Thursday, May. 20, 2004
Dear Diary:

It is rather odd, making small talk with someone I don't know particularly well who happens to have their hand inside my body, rummaging around to find my reproductive organs.

Mostly I just soldier through my annual checkup, but those moments when I put my feet into the stirrups and undergo the ritual of the pap smear and internal exam of the girlie bits are always a bit awkward for me.

And really, how do you respond when the person rummaging in your girlie bits compliments you on your abs? There are some things Ms. Manners leaves out. Sometimes, a woman just has to rise to the occasion.

That said, I adore my doctor. He's a very gentle, patient man and he's been treating our whole extended family over 20 years. While I'm there on my back in his office counting the ceiling tiles and just wishing with all my might that this could be over, he checks up on how the whole family is doing--my mom-in-law, the spousal unit's brothers, the spousal unit, my daughter.

It's exactly the sort of conversation you might have with someone you know casually to while away the time at a bus stop. Only you're not at a bus stop. Oh, no, you're in a tiny white room plastered with odd medical posters, a room that smells faintly of antiseptic, you're wearing nothing but a flimsy paper gown, and the person with whom you're conversing HAS THEIR HAND IN YOUR BODY.

Most of the time, I'm extremely grateful that my medical care is so personal, that I'm not a number to the person who's treating me, that I have, uh, context for want of a better word. But there are moments when I do wish it could be a bit less personal. This would be one of them.

In other news, I may have to murder the spousal unit. If it does come to that, I promise to be humane.

A few years ago, for the first time in his life, the spousal unit expressed interest in gardening. In order to give him the most positive experience possible, I started him out with the hardiest plants known to man--periwinkle, golden glow and pulmonaria. These things can literally be ripped out of the ground in handfuls, tossed on new ground, stomped in, and they will grow.

Which they have. They are now overrunning his little beds.

One of the most basic rules of gardening is that a weed is a plant growing anywhere you don't want it to grow. Yes, dandelions are weeds but periwinkle can also be a weed. There are times when you have to look at something you've planted, realize that it's a thug and it's over-run its allotted space, and tear out hunks of it. If you can't find someone to give it to, or a new place to plant it, then you have to throw it out.

The spousal unit is a packus rattus. He cannot bear to throw anything out. There is no one left in our social circle on whom we can inflict these plants because we've already given them to everyone we know. So when I told the spousal unit this spring that his golden glow, periwinkle and pulmonaria had to be ripped back and the excess thrown away, he was deeply, deeply wounded.

He is eyeing my gardens and portions of the yard for possible places to put his excess. Except that these are my spaces and I do not want to share. At all. I have plans. Schemes. Dreams. They do not involve making room for the overruns of his weedy, plebian plants. I have told him to go plant them around his workshop.

There are rumblings of discontent. Somehow, the spousal unit has come under the delusion that he actually has a voice in the landscaping and wasn't just put on this earth to be my peon. I know. I am as appalled by this turn of events as you are. While I'm not normally an advocate of violence, I think we can all agree that sometimes a gardener's gotta do what a gardener's gotta do.

There will be further bulletins as events progress.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 409.17 miles. Ten percent there rubber duck.Ten percent there rubber duck. 25 per cent thereTen percent there rubber duck. Ten percent there rubber duck.
Oh man. This is going to be hard
Goal for 2004: 1,000 miles - 1609 kilometers

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