Last fight

I've had some difficulty losing weight over the last three or four years. I've never been obese or anything, but I still needed to shed some weight: a year ago it was thirty pounds that I needed to drop, and now, it's around twenty. I realized that the biggest problem was that my wife kept feeding me high calorie food almost every morning, and even when I asked her to switch me over to vegetable drinks or something else, she would keep cooking for me.

At the start of this month, I just decided to tell her to not cook anything for me for a few months, and that I would take $100 off of her monthly payments from me (my food budget) while I got back down to a good weight. It worked very well for the first two weeks of this month, and I lost almost ten of the last pounds I wanted to lose, but then my wife started cooking for me again.

Today, she asked me for more money this month, $60, citing the fact that she had made food for me a few times. I said that I was already giving her over $100 for her Christmas shopping, so she should make do with what she had. She went quiet for a moment, then said that she felt uncomfortable, that a family shouldn't be quibbling over specific amounts of money like that. She was, of course, completely ignoring her own hypocrisy in bringing this issue of $60 up in the first place. I locked my eyes onto her like cutting lasers, and spoke deeply and strongly:

"You can't pay for everything with $1200 a month? For the last four years, I've given you over $1200 a month to pay for nothing but food, clothes and insurance, and that still isn't enough?"
"..."
"I paid my way back at my apartment with $700 a month, and that included rent, bills, taxes, food, everything. Why is it that you need to spend almost twice as much for just food and insurance?"
"I don't know."
"Over $1000 a month, every month, for four years. Just one month I give you $1000 exactly, and you can't pay. What are you spending it on? Considering that you seemed real happy to make this out to be my fault in the first place. What are you spending it on?"

She counted up all the costs, and came up over $1000 short, so she started adding in things that I pay.

"No! I pay the bills, I pay the taxes, and I pay our son's college fees. You pay your mom and our rent with your salary. That leaves $1200 I give you for food, insurance and clothes. What are you spending it on? What have you been buying, every month, for four years?"

She tried to change the subject and say that I had to pay her more the previous years because she tutored, and she paid the bills with that money.

"That has nothing to do with what we're talking about! And by the way, I still pay you the same amount of money every month that I did back then, even though I pay the bills now! So what have you spent $40 a day on, every day, for the last four years? I get barely $3 a day of my money to spend on gas and food. I wish I could spend $40 a day!! So what are you spending it on?!" I demanded.

She cited our son's milk, about $100 a month, and toiletries, barely $50.

"That still leaves over $1000! What are you spending it on?!" I roared.

She got quiet, and then came over to the Angry Chair to do some calculations. I went back to watching TV until she stopped writing and went back to the floor to wrap up Christmas presents. I took a quick look through the checkbook, which she religiously writes in for thirty minutes a day, implying that she should know exactly where all the money is going. She stopped $800 short, and she didn't explain any further.

I hate acting like a blasted ape. But I have no choice: when I'm nice to my wife, she presses her advantage and treats me like garbage. When I try to reason with her, she gives me the silent treatment for hours on end, then explodes later. It's only when I'm forceful after she is completely wrong that she backs down. And does this compare at all to what my life was like before I got married?

My wife is an obstacle, in every sense of the word. She stands in my way on everything: money, emotional support, my sex life, she even blocks doorways with her enormous girth. Everything I do in life has to be done around or through her. When I tried to treat her like a princess for the past four years, hoping she would understand just how much she gets from me as her husband, guess what? She started acting like a princess. And she never listened to me when I asked her to stop treating me badly or acting badly to our son. It wasn't until I started treating her like a wife that she began to settle down on the drama.

I want to treat my wife like my friend, as I did when we were dating, but the permanent and draining institution of marriage led her to be a fat, demanding shrew when I tried to be nice. She basically got tenure the second I signed on the dotted line for this "job," and nothing she does will ever get her fired, so the only way I have to keep her from acting up is to make her as uncomfortable as possible when she tries to start a fight. It's like raising a second child.

So now, I have to be someone I don't like being, just to keep the stereotype that is my fat, hairy, frigid, irritable and money sucking wife in check. And with our son relying on us to stay together and provide a good home for him, I have nowhere to go, and I still have over 14 years to wait until I'm free.

Then and Now 51 - Christmas Shopping

Then and Now 51 - Christmas Shopping
Time: Late 2007, dating my wife.

For the sake of this Then and Now, I'm going to refer to my wife as my girlfriend.

So here's something absolutely new to me: not only was this the first time that I ever had to go Christmas shopping on my own, it was the very first time that I actually enjoyed myself at it.

I headed to the underground mall near the train station for my big shopping trip, and I wasn't feeling very up to it going in. I'm a typical guy: when I want something, I find the place with the lowest price, go directly there to get it, then get home as fast as possible. So the thought of getting presents for all of my family and friends that night seemed like a night ruined to me.

But when I got there, I began to feel happier to do it. This was Christmas of 2007, and in my entire life, I had never been richer. I think my net worth at that time was around $5000 from work and light living, and I hadn't taken my Christmas trip back to America yet, so I was living high off the hog. It felt good to live a life of plenty, and to be able to share that success with the people around me. I was in the underground market with a couple hundred dollars to spend, and began my search, store by store, for the best presents for everyone.

I came across my younger younger sister's present first at a little custom accessory shop: it was a little bracelet with her name written on the side. The shop had a front area with bins of accessories and a few machines (sewing and the like), and the boss was working in the back. She came out when she saw me, a nice lady in her 40s who spoke English rather well, and I chatted her up. We mixed our languages talking about my fun time in her country, my life back home, and the fact that she wanted to try living in America at some time in the future. She kept trying to introduce her daughter, who had come back from school, to me, but the daughter was too shy to say much.

After that, I found another store where I bought my girlfriend a cute little rabbit doll that was holding a carrot in its paws, because I liked to call her "Bunny" sometimes. Later, she removed one of the threads on the carrot so only one side was attached to the doll, and she used it as a "carrot gun" to playfully shoot me at my apartment when I stepped out of line. She loved it back then, but I don't know where it is now; it might be at her mom's house.

Next, I went to a cards and collectibles shop to get something for my stepdad, and found a huge box of Magic cards written in the local language. I never really liked the game because every time I played with him, it would take an hour for me to set my creatures up and one card for him to kill everything, but I thought it was a fun gift to give him. The store had a couple of cases of figurines and games, but the place smelled like funk, so I left as soon as I could.

For my mom, I went to the very end of the underground mall where there was a very literal tiled wall that stopped any further progress, and it had very little foot traffic. I felt sorry for the stores back there: one was an ice cream place, another was empty, and the last was a store that sold ceramic pottery. I bought a miniature smiling rabbit for my mom at the last one. The lady who ran the shop didn't speak any English, and she was pretty old, so I only complimented her on the beauty of her art pieces before I left.

I later went to a music shop to get some local rock music for my older younger sister, who is a huge music fan, and who loved the Ella Fitzgerald CD I bought for her a few years before.

For my grandma, I bought an angel doll that could be plugged in to light up, because I knew she liked collecting Christian-themed goodies.

At another game shop, I got a plush 1-UP from Super Mario Bros for my brother, seeing as how he rode a motorcycle and was going to Iraq back then. He loved it so much that he made it an ornament on his rear view mirror in his truck, and his friends asked me to get them some shrooms, too.

At the same store, I got a plush Donkey Kong for my best friend, because he and I were huge Kong fans back when we played Super Smash Bros on his N64.

Finally, I got a miniature Vash the Stampede figure for my other friend Oscar, but nothing for my bud, because I wanted to give him my collection of Resident Evil novels back home, as I knew he loved the series.

With everything bought, I went up and out of the underground mall and back onto the streets. The night was somewhat cold and the road was dark, but in front of me was a huge department store, towering in the darkness. I turned around and fished out the 1-UP, then took a picture of myself holding it, smiling happily as I headed home with my swag.

As for today...

I woke up at 6:00.
I played video games.
My wife and son woke up, so I turned off the game.
I played cars with my son.
I watched TV.
I went out to tutor students.
I came home.
I started a load of laundry.
I cleaned up the floor and table.
I played video games with my son.
I hung up wet laundry.
I slept.

Then and Now 50 - Tina Warms Up

Then and Now 50 - Tina Warms Up
Time: Mid-2007, single and at my apartment.

This was the first time I had with Tina after her apology email in Then and Now 39, where she needlessly said that she was sorry that she didn't speak up more often. When I met her on this day, the change in her wasn't night and day, but it was still significant. She and I met up in the train station, and she smiled brighter than I had seen her smile before. Together, we went to an underground mall which went several miles from one part of town to another.

One of the first things we went by was a man playing a violin in a corner, collecting some money from passerby. Beyond a little fountain, we came to the dancing kids area that I saw in Then and Now 16, but that day, Tina and I only saw some families resting by little fountains. We passed by several hundred stores down there, including a local video game shop, a kids' book store, a bunch of clothes stores and a pottery shop, talking all the way about life and fun we'd had in the past few weeks, until after about an hour, we popped out of the underground market and back onto the street.

Outside was a movie theater that played movies that had been out for a while, only at a discounted rate. There wasn't really anything I wanted to see back then, because I had already seen Harry Potter 5 back at my bud's aunt's place in Then and Now 24, but I made a note of the location for later.

Tina and I then went to lunch at a local restaurant. The door was open to the heat outside, but there were some fans inside keeping everyone cool. We got a table off to the middle-right, with a few people surrounding us in the front and back. I had some breaded meat, she had a simple bowl of soup, and we talked more openly than the times we spent together before.

Finally, after lunch, we walked around until we got kind of lost, and found ourselves alone in an alleyway with a couple of cozy houses around us. We sat down in front of someone's planter, and Tina pulled out a little book from her pocket to show me a trip she had taken with her friends. I was happy that she was finally opening up enough to share something more about herself.

The previous summer, she and several of her friends took a road trip to the other side of the country, where they stayed in one of her friend's vacation homes. She had a lot of pictures of this trip in her book. One was of her and her friends piling their junk into their friend's tiny car, another was of them all standing outside the cute little vacation house, and she also took several pictures of herself standing atop a cliff looking out on the ocean. I felt really happy at that moment, and not just because she was finally sharing with me. I felt that she, like I, was living her life happily with friends and journeys across the land, and really living life to the fullest. Her life was going as great as mine.

She showed me a couple dozen more photos, and recounted her experiences shopping and walking around in the beach town there, for a good thirty minutes. Unfortunately, she soon had to go, so we went back to the train station and said goodbye. I almost immediately met my next hang-out "date," but with the number of friends and acquaintances I had when I was single, I don't even remember her name.

As for today...

I woke up at 7:30.
I went to work by train, and played video games on the way.
I taught students.
I came home by train, and played video games on the way.
I ate lunch.
I drove to another school.
I taught students.
I came home.
I cleaned up the floor and table.
I folded and put away dry clothes.
I started a load of laundry.
I surfed the net.
I hung up wet laundry.
I slept.

Then and Now 49 - Rain Preserve

Then and Now 49 - Rain Preserve
Time: Mid-2007, single and at the hostel.

One day at the hostel, I was using my subway map to find random stops and places of interest, as I had done in Then and Now 18. One of the stops was a single stop that connected the two main lines, but there was nothing of importance written on the map. I assumed it was some kind of residential area and that it ferried a lot of people to the two mutually exclusive lines, but I had to go see it for myself before I could check it off the list.

I got to the station, and it was dead, absolutely dead. There were only maybe ten people, mostly parents and older people, and nobody was making a sound. The lights were kind of dim, too, making it seem like some kind of ghost station. I quietly stealth-footed out, with the tiny thuds of my shoes sending echoes off of the high ceiling, and I exited the station to the street above. Right as I came out, a little bit of drizzle started to come down from the grey sky above, but thankfully, it never got any heavier than that.

The street was very long, and there were few cars passing by. I was walking on the side of the street that had some non-descript buildings to my right, but to my left was a massive field of green that was surrounded by a wide fence. I walked for a short time until I came to a museum, and deciding to get my cultural fix for the day, I went inside.

The lady there told me in the local language that they would be closing soon and that I couldn't go in, but when I promised I would only take a few minutes, she let up and said I could look around. I smiled and thanked her, and as I was walking in, I asked if I had to pay anything. She said that because I didn't have much time left to look around, she would waive the fee. I smiled even broader and thanked her again.

It was very quiet there, too, simply because just about everyone had checked out. The museum was divided into about six floors, with each one carrying a different theme. I remember that one of the floors was an ancient history floor with some old pottery and stuff there, another was classic portraits of locals in traditional and modern clothes at work or play, and another was a collection of different kinds of tools and technology, and how they evolved as the country continued on through history.

The final floor, which I think was the sixth, was horrible. It was some kind of modern art gallery and absolutely nobody was up there, and I don't think it was because the museum was closing. Almost every piece up there was just flecks of paint on a white canvas, or absolutely blank (save for a single triangle or something in the middle), and other kinds of nonsense, done in five seconds "pieces" that had nothing of relevance to say. I went back downstairs seconds later.

I left the museum shortly after and headed across the street to a place where the buildings of that part of the city started to thin out. I came across a very high hedge that wound around a very wide city block, and wondering what was inside, I followed it until I found an opening. On the inside was another tall building with a roof that angled outwards, and with some kind of reflective paint on the walls. Beyond it was a very wide natural area, some kind of nature preserve or something. There was a little path that went around and through patches of trees, which many, many locals and their kids were walking on. And beyond the paths, just behind the strange building, was a very wide man-made lake with some ducks swimming in it.

I stood on the banks of that lake for a while, listening to the sound of the drizzle lightly hitting the ground around me, and watching the ripples it made in the peaceful lake. I couldn't help but smile.

After that point, my memory gets hazy. I remember walking down some busy streets and coming across a part of town that had something like five pet stores all on the same block, and one of them had a parrot chained to a bird stand outside, but otherwise, that's about all I remember of this fun trip.

As for today...

I woke up at 6:00.
I played video games.
My wife and son woke up, so I turned off the computer.
I watched TV.
I took my son out to get breakfast, then we went home.
I spent about three hours fruitlessly searching for my lost keys, and roughhoused with my son off and on.
I went to work by train, and played video games on the way.
I taught students.
I came home by train, and finished video games on the way.
I cleaned up the floor and table.
I folded and put away a mountain of dry clothes.
I played video games.
I slept.