Forty-five minutes ago, at eleven-thirty in the morning, I went downstairs to suggest to Mr. Brett that we go to Paul’s Discount in Iowa City and buy him some clothes, and then maybe go eat something or see a movie.

I had to wake him up from his position on the couch in front of the boob tube to suggest this.

He promptly asked me to scratch his back. Which I did, because I am fond of him in spite of himself, but he went back to sleep.

This is a true story.

Now it’s twenty after twelve and I’m wondering if I should try to wake him up again to do something today, or if I should just blow it off and start with the daquiris.

It’s rainy and overcast. I’ve been washing throw rugs, sweeping and dusting, tidying. I also de-cobwebbed, which is something of a gross job but important when you live in an old house in the country. Spiders fled my cleaning wrath. I found a toad under the coffee table and carried her outside.

There is no end to the sweeping and laundry that needs to be done around here.

I’ve eaten bread and brie, potato chips, and hot cocoa today. Lousy diet. Now that it’s noon, I might start on the daquiris again. *smirk*

Sometimes I feel like all I do is take care of Brett. Since he started with Schauss-Voorhies, he leaves early and gets home late, and I spend a lot of time alone in the house doing things for him. Making beds, cleaning, cooking dead animals. When he gets home, he wants me to bring him his dinner and scratch his back and ravish him. In that order. He seems to think I’m household staff and not his life partner.

Last night I was a total bitch to him. He got home around seven, which means he’d been gone thirteen and a half hours but had only worked for seven, and immediately he stripped to his boxers (leaving his filthy clothes on the floor in a room I’d just cleaned) and asked me to sit on the couch with him and cuddle him and scratch his back.

I said, “I don’t want to scratch your back.” I thought, Doesn’t it occur to you, ever, to offer me some TLC? You know, catch more flies with honey and all that?

He started whining about how I never this for him and I never that for him, and what a poor victim he is that I don’t live to scratch his fucking back after he’s spent a hard three hours drinking beer at the bar.

I said, “Fuck you, dude. Seriously. All I ever do is wait on you.” And then I went into the kitchen and finished preparing his dinner of steak and mushrooms with wild rice pilaf. Elsewhere about the house there were clean clothes for him to wear, a gallon of iced tea in the fridge, and a living room that was clean and tidy. Where in the holy hell did he get off thinking I wanted to give him a massage, too? Yes, I know he’s been working hard lately, but no one gets away with the shit he gets away with.

God, it’s like I married into motherhood. (The fact that he was willing to marry me at all should have tipped me off.)

Marriage is so much better for men than it is for women. All Brett has to do is breathe and bring home a paycheck. If it weren’t for the fact that he lets me work part-time and ends up effectively paying me to wait on him, I’d hold his head under water until he quit being so annoying.

If only running a household was satisfying on any level. It’s boring, repetative, and endless. I’m thinking about going back to work full-time and just letting the place go to hell. It’s not like we throw dinner parties or anything anyway. I could tell him he has to do his own laundry, his own shopping, and his own cooking. I could simply live in my office on microwaved TV dinners and salad, and ignore the whole rest of the house.

The man would literally die of shock! Snort!