He's the Yin to my Yang

They say opposites attract.  I wonder why when opposites generally drive one another crazy.  Granted, being the partner of someone just like me would be totally boring, but being married to someone so completely unlike me is both interesting and frustrating.  I would imagine Captain would say the same thing.

We like to self-diagnose in this house, and I’m pretty sure Captain has a mild to moderate degree of OCD.  Or, as Captain tells me it is CDO because that is alphabetical...which just proves my point that he is kooky.  

Me, I have ADD…pretty sure about that.  I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached.  True statement!  I cannot count the times that I have been at Target, Wal-Mart, or Hy-Vee...and I have left at least one item that I purchased laying on the checkout counter.  Miss Ditz, that’s me.  

So our days pretty much consist of Captain trying to organize my chaos.  Or vice versa.  Sometimes we both have OCD but about completely different things.  

Captain recently took over the task of emptying the dishwasher.  This saves me time, and I appreciate it.  Until he tells me I have to keep the clean plates in the cupboard all stacked up by pattern…no mix and match thank you very much.  My thought…who cares?  A plate is a plate is a plate.  As long as it is clean and available, it will do the trick.  Makes me nuts that he obsesses on this one little thing.  

In the interest of fair play and full disclosure, my OCD obsession is condiment and meat/cheese storage.  Don’t ask me why.  Captain and I have been married for 27 years now, and up until about three months ago, he still put the salt and pepper shakers in the fridge when he cleared the table.  I mean, yeah, thanks for helping clear the table and all, but dude, salt and pepper are in no danger of going rancid and don’t need to be refrigerated.  We are still working on getting him to remember to put the cheese and lunch meat back in the meat/cheese drawer.  

Captain and I also are widely divergent on philosophical issues.  I tend to focus on the immediacy of a debate and how it affects—or doesn’t affect—me personally.  Captain is more of a big picture kind of thinker.  This makes for some interesting nights sitting on the deck enjoying an adult beverage.  After one too many adult beverages, it can get ugly but that’s rare.  Which is a good thing because I am bigger than Captain and I can be a mean drunk.  

Sometimes Captain takes the opposite side of a debate just to rile me up.  I don’t know why he thinks this is comical, but he does.  Sometimes I clue in relatively quickly, but sometimes it doesn’t dawn on me until further into the argument that he is just yanking my chain.  By then, I’m too mad and fired up to see any kind of humor in it and we retreat to our corners.

It has recently been brought to my attention that I spend too much time picking on Captain.  I thought we covered this or did y’all miss the post about what an awesome guy he is?  If you did, it’s out there; go find it.  

But, again, in the interest of fair play and full disclosure, I will cover some of my own...idiosyncrasies.  

I am scared of the dark.  Yes, this 48-year-old enlightened, modern woman is scared of the dark.  Flog me.  It’s vastly improved from the nights when I was a child and would wake up with night terrors about Bigfoot invading the house.  My mom...no lie...would have to get out the United States map and show me that Bigfoot--IF HE EXISTED--was waaaAAAaaay out there on the West Coast and we were waaaAAAaaay over here in the Midwest.  

Hey mom...that guy’s got long legs!  How do you know he couldn’t run here and scare the crap out of me and then go back home all in one night?!  It could happen, I was sure of it.  So sure, in fact, that I would lay on my back in the exact middle of my double bed so that I would be able to say anything that popped out from under the bed.  

When I was a teenager, I decided to try and Face My Fear, so what did I do?  I couldn’t do something as simple as just standing outside at night for five or ten minutes at a time to ease into it.  Nope, I read Amityville Horror.  Bright idea, that.  Slept with my bedroom light on for a week.  

But, at least now I can step outside at night by myself for short periods without having a panic attack, so that’s an improvement.  

I am also terrified of bridges.  And anyone who wants to mock me can just remember the day that the I-35 bridge collapsed.  If I am a passenger when we have to travel over a bridge, I simply close my eyes until we are across.  It works for me.  If I actually have to drive over a bridge, I have to stare directly forward at a spot in the distance and block out my peripheral vision of all that water.  I’ve learned to adapt to it.  

Heights will also just do me in.  If I get more than a foot off the ground, I am paralyzed.  Going up isn’t bad.  It’s that coming back down thing.  I once sat on my in-laws' roof and bawled for an hour because I couldn't bring myself to step off the roof onto the ladder.  Don't ask my why I was up there in the first place.  Stupid, apparently. 

We had an 80-foot silo when I was a kid, and one day there was rain coming and nobody home but me, so I had to climb up the silo to shut the door on top.  

Most people climb down a ladder moving right foot and left hand or left foot and right hand simultaneously.  Me?  Right foot...left foot...right hand...left hand.  One agonizing rung at a time.  It took me 45 minutes to get back down to the ground, where I simply collapsed in a heap for another half an hour.  It was traumatic.

So, you can see, even if I tease Captain, I am really the one who is a stew of whackadoo.  The bottom line is that even with the differences, the thing we have in common is a mutual respect for each other--including our differences--that is glued together by great love and humor.