Have you had fun reading something I've written?
One of my 60-plus rescued diaries teach you something nice or profound?
Has my relatively apolitical existence here (compared to a few, at least), helped you get by during those dark times when it seems like Democrats who go to Washington forget why they're there?
You owe that, through a variety of factors, to the woman currently sitting in our living room.
She was born 24 years ago today. And apart from writing this diary, my activity today on this site is going to be nonexistent. I'm adding her and my vote to yesterday's poll and spending one of my two weekly days off with her.
When I was writing one of my 15 (give or take a few) Holocaust diaries and came to thinking about how I might profit from the diary (long story, but I didn't), ... the horror of that thought. To profit from telling other people's stories about that singular tragedy.
She was there. I bet she couldn't understand half the words I said, but part of the deal with marriage is all you have to understand is there's pain and it needs somewhere to go.
That was my schindlerjuden befreiung diary.
And at least half of Today in History at one point had me in tears. Researching, writing, editing, responding to comments, ... the tears come pretty easily, and she's gotten very good at pausing whatever's on the TV, patting her lap and having me come over and wet her shoulder some.
So help me make sure she has a happy birthday.
Of late, I've taken to making things up. Life is too short to take it all seriously.
Some of you, it seems, are not getting the message. I blame the Republican Party for being un-oneuppable. A Tennessee state senator was caught yesterday in a sex scandal involving an aide, and I got the senator and the aide wrong, but I got the state and the legislative body right -- in a snark diary I wrote probably two weeks ago. It's still a draft. And it's kind of frightening when that stuff happens.
Now, her typical reaction to reading one of my snark diaries is, and I quote (because I've been hearing it nightly for ... ever, actually, for snark diaries and everything else),
You're so WEIRD!
Ironically, the snark diary my wife loved most was the David Shuster one, which she loved particularly because she hates how he breathes in. That piece was a labor of love.
Some of you probably know that I work in Texas. I got my job about six months after I graduated from college.
I graduated because of my wife. Seriously. I didn't care before. I was a brain, however capable, with plenty of energy but without any sincere direction regarding actually getting the piece of paper and moving on with my life.
My GPA at my last college (of three -- told you I had direction issues) before the wife and I got together was somewhere near 1.85.
After I met her, somewhere near 3.7. (And if I hadn't been working three jobs, it would have been higher.)
That's what she's meant to me. And that's what marriage is supposed to be. I don't call her my better half because I think that's overused. But anything I do that's worth doing begins and ends with her, if only mentally. She's the half of me that organizes and cares. (The other half is ridiculously elitist about caring only in certain circumstances. Makes for an interesting work ethic.)
When you've seen me do more work for a diary than most people might do, it's been because maybe she'll read it and she'll notice I left something out. Can't have that.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a wife to tend to.