Blast From the Past

Although I'm sure you can't tell by the sporadic blogging here, but I used to be a very faithful journal keeper, wrote every day for about ten years. Lately I've been rereading some of the older ones. It's a lot of fun reading about when the kids were still cute and still liked us, and about things that happened that would otherwise be lost in the murky mists of time. And then there are the ones that I cringe when I read cuz I can't believe I was ever that dense. Take this entry for example. You would not believe how much I've learned about marriage, women and conversation since this happened. (Annotations from the modern me in red)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST 1995

On the third day of our third year of marriage Kim and I got into a little tiff -- we never fight we just tiff -- it was a fairly typical one for us -- in fact an almost word-for-word clone of one a couple of weeks ago.
Here, recorded for posterity, only slightly one-sided, is what happened.
I returned from the library, my wife, who had been a bit beneath the weather, was watching TV, specifically "The Young and the Restless." I said, "How's that girl?"
She said, "What girl?"
I pointed at her and said, "That girl!"
She said, "I'm not Marlo Thomas." (There are lots of places in this exchange where I could have prevented this from becoming unpleasant. This is probably the first. I should have just laughed at the joke.)
I said, "I'm surprised you're familiar with that show. It must have gone off the air in 1971, you were only three." (This is probably the second. At the time I was still inordinately proud of my wife's youth, but sometimes trying to express that pride could come off as insulting.)
She said, "Did it last that long?"
I walked into our bedroom, retrieved a reference book, looked it up, went back into the living room and said:
"Well, I was close, it actually lasted until 1972." (And that is definitely the third. What an annoying know-it-all. I'm still a know-it-all, that hasn't changed. But I'm a much quieter know-it-all now.)
Or started to say that. Kim held up one hand that meant either "Shut up" "Go away" or "Go away and shut up."
This upset me because she has said that "As The World Turns" is the only soap opera she cares about, and we had this exact same fight -- I mean tiff -- during the "Young and the Restless" a while back. Then she said the reason she told me to be quiet was because the character was buying a wedding ring. Nobody was buying a ring today. (And here is where the cringing really gets intense. This guy here is really in need of a clue.)
I said, "I hope you come to me and say 'How come you don't talk to me anymore?' and I'll say, 'I tried.' " (Crrrrringe)
And things went downhill from there. All patched up now though.

I read this to Kim the other night, and she said, "Well, we've been together for fifteen years and so far I've never been tempted to ask how come you don't talk to me." You can probably figure out why.