So on a regular basis, I invade my husband’s Twitter mentions and tell him to stop whatever he’s doing and come suck face with me. Lately, he’s been working on instructional videos for his new company. While he’s great on camera (look, he just is! It’s not even me being biased because I think he’s a smokeshow!), actually doing the A/V work is pretty uncharted territory for him, so he gets on Twitter to ask people for advice on how things look, and what he should do differently. A lot of the answers are really helpful and supportive.

I also have things to say.

Lower the camera and take off shirt and maybe pants.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

okay but why are you still wearing a shirt, i thought i made myself clear

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 27, 2021

Anyway, apparently I’ve been doing stuff like this for a while?

I just found a picture of you as a naked toddler holding a bucket over your winky.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) November 4, 2016

Honestly, I’m just kind of a nightmare of a wife.

YOU CAN REPORT IT FOR ASSMENT.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

Anyway, today I did it again.

TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

The thing about Rand is that while he’s pretty good at playing the straight-man in this carnival ride of wedded whimsical fuckery, every now and then I push a little too far and … well … he’ll call me on my bluff.

pic.twitter.com/J0lw5yrU6z

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 3, 2021

Touché, Mr. Fishkin. Though I’d like to think we’re all winners here: him, for having that chest, me, for getting to appreciate it on the regular, and the good people of Twitter, who get to see it for the first time.

Now if you’ll excuse me …

sneaking into your office right now to make out

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

I nodded, but had been planning a gift for him anyway – something unexpected and fun, but not so expensive or over-the-top that I couldn’t squeeze something else in should he suddenly decide (as he occasionally did) that there was something he wanted. Predictably, a few days before his birthday, he excitedly told me he’d figured out what I could get him for a present.

“For my fortieth birthday,” he said, with a slight dramatic pause, “I would like you to give away forty things.”

I grabbed my chest like someone in a Spaghetti Western who’d just been shot. I insisted that this was not how things worked. Birthdays presents cannot be negative space. They cannot be the absence of something but the presence of it. They are about frivolity and the unexpected.

“I want you to give away forty things,” he said again. “That is what I want for my birthday.”

My husband would describe himself as a minimalist. I would describe him as a heartless sociopath when it comes to material possessions. I’ve seen him open up cards from his 90-something year old grandparents, smile affectionately as he reads the contents, and then gently fold the letter up and put it in the recycling bin.

“You can’t keep everything,” he tells me often.

“Yes,” I reply. “But surely you can keep some things.”

Before I go any further, let me absolve myself of the inherent accusations of hoarding that will necessarily accompany a request such as his: I genuinely and truly don’t think I have that much stuff. I realize that most hoarders say this, but IT. IS. TRUE. I’m constantly running out of clean underwear, I tell him, which I feel like is a testament to the fact that I don’t have enough pairs.

Still, I will concede: I am far from a minimalist. My adolescent and teen years occurred in the 90s, a decade during which young people were accumulating worthless items with the enthusiasm of squirrels stowing away nuts for the upcoming winter. “Come over and see my sticker/pencil/troll doll collection” young people would say to each other, and then we would silently judge one another on the quality and neatness of entirely worthless caches. Social hierarchies were established on who had amassed the heftiest pile of Lisa Frank accouterments.

“How do you expect me to have friends when my ceramic owl collection is just pitiful?” I tell Rand tearfully. He stares at me for a long time without speaking.

“Look,” I whisper to my husband as I throw things into the trash. “Look how I purge.”

“Those things are garbage,” he tells me. “Throwing away garbage is not something to be lauded. It is what you are supposed to do with garbage.”

His request is not unreasonable. Our home is a sprawling thing. Finding 40 items to give away should be easy, but the problem is that I have just purged well more than that recently. I have tossed things from my closet, I have cleaned out my jewelry drawers, I have gone through those boxes in the basement that have remained unopened since we moved. But these things can’t count. They wouldn’t be a birthday present if they did.

And so I start again. This time with objects that I want to keep, but that Rand hates.

I have, in the last few  years, developed the delightful hobby of tormenting my husband with photos of objects from the Goodwill, threatening to buy them. Occasionally, but not always, I do – (the inconsistency, I’ve found, creates more anxiety). But sometimes just the threat of buying something is torment enough.

I left the giant mug and demon painting, but bought the chip bowl shaped like a hat. Whenever I used it, Rand would groan like a old door.

“Please,” he said, “Get rid of that thing.”

For his birthday, I finally agree to.

“It should count as more than one thing,” I tell him as I pull it out of the cabinet.

“It counts as one,” he replies. I have married a monster.

“Do shoes count as two distinct objects?” I ask. They do not.

I hold up a free promotional key chain and ask if it qualifies. Rand stares at me blankly. That is trash, he tells me. Why do I even have that? I sigh.

My memory is a vast thing. This should make things easier to throw things out, shouldn’t it? I should retain stories and not things. Instead, objects serve as a sort of external hard drive – I can’t throw them out without recalling why I’ve kept them for this long. I don’t know how other people’s memories work – but fittingly for a child raised on television, mine plays out like a clip show. Here are the earrings I was wearing on the night Rand proposed. The watch he gave me for Christmas, 2001. The program from the show we saw when he took me to New York for the first time. If I close my eyes, I can revisit those moments again and again. If throw those items out, does the memory go with them?

I keep these things, of course. Better not to risk it.

I think about how quickly my stepmother cleaned out my father’s workshop after he died. I think about the desk where he spent so much time and how bare it looked afterwards. I wonder what happened to his things. I think about the fire that tore through my mother’s home, burning all the letters he sent me. I want to tell Rand I’ve given away more than forty things in recent years, but that would defeat the purpose of the gift. Instead, I place the chip bowl into the giveaway pile, along with precisely 39 other items. My husband beams at me, and I stare at his face, trying to remember every detail.

And then the idea of punching Nazis became far too relevant and timely again.

And Rand continued to perfect his impression of Sean Connery.

And I went to the thrift store and found the perfect shirt. And the perfect jacket. And suddenly the pieces started to fall into place.

Sure, sure, Indiana was the dog’s name. And okay, he was a terrible, I mean absolutely terrible professor, if you really think about it.  But also:

And:

What’s the old saying? Be the Halloween costume you’ve always wanted to fuck? Pretty sure that’s it.

So this Halloween, this happened:

Drs. Henry Jones, Jr. and Sr.

Which I think we nailed.

Oh, and then … our poor friend Rob. We enlisted him to dress up as The Grail Night. A character who is on screen for maybe 3 minutes total. And good sport that he is, Rob went along with it, wooly eyebrows and all.

I asked Rob if he had placed the fake eyebrows directly over his real ones (he had) and what was going to happen when he tried to take them off. “I’m punting that problem down the road.”

If you haven’t seen Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, this makes little sense. And a fair number of people hadn’t. But the few dear souls that got it … well, they really got it. One guy drunkenly shouted, “OHMYGOD I FEEL LIKE I’M IN THE MOVIE.” when he saw us. Which absolutely made my night.

And there was another unexpected side-effect of my costume: dressing up as one of my favorite fictional male protagonists left me feeling like a badass in a way that I could not have anticipated. I told Rand that I was tempted to dress like this all the damn time. After all, it was comfy as hell, strangers were screaming “INDY!” at me, and  TWO PEOPLE GAVE ME THE GUY NOD.

Plus, we were adorable.

Even if this is, you know, profoundly weird, because we’re father and son.

Though it took us years to finally get around to it, I’m so happy these costumes eventually came to pass. Because they were so much fun. And it was nice to take a break from all the garbage in the world for a little bit … while still remembering one crucial thing:

Nazis? They’re the bad guys.

How it came to be was radically different from my own path. When I wrote a book, it became a job, it became the thing I was doing because on a daily basis, there’s not that much else that is asked of me. But there are always things asked of Rand, and I watched him write this book in stolen moments between a thousand other obligations.

I would ask him if he had plans for the weekend, and he’d reply that he had to get two chapters done by Sunday evening. I stared at him, mouth agape. I didn’t understand. I still don’t. But that is the nature of my husband. Give him any measure of time – a scrap of it, a spare moment, a half hour uninterrupted and left to his computer, and he will make something great. Give him several measures of time, and that great thing will be a book.

It is called Lost And Founder and it is part-memoir, part-cautionary entrepreneurial tale, part-startup guidebook.

It’s been fun to be on the other side of things, to sit in the crowd and listen as Rand reads from his book, to see friends as well as strangers stand in line, waiting for him to sign their copies. To hear him answer the questions his moderators and the audience asked of him. To finally – after being the recipient of so much good advice from the love of my life – be able to offer a small measure of it in return.

“Read every excerpt beforehand to yourself,” I said.

“But I’ve already done that. I recorded the audiobook.”

“Trust me,” I told him. And as we sat at the dining room table, Rand read a few paragraphs about when he found out about my brain tumor. And even though it was years ago – firmly cemented in the past so that months go by and we don’t even think about it – he broke down. He looked up at me, stunned, as if I had an answer to what was happening.

I shrugged.

“It’s just what happens when you read something aloud in front of someone else,” I explained. I had learned this when preparing for my own reading: a couple of lines into certain chapters about loss and love, and I found myself crying. But after reading it a few times, the tears exorcised themselves.

The read-through technique worked much the same for Rand. By the time he read for the crowd in Seattle, he was fine. Actually, he was great.

Was he heckled by an audience member for his excessive handsomeness? Yes, yes he was. (I regret nothing.)

I told him that this was way too much to write when signing someone’s book. He ignored me.

“Rand, first question: are those leather pants?” – our friend Glenn, who is a ruthless interviewer.

For his New York reading, we had a car pick up his grandparents in Jersey and drive them into the city. The room was packed.  The bookstore supplying copies for the event sold out of Rand’s book.

My photos are blurry because I sat high atop some bleachers with some dear friends in the back. Both Rand and Mike, our friend who moderated, were brilliant, and yes, I am biased, but it’s still true, damn it.

Afterwards, my husband’s grandparents, now firmly in their 90s, walked through the streets of New York with us – streets where they had grown up – and told my husband how proud they were of him.

Later, I would ask him if getting a book published was the realization of a lifelong goal.

“No,” he said, “it’s the realization of a two-year long goal.”

I love him dearly. And so I resisted the urge to hurl a hardcover copy of his 2-year-long-goal at him. But that, I realize, is how he operates – these accomplishments of his – these things which I think are unquestionably incredible – are not the apotheosis of his career. He’s still searching for what that is. In the meantime, he finishes projects in those spare pockets of time he has. And sometimes, those projects are a really wonderful book.

“No. Your book has been out for a year, and they have a lot of copies. That’s a good sign. That means they keep it in stock.”

“Are you sure? Because doesn’t it mean that no one’s buy them-”

“No. It’s a good sign. They restocked them. They’re selling for full price. This is good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It’s still a surreal thing to see my book in bookstores. I don’t really process it as something I’ve written. It’s more like when you see something that you own that you haven’t made – like a shirt or a mug or a lamp – in a store, and you think, “Hey! I have that at home!” It’s just a neat little coincidence. It’s certainly not enough affirmation of your career to counteract the lifetime of self-doubt that you’ve managed to accumulate.

Ahem.

And now recently, I’ve had the added privilege of seeing my beloved’s book on bookstore shelves, too:

But this deserves its own post.

While down in Portland last week, Rand and I stopped into Powell’s, where I had the slightly-less-awkward-now-than-it-was-the-first-dozen-times-I-did-it privilege of explaining to the staff that I wrote this particular book and would it be okay if I signed a couple copies? I’ve found that the people who work in bookstores – both independent ones and big chains – are always incredibly grateful and obliging when you ask this. And you know those “Autographed” stickers that you see on the cover of signed books? They always have those on hand, and as soon as you’re done signing your book, they slap one of those on the cover. It’s … well, it’s really fun. I need to remind myself of that, because sometimes I forget to take the time and really enjoy those moments.

At some point, as I was signing books at Powell’s, I looked up and caught Rand taking photos of me.

He captured the exact moment I realized what he was doing.

Until I spotted him with his phone out, I hadn’t considered that what was happening might be a photo-worthy event.

I mean, it was just me standing there.

In one of my favorite bookstores.

Signing copies of my memoir.

Of which they had plenty in stock.

It’s really easy for me to lose perspective on how great my life is. Luckily, I have someone who is always reminding me.

My husband and I are driving through southern Oregon, like we have every summer since we were married. I see a Red Lobster.

I scream.

I tell him to pull over immediately. He ignores me. After more than a decade together he can distinguish between my “something is urgently wrong” scream and my “I need a cheesy garlic biscuit” scream (he is able to read nuance).

He keeps driving. I accuse him of not loving me. He disagrees. I tell him that I need endless shrimp. He counters that no one needs endless shrimp. I tell him that orcas do. I feel that this is a winning argument.

“You are not an orca,” he says.

I tell him that one day I will demand he take me there for my birthday, and he will be unable to deny me. He says nothing. The restaurant’s sign grow smaller in the side mirror.

My husband refuses to eat at restaurants with more than two locations. He does not understand the love that is ingrained in me. It predates him. We have to travel back to find its origins, to a time when everyone has terrible hair and most clothing is layered over a turtleneck. Welcome, dear friends, to the 1980s.

I am 4. Or 5. Or 6. My age correlates perfectly with the number of years my mother has been in America. She and her parents are Italian. In my earliest memories, she and my grandmother spend hours in the kitchen. They roll out pasta by hand. My mother stuffs cannelloni and makes bechamel. My grandmother makes giant pizzas covered in anchovies and the oil pools on top of the cheese. It is Seattle a decade before the internet. There is no such thing as fresh mozzarella in this new world. I am round-cheeked and sustained almost exclusively by carbohydrates.

By the time I am in the third grade, we have moved to Florida, a state which is almost completely surrounded by water. Maybe my mother thought a peninsula would be more like Italy. It is not. Florida feels like a primordial creature that has just endeavored to step out of the sea, and may go slinking into it again if you do not pay attention. The humidity makes everything wet. We do not have air conditioning. I am strange for having divorced parents. I am strange for speaking another language with my family. I am strange.

It is too hot to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. My nonna is growing older. My single mother is tired. They do not make fresh pasta anymore. The tradition is gone before I have time to realize what I’ve lost.

My family does not go to restaurants. My mother and aunt argue that there is no reason to when the food you make at home is better. (I am young. I do not think the food they make at home is better.) I become a child intent on being the subject of her own demise: I refuse to eat.

Every year or two, my uncle visits from Italy with his family. I do not realize that we are lonely until after they arrive and it dissipates. My grandparents smile. My mother laughs. My family does not feel small and isolated. Look, there are more of us now. We lovingly scream at one another in the same language. We are not an island. We are attached to something bigger. We are a peninsula. We are better than Florida.

(We still do not have air conditioning.)

My cousin and I collect tiny mollusks from the beach, pearly blue in color and barely the size of my fingernail. My aunt carries them home in my useless bikini top (the first time in its existence that it has actually carried anything of substance), and later will serve us a pasta studded with tiny clams. She will insist they are the same bivalves we collected. I am skeptical, but eat it anyway. (Twenty years later, she will admit to the deception: the clams were canned, and ours were discarded.)

After weeks of effort, my cousin and brother and I succeed in systematically breaking down our parents’ defenses. There are three of us and our whining is a magnificent chorus that spans two languages. Enough with your pasta. Enough with your recipes. Enough with my nonna’s hands, covered in salt to remedy the burns she sustained while cooking because her eyesight is failing. Take us out to eat.

Our choices are limited. We are in central Florida near the end of the twentieth century. Our upscale dining options are Red Lobster and Olive Garden.

We end up at Red Lobster because we are not going to Olive Garden. Contrary to what their extensive marketing campaign claimed, no Italian wants to go to Olive Garden. Our only option soon becomes an annual tradition. Some summers, we go twice.

The minute we step through the door, I feel an opulence I thought was inaccessible to me. This is the height of middle-class American casual fine dining. There is air conditioning. There are tablecloths. There is the sound of clinking silverware in the distance and a tank of lobsters by the door.

I marvel at these creatures, marked for death. I press my hand against the cool glass of their prison. I should be sad, but I keep thinking that their end will be noble. Besides, I am absolved of guilt for the demise of these particular crustaceous souls: no one at our table will order lobster. Even our extravagance has its limits.

Every meal comes with a salad, and we all opt to make ours Caesar. It is covered in cheese and croutons and I think how fancy Caesar must have been and how he is Italian, like us. I honor my heritage with bites of once-crisp lettuce now limp with dressing. When I later learn that Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana, I will refuse to believe it.

I almost always order the same thing: shrimp scampi and a baked potato with “the works.” I order my potato this way because it sounds elegant, and it costs the same as a potato with merely butter. I am getting the most for my dollar. I am savvy about money. When I am grown, I will be rich and eat here every week.

The visiting Italians marvel at the potato. They have never seen anything like it. I want them to fall in love with America. I want them to move here so I feel less alone and so that my grandparents are happy all the time, but they never will.

The shrimp swim in a tiny ramekin of butter and garlic. Scampi is an Italian word, I think proudly. The servers do not treat us like pariahs. We are regal. We are European. The Romans conquered the world, and now we have conquered Cheddar Bay.

The biscuits come in baskets, inexplicably mixed with spherical hush puppies that are doused in powdered sugar. The savory mixes with the sweet but we continue to eat basket after basket. My mother tucks a few in her napkin and smuggles them out of the restaurant in her purse. Two biscuits to later be shared among three children. It will be a bloodbath.

We do not order dessert. We do not order soda. I do not mind. I do not feel deprived. Those are for people who like to waste their money. We are too clever for that. Besides, there is an abundance before me. Behold the bounty of the sea, dredged up from the depths of the oceans, battered, and deep-fried. We have both tartar and cocktail sauce. We can have everything. For ninety minutes, we even have air conditioning.

I am so full that I have to unbutton my pants.

Time passes. We move back to Seattle. It is cold. My grandmother stops cooking. My grandfather stops eating. They leave us all in one fell swoop, my grandmother in the spring, my grandfather in the summer.

Six months later, I meet my husband. He is refined. He has straight white teeth and clean fingernails and impeccable taste. He takes me out to an Italian restaurant for our first date. The napkins are made of cloth and there are candles on the table. When he rests his forearms on the table instead of his elbows, I realize I am out of my depth. The owner stops by our table and I chat with him in my mother’s native language. This is calculated. I want to impress my date. It works.

Many years later, walking through Milan on a chilly night, I will ask him if he thinks it is neat that I speak Italian.

“Neat?” he says. “No. No, I do not think it is neat. I think it is a goddamn superpower.”

He takes me out to beautiful restaurants that neither of us can afford. When we are out of money we stay at home and cook. He obsesses over my family recipes and learns to make them better than I do. He learns to make them better than my grandmother did.

He cooks countless dinners for me, and on nights when I am finicky, he cooks two.

I accuse him of not loving me because he will spend hours in the kitchen preparing me a meal but will not take me to eat unlimited Cheddar Bay biscuits. This is the same argument I made to my mother more than twenty years ago.

We are driving through southern Oregon again. It is three days after my 33rd birthday. I do not know where my husband is taking me. I cannot see the now obvious conclusion of the story. I am in a state of disbelief when he pulls into the parking lot and opens the door. At dinner, he puts on a bib and beams at me over a brilliant red-orange lobster, and all I can see is his smile.

————— 

Note: I’ve written about this before on the blog, but I reworked it into this piece and never found a home for it.

My husband, Rand, is more fashionable than me. This is contrary to everything that movies and television have taught me, where the female sex is supposed to be stylish, and men can run around looking like they’re in the middle of washing their car. Behold.

But that’s not the case with me and Rand. He consistently looks great. And sometimes, despite knowing better, that makes me feel really awkward.

The inherent sexism in all of it is clear: women are to be valued for their appearance (that bequeathed by both god and Barney’s) and men are to be valued for their brave efforts to pass cargo shorts off as formal wear. So I must commend my husband for bucking convention and gender roles in his dapperness. Because … dear lord.

I mean … what the fuck is even going on here?

It’s like a scene from The Most Interesting Man in The World: The Early Years. It’s like the sorting hat at Hogwarts put him in a house called “OH HELL YES.” He looks like he went to Jeff Goldblum’s Fashion Summer Day Camp for 9 straight years and earned lots of merit badges having to do with smoldering.

My life is a nightmare. I am married to a guy who looks good in 90-degree weather, while jet-lagged, while hiking the goddamn rock of Gibraltar, the latter feat being so preposterous that our friends who were traveling with us could only turn to me and ask, “Seriously, what the fuck?”

I don’t have an answer for them. I have loved this man for nearly 15 years and it has always been like this. He smells like cedarwood and incense and raspberries and competence and he rarely has cake frosting on his shirt.

Australian comedian Celeste Barber recently wrote about her life with her hot husband and all the difficulties it carries with it. She has to deal with random people walking up to her and saying “Well done” while gesturing to her dishy partner, which is sort of complimentary in an incredibly insulting way (like when dogs hump your leg. It’s like, “I guess I’m flattered, but WTF.”)

This has happened to me occasionally. People will look at Rand appraisingly and usually give me a proud nod. But more often than not, they don’t even realize we’re together, because the dude looks like he’s from an entirely different tax bracket.

And I look like I’m cleaning out my car circa 1998. I look like it’s Casual Friday at an accounting firm manned by hobbits. I look like promotional consideration has been paid for by apathy, color blindness, and the irregular clothing section of Ross (which is, for the uninformed, the entire store).

I look like a crazed fan who’s been standing out in the sun for hours hoping to get a photo with the star she has an interminable crush on (an analogy that isn’t even that far from reality).

Dude is flawless. All the time.

Here Rand is wearing a shirt by an indie French designer and I have on a tank top that I got on sale at Ann Taylor Loft even though it was the wrong size. I literally slept in it the night before and was like, “Ah, what the hell.”

Rand looks like he isn’t even warm and it was literally a hundred degrees.

My editor recently asked me for a placeholder author photo for my book, and I had to send her one from 2012, because that was the only one I could find where I didn’t look like I was shipwrecked.

And I know what you are thinking: for fuck’s sake, quit complaining and just LEARN TO DRESS YOURSELF. But darlings, I have tried. That’s the terrible part: this is me trying. I’m wearing jewelry and make up and I’ve done my hair, even though it seems like I picked this look out of I Think She Just Came From the Gym Magazine.

Society as a whole has created the impression that as a woman, I should just know this stuff. That once you start menstruating, you also understand whatever the hell a sheath is, and how to find one that works perfectly with your body type (even if that body type is, as once described by the saleswoman I encountered in a London boutique, challenging.) There’s this understanding that the female sex is supposed to be fashionable, and those of us who have male partners are supposed to dress them, because boys are utterly clueless, AM I RITE, LADIES? HA HA HA HA HA SOMETHING SOMETHING CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN.

This bullshit misogyny goes both ways. We think that men – and in particular, straight men – aren’t supposed to understand fashion. If they do, it somehow negates their masculinity. I’ve had straight women tell me, bemused, how they have to buy all their male partner’s clothes because their guys just HATE to shop. And when I tell them that I’ve tried to buy things for Rand, but I usually miss the mark because he’s so particular, they just sort of stare at me for a long time.

“Oh. That must be … nice.”

Because clearly, if a straight man likes to shop, something is very, very wrong with him. It’s fine if a gay guy understands the traditionally female domain of clothing, but if a straight guy does it? Well …

Rand occasionally gets homophobic slurs hurled at him (most recently while walking down a street of a major Midwestern city). He obviously doesn’t mind if people think he’s gay (because, you know, being gay isn’t an insult. Duh. A few weeks ago, a handsome young man stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Rand coming around a corner, looked him up and down and said, “Oh, my.” Rand smiling ear to ear, looked at me afterwards and said, “Still got it.”), but he does hate the hate. He told me he was grateful for the glimpse at what so many of our friends go through – and also sort of amazed at the judgments people make based on how you look.

That you can get harassed even if you look nice. Hell, you can get harassed because of it.

And while so many of us are great at not being superficial when it comes to others, we have trouble extending that same human decency to ourselves. I would never pick on a friend for wearing her old Converse shoes out to a bar, but I do that to myself all the time.  I consistently feel self-conscious because the love of my life … well, he cleans up better than me. I say this not as a desperate attempt to conjure up compliments for myself, but as a statement of fact. As though that’s somehow what’s important.

Let me be clear: clothes are great. They keep us warm, save us from lots of awkward interactions with family members, and prevent us from getting injured while cooking bacon. They are a great vehicle for expressing yourself. But there isn’t a right way or a wrong way to do it. If it’s what you are passionate about, that’s awesome. But stop picking on yourself if you can’t figure out the whole high-waisted short thing. Because – and I know we all hear this all the time, but it bears repeating – it’s really not that important. How we look is due to dozens of things we can scarcely control: circumstance, genetics, our income and the income of our parents’. It was decided at a million different junctions in our lives: when we were in the womb, when we decided to shave our head in college, when realized that we hated running and high heels and that we loved pants that felt like pajamas.

And none of it really matters.

If Rand wants to take a stand against traditional gender roles and sexism, and do so while looking downright gorgeous? I need to be cool with that. I need to remember that it’s not a reflection on me. If I want to dress up, I can. But I don’t have to prove my worth as his partner via my appearance. I’ll wear cargo shorts while he turns heads.

But make no mistake: that pretty little thing all dolled up in the corner? The one with the legs that keep going and going? He’s with me.

The proprietor stands behind the counter, eyeing us warily.

“How many do you want?” he asks.

Lisa and I look at each other.

“Maybe twenty?” she offers tentatively.

This sounds like a lot, even to me. The man behind the counter is doing his best to withhold judgement, but I see his eyes bug out at this number.

“How about ten?” I suggest.

“They’re … they’re quite big,” he says.

“We’re feeding a large group.”

Even as these words leave my mouth, I realize how unlikely they sound. The three of us – Jon, Lisa, and I – have a sort of maniacal look in our eyes. It seems highly probable that we’re just going to go into the alley around the corner and mash the fried confections into our mouths under a searing Spanish sun. Even in a best case scenario, there might be five or six of us at most.

We end up getting ten churros.

“Con chocolate?” he asks.

“SI, SI!” Lisa and I say, overly enthusiastically.

Jon has a sort of half smile as he watches the exchange unfold. The man behind the counter laughs. He now understands who he is dealing with. That we don’t just want churros. We want an overwhelming amount of churros. A plethora of churros. We want more churros that we could possibly know what to do with. We specifically want too many churros.

“Un litro de chocolate? Or medio litro?” He is holding up a small plastic liter-sized jug, and gestures with his hand to see if we want it filled halfway up or all the way to the top. Normally, the chocolate is served in significantly smaller cups.

“Medio litro,” I say. I mean, we aren’t animals.

We hail a cab, and head back to our hotel. These churros are not for us. At least, not all of them. These churros are for Rand.

Rand has sort of a knack for having ill-fated churro experiences while visiting Spain. To the uninitiated, the fried confection is not unlike an American funnel cake (though I know I’ll get hell for saying that), and served with a deep, thick chocolate dipping sauce that varies from a dark and rich ganache to a significantly lighter custard-like sauce (in Valencia, we kept finding the latter). It is, without hyperbole, my husband’s favorite dessert and one that he seeks out with middling success. The issue is often the time of day – most churrerias are only open early in the morning, or between the hours of 5pm to 7pm. The ones that we’d found that were supposedly open late were either out of churros or out of chocolate. More than once we’d sought out a place that Rand had researched online only to find that it had recently shuttered its doors permanently.

Here he found churros but no chocolate. Look carefully at his face. His eyes are screaming.

And, as my face confirms, churros without chocolate are like showers without chocolate. THERE IS NO POINT.

Rand and churros are star crossed lovers forever doomed to be apart, a concept which becomes substantially less romantic when you consider that one of the pair wants to eat the other.

I am determined that he will not miss out this time. The conference that had brought us and our friends into town ended the day before, and Lisa and Jon and I have spent the day eating paella and shopping while Rand has been caught up in a meeting. We’re determined to end our streak of hedonism with an act of largesse by bringing my beloved a shit-load of fried pastry and chocolate. I text him, and find that he’s already en route to another churreria (naturally).

I call him up and insist that he join us at the hotel, explaining nothing. And to his credit, he abandons his hope of getting fried confections without complaint and comes to meet us. If he is disappointed that he has been thwarted in his pursuit, he does not register it on his face as he crosses the street to see us. He smiles brightly and waves.

And then he sees the churros. And the medio litro of chocolate. (I will let the photos write the next few paragraphs, if I may.)

I was about to make the tired joke that he doesn’t look at me like this. But he does. Fifteen years, and he still does. Pray for him.

Later I notice the rather remarkable similarity between my beloved and Carrie Fisher’s dog, Gary:

His reaction to it all is a joy to watch. Anyone who tells you money can’t buy happiness has never seen my husband’s face when presented with 10 euros worth of churros.

Ten churros. Four people. The math, if you look closely, works out perfectly.

Rand laughed. “You do,” he agreed. “You look like you are hunting me.”

My rapacious pursuit only intensified from there.

So majestic.

I felled him like he was a wounded gazelle. Look how he begs for mercy.

I showed him none.

He has to veto a lot of ideas like that. Some he lets slip by.

Me on my birthday. Photo courtesy of my friend Chrissy. Chicken head courtesy of my cousin Marco.

He was pretty cool about the whole wearing a chicken head while washing dishes and waiting to see if the neighbors noticed. He’s great at indulging me when I want to be immature (within reason. The dessert-for-dinner thing only happens a handful of times a year).

But he never gets to be a kid. This wasn’t always the case, but as the years have passed he’s started having to be an adult. All the time. Most of our travels are because of his work, so while I’m having a blast, Rand is running off to meetings, or presenting at conferences, or doing interviews, or any number of things that I’ve managed to largely avoid in my 3+ decades on this planet.

I try to even the playing field. I make him cookies. I buy him comic books. I try to add a little bit of levity into his life of responsibility. Sometimes, it’s not enough. Sometimes, I need reinforcements.

Sometimes, I need turtles.

We came across them while we were in Austin. We took a shortcut through the University of Texas campus, and we spotted a small pond.

“Oh,” Rand said, somewhat disinterestedly, “it must be a duck pond.” (Let’s be honest: no one gets that excited about ducks.)

And then I read the sign. Turtle Pond. And I showed it to Rand.

In the span of roughly 15 seconds, my husband stopped being a grown-up. In a fraction of a minute, my beloved became a kid.

Here he is waving to them. You guys, he waved to the turtles.

And then my heart exploded.

Don’t tell anyone, okay? Most people think he’s a grown-up. And most of the time, he is.

Except when there are turtles around, obviously.