Bernie MacBook

I was reluctant to share the story of my newest acquisition, because it might make me look very smug and materialistic.

False.

Actually, I'm no less smug and materialistic as a 27 year-old. I've just been a wicked slacker in uploading photos to share my smug grimmace over my newest materialistic acquisition.

A few weeks before my day of cake and candles, Lovey asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I sighed, "Oh, maybe some books," all the while hoping the Phantom of Birthday Philanthropy would take pity upon my dealings with a 9 year-old compooper and gift us with a new one, one that didn't take half an hour to ramp up and from thence exhibit symptoms of comooper hypochrondria.

Intermittently, I would visit my school's website where they gave student discounts on computers, and sometimes those perusings might possibly have led me to send e-mails to Lovey with the highly subliminal subject line "YOUWANTOBUYMEAMACYOUWANTTOBUYMEAMAC."

But I accept my life of poverty in the House of Broke, where the greatest weekend indulgences include trips to B.J.'s whereby we *might* partake of the snack bar Ohcanwecanwecanwegetsomenachochips???? And I do not expect anything new to come my way until the day when Wee Lee stops making us Christmas presents out of paper mache. When he/she is twenty-two.

So imagine my delight and surprise when I arrived home after 15 hours of sticking it to the man and sticking it to the professor to be gifted with a box, a heavy box...

I'll enlarge the photo here so that you can appreciate the kind of man I married, one who is not afraid to ask my family three months beforehand about contributing to the Bernie MacBook fund for Kendra. Thanks, Lovey, and thanks also to my amazing family, who taketh pity upon the poor. Thou shalt be remembered on vanity websites. And thou shalt inherit the love of the smug and materialistic.

Bedfellows

We are a two bed household. Not the '50s Good Catholic throwback two bed household with two single beds right next to one another, leading nosey guests to wonder which bed is for babymaking. Rather, we are a two bed household with one bed that we sleep on and one bed that our guests sleep on when they delight us with their company for a weekend or more.

The guest bed was gifted to us by a good churchie, whose generosity is generally unmatched. It is one year-old. It is from IKEA and is a commodious queen. The frame is blond wood which matches the rest of our furniture. Ahh, but the mattress. The mattress reminds me of curling up on a large, level plateau of dense tiramisu, iced with marshmallow creme. It is delicious.

The bed on which we sleep was purchased seven years ago through 1-800-MATTRESS. It has no headboard, nor baseboard, nor anything that would make it look like it is a charming "place" to sleep. The double mattress is suspended off the ground by a metal frame that is portable enough to fold up and be mistaken for tent stakes. Oh, and the frame has wheels so that if one person is already sleeping in the bed and another person is climbing in the opposite side, a small nudge typically interrupts the slumberer from her date with the Sandman. The mattress needs to be flipped periodically because of all of the strange rivulets and dips wrought over time. The double bed cannot be likened to the experience of sleeping on top of a dessert. Unless, perhaps, it is a bundt cake.

Lately, I am inclined to take my swollen ankles, my charlie horses, my rotund belly which feels the small boxing gloves from within more acutely these days, and my peanut bladder into the guest room to resign for a night's nap. Lovey Loverpants follows because there is room enough for two to sleep comfortably, and for two-and-a-half to sleep moderately comfortably. And yet, we spend much of the night adjusting to the different noises and alternating for climate control since the guest bed may as well be a hemisphere away from our room. By the morning, we are stupefied as to why we are still tired, having slept on tiramisu all night without ever our two starfish appendages touching.

The other night, Lovey made a furtive plea that we both sleep in "our bed" tonight.

"I just don't like the guest bed as much. You know why? Because I feel so far from you. I wake up in the middle of the night and I don't know where you are."

And for all of the nights spent sleeping in our bed with an elbow in my rib and waking up to my hand gone numb under a neck, there is a reason why our bed is our bed and not the guest bed. There is room to extend our accommodations for guests, but there is no need to be generous about the space that we share in sleep. Even in our sleep, we can feel distance, and we can get lost. Nothing like reaching out a hand to find another that brings you back and reminds you of where you are, even in the dark.

Left to My Own Devices

My parents rarely left me alone until I was 10 or so. On the occasions when I was left alone, at home, to my own devices, I went buckwild.

My parents were, until very recently, very boring people. Boring by these standards: They paid their taxes. They had the same jobs since I was born. They subscribed to your standard suburban people magazines: Time, Better Homes & Gardens, Sports Illustrated. The people in their address books actually lived at those addresses and those were their real names. Their hobbies were reading, golfing, cooking, and vacationing to non-exotic places, like the beaches in South Carolina. They never talked about illicit drug use, shagging in microbuses, or anything else truly insane, other than doing unscrupulous things while drunk, like driving over railroad tracks, but that happened before I was born, so it really didn't count. Not that I wouldn't have been horrified (!!!) if my parents actually had talked about these things like they actually happened recently, "So, you know, we were all just lounging on Patty's back porch and talking about the best way to tame Wisteria when all of a sudden, Monica, started the wave, and by that I mean she lifted up her shirt..." but my childhood was mainly stable and very boring, and, for this, I consider myself very fortunate.

These days, my parents are much more interesting. But I'm not going to give you the goods on them for free. You'll have to pay to read about them in my autobiography. After I write it, someday.

But back to being home alone in the house of my boring parents. Even if my mother was only gone to the bank for 15 minutes, I would raid all of her Christmas letters - the ones that were addressed exclusively to her. I would go through her jewelry box and try on all of her gypsy-ish earrings. I would try to unlock my father's briefcase. I would go jump on the living room couch, reserved only for sitting on when company came over.

None of these activities ever netted me the kind of mischievous satisfaction I had hoped it would. Of course it didn't. My parents were very boring people.

And if they had anything exciting to hide? I'm sure they would have hidden it, in places that I would never have thought to look.

As years passed by and I was left at home with my siblings for long nights, and as I garnered a fairly large pool of babysitting clients, the temptation to stir up trouble began to fade. I didn't want to look at things that didn't have my name on them. I didn't want to open doors, or briefcases, that were obviously barring me from entry. I don't know if this was part of becoming a teenager and feeling as though I had so many thoughts of my own to keep under lock and key, but I began to be more respectful of the responsibility of being left alone.

Now, however, since I am Never Alone, since I have the loathsome chore of coming home every night to a warm, loving body, who immediately asks what I want for dinner, the moments that are Mine All Mine alone in our two floors of ghetto fabulosity are rich and delicious. Yesterday, while Warm Loving Body was practicing for his triathlon, I staged a photoshoot -- Ohhh and we've lost the entire state of Utah's readership and that of my sister at the mention of the word photoshoot. Not that I implied it was anything risque, even though, when my bunkmate finally found the pictures after sitting at his laptop for 8 hours where the pictures were SAVED TO HIS DESKTOP WITH HIS NAME AND "LOOK AT THESE" clearly typed, I told him that the man from craigslist had come over to assist me, since I wasn't very talented with the tripod.

I soon think my bunkmate will be password-protecting his laptop from now on....

Mama didn't raise me with no manners. But she sure did give me an imagination.