Stuff you need to get used to after you get married [WIT]

Getting used to marriage stuff
Wifey's "Intelligent" Thoughts

So you're newly married.

You're excited and you feel like you can conquer the new world.  But this could last for only a month.  Or a week.  As days go by you'll probably experience some discomfort--a gut feeling of "something's not right". Or just be outright annoyed and frustrated.  Here are my top 6 things that I needed to get used to:

1. In-laws. (Oh, especially if you live with them.)  Unless they're absentee in-laws or angels.  But more often than not, you'd have to be OK with having two new "angels" peering over your shoulder, making sure everything's alright, or all right.

2. Sleeping with someone on the same bed.  (I didn't expect this, especially since we were all lovey-dovey and eager to, you know, sleep together.)  If you know the fairy tale entitled The Princess and the Pea, it's like that.  You can't sleep because something feels different, but you can't seem to put your finger on it.  Or maybe you're about to fall asleep but you suddenly spring back to consciousness because you're not used to the bed bouncing a little whenever your spouse moves or rolls to the other side.  So go get a king size bed, with a sturdy mattress, especially if one of you likes to roll around while sleeping.  But if you have no choice, then a queen is fine.  Use pillows as your shield.  Then--thank God--at some point you'll get used to it, and it will actually feel weird when he's not sleeping beside you.

3. Your spouse's snoring.  Unfortunately, some people never get used to this.  Luckily for me, I can somehow carry on and wear imaginary ear plugs.  Although there are times when I get disturbed by hubby's snoring, I just push him a little, or move him to his side and, behold, the snoring stops.  For a while.  Then it continues.  But the peaceful silent period between the last snoring and the next snoring gives me a window of opportunity to fall fast asleep, or at least to be too sleepy to mind some rhythmic, ambient sounds.  The next line of defense would be for the non-snorer to wear the actual earplugs, or earphones to listen to relaxing music.  But if all these fail and the case is really bad, it's time for the snorer to see a doctor.

4. Your spouse's bathroom habits.  One is the classic toothpaste story.  My story has a slightly different version--hubby leaves the cap open, and I find myself closing it most of the time.  (The good thing is, none of us gets bothered when it's not nicely squeezed out till the end.  Hehe.)  Another thing is that I had to get used to putting the toilet seat down from its "up" position, since I grew up with the toilet seat down all the time.  I would hear my mind say, "Why do I have to do this all the time?  Why can't hubby do it himself?"  Thus, a compromise is in order.  For example, "I'll be OK with putting down the toilet seat if you remember to close the toothpaste cap."

5. Cleaning up someone else's mess.  It has just dawned on me now that there are twice more dishes to wash and twice the amount of hair that falls on the floor.  Basically, consider the amount of effort that you put in chores, then multiply that by 2.  Suddenly, your free time shrinks and you have less time for Facebook (which has been reduced by 50%).

6. Bodily excretions and your five senses' possible encounter with them--first thing in the morning when you wake up, after meals, at bedtime, or any time without prior notice.  Just deal with it.  It's the only way humanity can evolve.

So those are my top 6.  The good thing about getting used to these eventually is that they cease to be irritating.  Love is a muscle.  You train it. You get training pains as expected, but eventually you'll get used to the sores after each workout.  Your muscle gets stronger, well-defined, and worthy of winning medals.

Caveat: If one or both spouses are super stressed out, hungry, fatigued, or PMS-ing, then these issues will, more likely than not, resurface. And non-issues will become super-issues.  Please remember that in these cases, the afflicted should be given proper treatment and relief, before being judged and sentenced to one night of sleeping on the couch. It is best to prevent these untoward incidents by making sure that each one is not hungry, sleep-deprived, stressed, or in pain.

I'm sure couples out there have other stuff they've needed to adjust to after getting married--aside from the ultimate, life-altering change of having children, of course.

Heaven and hell together at last [WIT]

A marriage of heaven and hell
Wifey's "Intelligent" Thoughts


A couple's great sex life pretty much covers the "heaven" part of the marriage.

I'm not kidding.  OK, maybe just half-kidding.  I'm facing the fact of married life--and I know a lot will agree with me--that a good (or awesome) sex life in a marriage is as important as making a dish tasty (or awesome).  Food will still have nutritional value, but who could stand eating tasteless stuff like that every single day?  It's unbearable, almost inedible.

This isn't about encouraging premarital sex, but I think there is absolutely a great value in doing research on good sex, and having a healthy perspective on it, especially when marriage is around the corner.  I'm afraid that some people don't see its essence in married life, especially because in some cultures, pleasurable sex is generally seen as something sinful, and talking about it is taboo.  But what could be wrong about reading up on how to give a stress-relieving massage (and other tricks, ad infinitum) to your spouse?  Being married for more than a year now, to my surprise and awe, marriage mysteriously does something to sex: it takes out its lustful horns and an "R" or "PG-13" movie rating and replaces it with angel's wings, transforming it into something holy and sacred.  Probably the most pleasurable form of duty ever known.  Making love is literally creating and producing more love and exporting it to the world (e.g. having children).  Happy couples or families are inspired, more productive, and less cranky.

Of course, married life isn't all about heavenly sex--or obviously, a deep, lasting friendship.  Moving on to the hell part of the post... [Insert doomsday music here, such as the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5]

Some people portray their marriage as all rosy and on top of clouds or a dream come true.  And some others, if not most, don't like to talk about the depressing stuff, at least publicly.  Or it's something they reserve to one or a few trusted people.  While the fairytale-like experience of marriage could be very real, it looks like most marriages go through some form of struggle, of varying intensity.  (Calling the attention of all star-crossed lovers out there seeking married life, believing it is happily-ever-after from then on.  Please proceed to the marriage preparation counter immediately.)

There's marriage adjustment, bad bathroom habits included.  Clashes in personality. Conflicting values, views on religion or spirituality, and ways of going about things.  There's the dilemma of having a baby, or another baby, or not.  There's postpartum depression.  Mid-life crisis.  There's infertility.  There's not getting enough sleep due to a newborn baby, or headaches brought about by rowdy kids and problematic teenagers.  Parenting children or children who do the parenting.  There's disease, whether terminal or not.  Infidelity.  Oppression, discrimination, and extreme nuisance from in-laws.  There's the individual's serious baggage and unresolved past.  The "Acts of God" clause in an insurance policy (a.k.a. natural disasters).  Unfortunate crime, security, and safety incidents.  There's financial tension and mismanagement.  Juggling all these with endless, mundane, and stressful household chores and work.  Oh, I almost forgot politics and government.  Did I miss anything?

I don't want to talk about choosing the right partner for you and all the other should's that psychologists, marriage counselors, and experts having been saying over and over again for decades.  (But please, do humanity a favor by listening to what they have to say, and not allowing them to say, "I told you so".)  My unsolicited, one centavo worth of advice is this: before pledging the rest of your life to one person, make sure that you, as an individual, must first have the courage and perseverance to go through hell alone.  Yes, alone.  It is true that husband and wife are "no longer two but one", and it is also true that if you have faith in God, God never leaves you.  And you can also get support from friends and family.  But that doesn't take away the experience--that of feeling as if everyone, including God and your spouse, has abandoned you.  And so it is an illusion that when you get married, you will never be lonely.  In fact, a spiritual director once told me that in marriage, the experience of loneliness is even deeper than that of religious life.  I can't say that every married couple goes through this, in the same way that not everyone experiences an earthquake (or a natural disaster to that extent) in their lifetime.  But if it does happen, please be ready for hell--or at least have the guts to face it.  It won't take away the pain (a hell lot of hurt!), but at least you know that you'll pull through it.  Hub and I are survivors of that anguish.  The thing is, there is no other choice but to survive--it's till death do us part.  You can call that a marriage's curse, but in this case, it is a grace--if not, THE grace.  A deeper and stronger friendship emerges out of the purging fire.  We're more understanding, more patient, and less cranky--even to others.  And that is one big chunk of heaven on earth right there.

I'll never forget the wise words a friend back in high school shared with me.  He said that the intensity of the pleasure you experience in a loving relationship is the same as the intensity of the pain you will experience.  Awkwardly translated, "How pleasurable the pleasure is, is how painful the pain is."

In hubby-wifey life (or in any loving relationship), it can swing to either end of the spectrum.

=====

I've already finished the draft of this post when I Googled and saw William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and discovered that this post's title has nothing to do with the book.  According to Wikipedia, the latter part of his work "climaxes into a fierce proclamation for the different peoples of the world to break the bonds of religious and political oppression".  Whoa, intense.  Not exactly in tune with my married life theme.  But who would've thought I'd share a quote from that?  And it is with this I end:

Without Contraries is no progression.  Attraction and Repulsion,

Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

Ground pork concoction: the never-ending saga continues [DBHW]

Domestic Blunders to Household Wonders:
Ground pork concoction: 4 ways


"Don't ask me what it tastes like or what I put in it.  Just eat it, dammit."

--is how I would describe this dish.  Not good.  But this is about blunders to wonders, and so there is light at the end of this 3-day tunnel.

I combined ground pork, carrots, potatoes, and maybe one or more of the following: your typical soy sauce, Kikkoman soy sauce, Knorr seasoning, some button mushrooms, and miscellaneous herbs and spices.  Had no idea what I was doing, so it ended up a bit weird.  Lab experiment fail.

DAY 1

Lunch:  We were hungry so it tasted OK.

Dinner:  Hey.  This is not as great as we first thought it was.

DAY 2

Breakfast:  Made it into a SANDWICH. I put some ketchup and mayonnaise on a hot pandesal.  I surprised myself!  Yommy.

Lunch:  Eureka!  I made some into an omelette!  Not bad.

Dinner:  Blah.  Getting tired of it.  And so the nightmare continues.

DAY 3

Breakfast:  I forgot about it.  Intentionally.

Lunch:  While still dreading to eat it, a brilliant idea saved me.  I turned it into SOUP!  Added onions, pork broth, salt and pepper.  Surprisingly yommy!

Dinner:  Soup still yommy.  If not, better.

And so this seemingly never-ending saga finally ended, happily at that.  I have observed that some of my cooking nightmares end up as wonderful realities by soup-ifying them.

Don't ruin my happy ending by asking how many kilos of ground pork I used for this dish.

My lips are dry [ISIH]

Dry, unkissable lips
In sickness and in health

In one of our visits to the bank, our account manager commented with a questioning look, "I always see the two of you carrying around a water bottle. Why is that?"  This post is one of the explanations why Bee and I always lug around our conspicuous water containers (the Lock & Lock ones with a blue cap) no matter what the occasion.  When I don't have my bottle with me, it makes me feel like something's missing in my life.

Ever heard of water therapy?  I first heard of this from my sister--a dermatologist--and she swore she got well from a cold just by drinking a huge amount of soup and water in small, frequent doses. But not too much, of course. Please see the Mayo Clinic's take on the daily recommended amount of water intake.

If your lips are dry and it's not because of cold weather, then it's a sign you're not drinking enough water.  Aside from cold and UTI prevention, it also keeps you from eating too much--very helpful when you're on a diet.

If your lips are still dry after knowing that you've been drinking enough water, then it's time to put some water (moisture) on your lips, then seal them with petroleum jelly.  Chapstick's nice for kissing, but my dermatologist sister doesn't really recommend it.  She mentioned that it can actually lead to further dryness. I'm guessing that's because it puts unnecessary chemicals on your lips.

How do you know if your lips are dry? Rub your lips together or touch them. It should feel completely soft and smooth. If you feel some roughness, then it's time to glug on some liquids. So if you see me rubbing my lips together or touching my lips with my finger, it could either mean that I'm checking if I'm dehydrated, or I'm feeling kinda sexy.

How I started out as a housewifey [WIT]

Wifey's "Intelligent" Thoughts:
Starting out as an undomesticated housewifey


I learned how to cook rice only after the wedding.  I learned a gazillion other stuff AFTER the wedding--the type of stuff you'd probably want to know before getting married or before living on your own when someone else has been doing all the chores for you since you were a kid.  If you can already manage on your own, good for you!  But I didn't.  Hence, this blog.

I've been cooking consistently for about a year now, but I'm not particularly passionate about spending tons of time and effort for a dish that could be gobbled up in seconds anyway.

In one of our breakfast get-togethers (just like a 5-year-old, I'm proud to declare that I was the one who prepared breakfast that time), a friend remarked that cooking seemed to come naturally for me--perhaps it was because of the way I had carried myself, looking quite poised in the kitchen.  Seriously now, I was surprised at his comment, since I'd never seen myself as a "natural cook".  After some thought, I replied that maybe it's because I'd been watching a lot of cooking shows and I hung out in the kitchen occasionally while I was growing up, observing household help prepare the veggies.  I'd sometimes help in slicing tomatoes or removing the ends of green bean pods.  And so another friend asked, "So that's all it took for you to learn how to cook?"  Yeah, I think so, I replied.  I started out fumbling, and then I just sort of got used to it.  When you're already starving, you have no choice but to survive through the cooking.

What I didn't tell them, though, was that sometimes when I'm cooking alone, I'd say the ingredients and each step aloud and pretend I'm on a cooking show talking to my audience. "Next, we add two tablespoons of salt to our ground pork mixture, and allow it to simmer in the pot for 5 minutes until it becomes tender and has wonderfully absorbed all the flavors..."

Several weeks after that incident, I realized that although I didn't come from a family of cooks and had no formal training whatsoever, hey, I've had a lot more "education" in cooking than I'd thought!  Watching what my mom watched on TV, my exposure to cooking shows started when I was very little, with a consistent dose of Wok with Yan--I fondly remember Stephen Yan exclaiming "wondah powdah!" And this Chinese woman's show. She was probably in her late 50's and I couldn't understand a thing she said (but I still remember the music played right after each dish is done--it's a variation of "Popcorn" by Gershon Kingsley).  Later on, during summer breaks, apart from Jem and the Holograms, I'd find myself watching Jacques Pepin, quite amused how he'd say the word "orange" in his French accent ("aw-RAHNZH").  When I'm not watching TV, mom would occasionally encourage me to learn how to cook, so I'd go down to the kitchen to just stir all the ingredients together in a pan, at our household cook's direction, after she had prepared everything else.  In high school, we had one semester of cooking and baking--although my groupmate did most of the cooking, while baking was kind of unmemorable.  In the summer before freshman year in college, I took a mini-job as a server/ kitchen assistant in a Mediterranean restaurant, even though most of the time I was mainly a waitress and all I ever did in the kitchen was tear lettuce leaves apart and peel garlic while chatting with the cooks.  I took another summer job the following year as a barista in one of the popular cafés in town and it was kinda cool hollering out people's names after preparing the concoctions.  My first corporate job after graduation entailed me to learn how to make (ultra-fattening, as I found out) donuts, and to teach new employees how to make them.  And thanks to all these years of being couch potato, I've watched dozens of cooking shows hosted by likes of Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Bob Blumer, Giada de Laurentiis, Wolfgang Puck, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, Kylie Kwong, Rachel Ray, and then other shows like Iron Chef (both the Japanese and American versions), Top Chef, and yes, even Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (the part with Ted Allen, the food and wine guy, and oh, he's also hosting another reality show called Chopped).  And when I finally got married, my mom-in-law stayed with us for around a month and a half, and so I used all that time to observe her intently as she cooks, getting some practical tips and new ideas.  And whenever my best friend would come over my place, I'd gain a few indispensable tips from her since she took up a course in culinary school.

Notice that I've just been rambling about cooking.  What about other household chores?  Like cleaning?  Organizing stuff?  Laundry?  House maintenance?  Pest control?  Managing expenses?  Let's just say that among all the household chores, cooking is the least of a burden for me.  For the rest of the chores, I hate and I disappoint.  I dread doing them almost as much as I dread writing about them

Going back to cooking, you may now be thinking that I'm not such a bad cook.  Well, "Anyone can cook!" as Chef Auguste Gusteau said in the movie Ratatouille.  Hubby even tells me I have talent. Then again, maybe he just says that to make me feel better.  This blog, together with a dozen burnt sausages, proves that sometimes when I cook, I terribly suck.

I have married a nerd so I need a nerd handbook [OMB]

On My Beehalf:
How to understand nerds

This confirms that, yes, I have married a nerd. Behold hubby, my lovable encyclopedia-airport-airplane-travel-map-geography-royalty-history-economics-math-astronomy (but not really a computer) nerd.

So I've stumbled upon a nerd handbook which shed some light on his endearing geeky ways.  The handbook's author, Rands In Repose, has also written an interesting book entitled Being Geek, which seems to focus more on computer geeks.  Although hubby loves to travel (thank God!) and isn't much into computers, he's a certified nerd alright--just replace all computer-related terms with telescope-related terms, or terms from the areas of study and interests mentioned above, and expect all travel itineraries to include conversation about the history of those areas of interest as well.  If you're still not convinced that my hub's a nerd, well, get ready for this: who else on earth would animatedly talk about English royalty (we live in the Philippines), read a dusty encyclopedia while eating lunch (sometimes while I'm eating with him), and draw maps of countries (with corresponding division of provinces or states, quite accurately!!) as a relaxing hobby??

I'm reposting the Nerd Handbook below, so you too can figure out the darling nerds in your life.  (Words highlighted are mine to emphasize what struck me regarding my hub.)

The Nerd Handbook

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should.

At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.

Regarding gender: for this piece, my prototypical nerd is a he as a convenience. There are plenty of she nerds out there for which these observations equally apply.

Garlic. Icky hands. [DBHW]

Domestic Blunders to Household Wonders:
Garli-icky hands


Mmmmm garlic.  It smells great on a hot pan, but it's dizzyingly deadly when you smell it on someone's hands or breath.  And you wouldn't really want to get Edward Cullen unconscious, unless you have other plans--if you know what I mean, *wink*wink*. (If you don't, that's great! I'll have him all to myself.)

ANYWAY.  Since I use garlic quite often in my dishes, I had grown to like the garlicky smell on my fingers, because I'm weird and I drool over garlic.  But thank God my better senses took over and now, I'm just annoyed by the smell of garli-icky hands.

After washing my hands vigorously with soap and water, lo and behold, garlic smell was still there.  Two days have passed of washing hands and taking showers... Still there.  Water and soap for the gazillionth time will probably NOT even do it, and in any case, dry skin ain't cool, man.  Perfumed lotion, nope.  Nails cut, nope.  Rubbing alcohol didn't work either.  I didn't realize garlic smell was this stubborn!

Luckily, a couple of friends gave me a tip to use STAINLESS STEEL!  How ingenious is that?  Just rub your hands on anything made of stainless steel (spoon, ladle, pot, knife, whatever is handy) with some running water and a bit of salt should work too.

Did a bit of research, a.k.a. Google, and Martha Stewart has also given this tip.  To avoid having garli-icky hands altogether, you can get yourself some garlic gadget like a garlic mincer.  Yay!