Tuesday, March 22, 2011

It's a Me Thing # 5: Spring Has Sprung






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Friday, March 11, 2011

The Perils of Cohabitation #1: Boyfriend is Stronger than Me

Boyfriend is stronger than me. Despite having stopped playing competitive football a couple of years back, and having very little time to work out lately due to the amount of work he has been putting in to his teaching practicum, boyfriend is still stronger than me. MUCH stronger.

I work out at least three to four times a week. Boyfriend does not. He is still stronger than me.

My arms and legs are longer than boyfriend's. I can reach more things than he does, and physics-wise should thus have more "leverage". I, however, do not. Boyfriend is still stronger than me.

Boyfriend complains that he is out of shape constantly. He tells me that he is weak and he cannot wait to get back into "fighting form". By comparison, however, this matters naught. Boyfriend is still much stronger than me.

This is boyfriend.

In real life, boyfriend looks less like a juiced guido gorilla in a skintight t-shirt. It's been a long day, don't hate on the crappy artwork.

I often call on boyfriend to lift heavy things around the house (partly because he is better at it than me, and partly because I just enjoy watching him do it). He performs these tasks with far more ease than myself. 

On occasion, boyfriend and I also go to the gym together. We don't work out "together", just near each other. I do my own thing, and he does his; it is impossible not to notice, however, the strong discrepancy in our workout styles.

This is me:

This is boyfriend:

It is a highly embarrassing process for me to endure. To this day, I often wonder why I continue to do it.

Perhaps the best representation of boyfriend at his strongest is when he gets angry. It is at these times -- and boyfriend does, on occasion, have a rather imposing temper -- as he flings large objects yards away from him, or kicks irritating household clutter into shattered oblivion, that you can truly see the extent of his brute strength.

Okay, so maybe he does look a TINY bit like a gorilla...

All in all, boyfriend has got muscle to spare. He knows this -- it has been proven on numerous occasions (and through numerous playfight losses on my part). And so, when presented with the following situation day after day, I truly have to wonder if there is some alternate-kitchen-universe-conundrum boyfriend deals with, that makes such a simple task for me by comparison so devastatingly difficult and heavy to lift that he simply cannot perform it without my assistance.

You see, this is our dishwasher.
Good boy.

It does a great job washing our dishes; in fact, it cleans them with the greatest of ease. 

This is our sink.
Twice the fun!


It is a double sink in the middle of the kitchen, and it is lovely. It has a garburator on one side, and a regular soaking sink on the other. It can grind up stinky scraps of inedible food just as easily as it can wash my hands, fill a water bottle, or generally look shiny.

This is the proximity of our sink to our dishwasher.
There are a lot of scars on that hand that I did not previously notice.
It is perhaps five inches, at the absolute most, between the left-most edge of the dishwasher and the right-most edge of the sink. They are practically touching. It's like the Shakespearean romance of kitchen placement: so close, one can nearly feel the other... they are practically Siamese twin kitchen appliances.

And it is this proximity -- this harrowing, puzzling, clearly-boyfriend-frustrating proximity, that continues to confuse me. After all:


This blender must weigh a ton, and the switch to put these strawberry tops down the garburator must be as heavy as an elephant, because why else would the distance between the dishwasher and the sink be so clearly insurmountable?

Curses! Foiled again! I'll get you next time, boyfriend...