“Honey? Where’s the other present your mom sent me? You said there were two.”

“Yours are the ones with the red ribbons.”

I dig in the box. I opened one gift yesterday, so there should be another red ribbon somewhere. Instead, I find an unwrapped set of very cute pajamas.

“Did you open my present?”

“No, why?”

“Cause I don’t think these size small PJs are for you, and they’re opened right here by your t-shirts.”

“I didn’t open anything of mine. What t-shirts?”

I hold up the Life is Good shirts with a cyclist and a football player. E grabs his hair and curses under his breath and I know who did it. It’s the person whose presents aren’t even in that box.

It’s been a stressful two weeks dealing with my boyfriend’s older brother. Bro moved into E’s place this summer after he couldn’t pay his bills anymore. He was fired because he refused to conform to a simple rule, but he wouldn’t let The Man tell him what to do. Nor would he sign up for unemployment, because that’s for losers. Noble. So he took over half of E’s one-bedroom apartment and has been living on a waiter’s tips and a sense of entitlement.

He doesn’t even try.

It’s only gotten worse since he moved in, and these last few weeks we have been DESPERATE to get him out. But it’s a double-edged sword because E is thoroughly convinced that Bro is just going to make a financial mess of himself again and land on the doorstep some night, drunk and stoned, demanding to move back in. And E, with a deep resentment barely overridden by his sense of fraternal obligation, will let him. And they both know it.

But Bro has finally found an apartment and put down a deposit. He’s got the keys. I very kindly (read: pushily) provided him with a dozen of the sturdy boxes we use at The Hospital and told him that if he needed more, I’d hook him up. He packed five of them and has moved exactly one.

In the spirit of Christmas and the love I bear for my boyfriend, GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT.

Quit slacking and mooching off him. Don’t whine to us about how poor you are when we know you blow all your money on your vices, legal and otherwise. Quit leaving a mess everywhere. Open your own damn Christmas presents. Don’t eat the food we bought for ourselves. Stop turning the furnace up to 75 and not contributing to the gas bill. Quit waking us up in the morning because you want to talk about nothing. On that note, quit keeping us up at night because you’re drunk and want to talk and sing Miley Cyrus songs.

E and I sleep at my place a lot now because he just can’t stand being at his own apartment anymore. I love having him over, but that’s just stupid and wrong to feel pushed out of your own place like that. He is so stressed and angry and it hurts my heart to see him like this. It’s not that E hasn’t tried, both nicely and occasionally in anger, to wake Bro up to what he’s doing. But it’s all a joke to him. E wouldn’t REALLY throw him out, right? Ha ha ha!

We are ready to cut him.

My badly sprained left thumb (volleyball, yet again) has made typing pretty painful last few weeks – the brace doesn’t help. Typos abound; this is pretty much the millionth draft of this post. But from here at the Rams game, at halftime, I feel like there is something I MUST say:

E, if you ever propose to me, in a stadium, under any circumstances, I will say no.

Men of the world, take note.

(But I very badly want to be on a Kiss Cam. Just once. Are those things mutually exclusive? Just wondering.)

I used to get the worst migraines AFTER finals in college. When all academics were said and one for the term, I’d come home and spend 24-36 hours pretty much dead in bed, whimpering in pain. Never before, when I was nervous and cramming facts into my head. Never during, where I was sweating and trying desperately to recall something, ANYTHING that might be right. Nope. Always AFTER the worst was over, it would hit me.

I finished NaNoWriMo at 1:12 am CST on Sunday, November 29th. Didn’t sleep till four, I was so excited. And in the morning, when all the drama  of the deadline was over, the nerve attack hit.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’d been off work for five days. What had I forgotten to do? What was coming up Monday? Did I have meetings? Deadlines? Had I remembered to put everything on my to-do list?

I started to feel a bit psycho.

Then I started thinking about my manuscript. Was it even any good? How much did I really like? If I lop out the crap – oh geeze, only 34,000 good words? What if I never finish it? What if I finish it and it sucks – AND what if I finish it and it sucks and I send it to a publisher and they send it back with a “yeah, right” note on a used cocktail napkin?

PANIC. PANIC. PANIC. PANIC.

E was off work on Sunday so I sought comfort with him. But everything he tried to do to relax me just made me more uptight. Footrub suddenly hurt. Back scratching suddenly stung. Head rub made me dizzy. Beer upset my stomach. I even turned down a chicken quesadilla Hot Pocket because I was so queasy.

“GAAAAH!” I screeched at one point. “What is WRONG with me?”

“I don’t know why you’re so nervous about everything today,” he said glumly. “It’s my day off work and I thought we – ”

“I just have so much to do at work tomorrow and I’m afraid I’ll forget something important and I really should have gone in on Wednesday and the newsletter isn’t done and I think I forgot to feed the cat and – ”

“I know how we can relax a bit,” he said, smiling impishly, reaching over to pet my leg.

I jumped. He tried to rub my shoulders and I tensed up. He kissed my neck and it tickled.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling back, “I don’t know why I can’t calm down, I’m just so worked up, like it’s physically affecting me and I know it doesn’t make any sense…”

“Baby, I’m just trying to help and you’re so worked up.”

“I know. And I know you’re… well… FRUSTRATED, but I’m just not in the mood to… you know.”

“I know,” he said, and looked away.

So I gave him a hand job.

Because, you know, my hands were shaking anyway. It worked out well for both of us.

Then I got my Klonopin prescription refilled on Monday, and now everyone is fine.

——————————

This is my first TMI Thursday. Not much to it, I know, but I don’t really write much about hand jobs (anymore) so this is the best I can do at present.

…so I took a picture of my desk, for posterity. Sorry it’s shaky, my hands hurt too. My everything hurts.

• Mmm, beer.
• Somewhat-outdated-but-still-useful “Unofficial Guide to London,” because that’s where the scenes are right now
• Mac and cheese
• iPod with Genius mix based on Matt Nathanson’s “Come on Get Higher”
• Stack of unpaid bills
• “Real Pork Bloggers” mousepad from BlogHer.
• Laptop on cooling stand
• And pile of messy cables connecting it to new monitor (waiting on docking station to arrive) that is displaying not OneNote, but Tweet Deck.

Also on desk but not pictured:

• Unopened Netflix DVD, arrived Nov. 3
• “Telling Lies for Fun and Profit” by Lawrence Block
• Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style”
• Blackberry (is taking this shaky picture)

I have written one hundred and forty words in this post. Can I count that toward my daily total?

UPDATED 11.29.2009, 01:12 CST

I WIN I WIN I WIN!

My boyfriend and I work pretty much opposite schedules, which means it can be hard for us to find time to spend together, especially time we can spend with just each other and not the group of friends who also want to see him on his off time. Because he’s in the restaurant business, he goes into work in the late afternoon when I’m leaving my desk job, he’s coming home when I’m going to bed, and I’m leaving in the morning when he’s still snoring.

We both have off during the day on Saturday and Sunday (when he is asleep till noon) and on evenings Monday and Tuesday. It’s not a ton of time, and since we don’t live together we don’t even get to see each other for those five minutes that our paths cross during waking hours on the other days. And Monday nights are volleyball with a big group, and Sundays are football with friends, etc.

It sucks a bit.

But as much as I value the time I do get to spend with him, I no longer feel inclined to make that alone time into a big production. Yesterday is a good example:

E: What do you want to do tonight?
Me: Go to a movie?
E: There’s nothing to see.
Me: Dunno then, whatever, we could just chill.
E: No, we should Do Something.

And probably a dozen more times over the course of the evening that we spent doing nothing but watching TV, he repeated “we should go Do Something” even though we couldn’t think of anything to do.

I don’t care if we don’t Do Something every time we hang out. I like hanging out and watching TV with him, not leaving the house, not having deep, meaningful discussions, not spending a bunch of money. I like sitting on the couch and reading while he holds my feet at the other end and watches something I’m not interested in.

I can appreciate more that casual time is still important time and we don’t need to Do Something to make our limited time together into something meaningful. I think it’s sweet that he wants to do things for me and so on, but I’m tired of the push to make things into a production. Sometimes it makes me feel like we’re failing to make the best of our time, and that’s frustrating.

When we’ve been married for a zillion years, remind me of this post and I’ll long for the days when he wanted everything to be special bonding time. But for now…

Honey, can we just SIT DOWN for awhile? Just you and me? Let’s eat what’s already in the house and watch a movie one of us owns or something on TV. Let’s not do anything tonight.