic straws... or I could just take all of ours. No computer paper left? No problem... I'll just "borrow" some of J's.

Recently N has taken a liking to my stapler. This is because he has no staples left in his own stapler. I told him where the extra staples were. He forgets their location and constantly noses around my desk, looking for the staples, while I am trying to work. N is fun to live with.

offspring

Tonight, while cooking dinner together, N forced me to listen to Offspring until I could correctly identify the band.

I feel as though the song "Self Esteem" has special meaning for our relationship, so I will excerpt its lyrics here:

When she's saying, oh that she wants only me
Then I wonder why she sleeps with my friends
When she's saying, oh that I'm like a disease
Then I wonder how much more I can spend
Well I guess, I should stick up for myself
But I really think it's better this way
The more you suffer
The more it shows you really care
Right? Yeah!

the blender

So N broke my blender. Well, technically, he didn't break it. I broke it. But I only broke it because (a) he likes to wait until the dishes are overflowing the sink before washing them and thus (b) he needs to stack them in intricate, dangerous, Jenga-esque patterns on our dish-drying rack, which, due to the closet-sized space of the kitchen, is located above the refrigerator, leading to (c) the blender jug narrowly missing my head when I opened the refrigerator door, crashing to the floor, and cracking the plastic. After N made the brilliant suggestion of duct-taping or gluing the plastic jug back together, I then hurled it across the dining room, the ensuing shards of plastic making an ill-advised repair job a moot point.

N then decided to find an online source to replace the plastic jug so that we didn't need to buy an entirely new blender. I appreciate his thrifty ways at times, but waiting a week and a half for the blender jug to arrive was not fun. My longing for my breakfast smoothie was bordering on obsessive when the jug finally arrived yesterday. I unpacked it, rinsed it out, put it in the blender base, and then discovered that our old jug cover would not fit the newer one. Quite frustrated and annoyed, I placed the entire thing on N's desk to talk with him later about it, and completely forgot it was there.

N comes home from a long day as I am frantically juggling several processes in the kitchen, trying to get dinner on the table. I am not in the mood to talk about the blender. N must have sensed this, because he immediately saw the blender at his desk and began to crow about how his amazing idea had solved the problem. I informed him that the cover did not fit and thus the problem was not solved. He suggested we duct-tape the cover. Does the man not realize the problems associated with duct-taping kitchen equipment that must be washed?!? He then decided he wanted to enter our closet-sized kitchen and rummage around under the sink for supplies to execute his amazing plan, part 2. This was precisely when I was maneuvering swordfish steaks on the stove and trying to get them into the oven, and an extra body in the kitchen was not welcome. I flip out and beat him out of the kitchen, scream at him for a while, and then we eat our dinner in silence, watching a horrible movie on television.

Tensions thawed for the hour that we watched Top Chef together, but then roiled up again when we discussed our conflicting views on a recent breakup of two of our good friends. Mental note: thwarted love =/= sexy bedtime talk. Serves me right, I had horrible dreams.

This morning I discovered that I could use our mini food processor to make a passable smoothie.