“Your baby appears to be reasonably humanoid and free from grotesque abnormalities – congratulations!”

Sometimes shitty things happen that are totally a surprise. You start the day thinking everything’s going to go great and then BAM! you get groped on the subway, causing you to spill your coffee on your brand new suede boots, and then you’re yelled at by a passenger for splashing them. And you’re stunned all the while because you thought it was going to be a perfectly normal day.

Sometimes shitty things happen and they’re not a surprise at all, even though nothing suggested that anything should have gone awry. You get groped on the subway, spill your coffee, ruin your boots, and get yelled at by a passenger – and you’re not surprised at all because you knew you shouldn’t have got on the subway that day. You knew it, you did it anyway, and now you’ve been groped and your day sucks.

I hate that. I hate the knowing and the subsequent ignoring and the resulting shitty day that maybe could have been avoided if I just didn’t do the thing I didn’t think I should be doing.

So today, instead of going into the city with The Princess, I stayed home because it felt like a really really bad idea for me to go.

Crazy, right? Which is the reason I would normally just plow ahead, and do whatever it is anyway. Except, if I keep having instances where after shit happens I’m left thinking to myself ‘I knew I shouldn’t have done that/gone there/etc.,’ and I don’t do anything differently – well that’s crazy too.

You know how that one time, for funsies, you thought it would be a good idea to write your list? Sorry, your List. You know, the list of everyone in your current or past on whom you wish unbearable physical harm/humiliation/financial ruin etc? And then for whatever reason, instead of throwing it away, you put it somewhere for safe keeping, maybe because you thought it was kind of funny, or maybe because it was on paper and you felt Go-Green guilt for putting it in the garbage – and even if you tore it up it would still be too intact to go in the recycling – because people can be unethical snoops and you never did get around to investing in a shredder. And then out of the blue, one of the people on your list actually dies. And then part of you has a really terrible urge to dig up that old list and cross the name out, or put a check mark beside it – because that’s the sort of thing you do when maintaining a list. Except that would be crazy so you can’t. And if it was ever found it would be weird enough to explain on its own, and even weirder to explain with one of the names crossed out and dated.

So what I’m saying is: Goodbye Aunt Jane, your popcorn always smelled like pantyhose and the possible explanations for that still frighten me.

Joking joking – Aunt Jane and her pantyhose popcorn died years ago!

The world has not quite but almost righted itself. I found out that the 3 Remicade nurses I mentioned previously – the smart women with active social lives who have seen actual naked men and have read real books, but were somehow head over heels about 50 Shades of Grey … had never read any erotica before. Frankly, I’m pretty sure they were totally unaware that erotica even existed. Yes, this may seem weird – it did to me, but after asking around a bit, I’m realising that this is kind of normal. A lot of women have never heard of erotica, and A LOT of women have never read any.

This baffles me, but the whole ‘women being pissed at their boyfriends for looking at porn’ thing, begins to make more sense.

The crying.

I don’t know how lesbian couples get through this. Girls – women – ladies – FEMALES cry. We just do. It isn’t about weakness or sensitivity, or manipulation (most of the time). It’s just how we’re wired to deal with extreme emotion. When the Princess and I argue, there are enough tears involved that the threshold point is already near. Swap the Princess out with a woman and the crying limit is breached far too early into the argument for the hidden, underlying issues to be addressed, much less resolved.

When the Princess and I clash, it’s usually a bit into the argument that we figure out what we’re really upset about, and this tends to be where my tears show up. The Princess usually doesn’t get weepy until we’re wrapping up the resolution. If he started crying when I did, the whole thing would get stupid far too soon to be useful and we’d have to delay and reschedule the end game. Totally inefficient. It would drive me nuts.

Unless I’m just not meeting the right lesbians, it doesn’t seem like they cry any less than hetero women. How do they get anything done in a relationship? Write each other letters? Argue via email? Texting?