Random Esquire

You may recall that Boss and I are doomed to buy two different kinds of apples for life, two different kinds of peanut butter, and possibly make two different shapes of cake. Those differences are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Boss is a picky eater. In fact, the list of verboten foods effectively wipes out entire ethnic cuisines. Here is but a short list: pork, tomatoes (raw), onions, cilantro, bell peppers, and mushrooms. This, combined with a dash of indecision, makes eating at restaurants an adventure. I typically tell her to order two things she thinks she’ll like and figure I’ll end up eating one of them.

One particularly sticky area in which this personality trait rears its picky head is in the pizza department. Boss only likes one kind of pizza. It isn’t sausage. Boss doesn’t do processed meats like that - which means pepperoni is out, too. Don’t put mushrooms, onions, tomatoes, bell peppers on it, either.

Boss only likes pineapple on her pizza. This means we will sometimes partake in the 2-for-1 deal at Domino’s and I will get whatever I want and she will get a pineapple pizza. That’s what we did tonight. As an aside, the Domino’s people think my last name is “Pac-man.” No kidding. The delivery guy always says, “You’re Pac-man?” I just nod.

When we order from Domino’s (Yes, we live in Chicago and sometimes order from Domino’s. Yes, I know it is horrible.) we also get an order of Cinna-Stix which are, from what I can tell, sticks of pizza dough brushed with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar - all cleverly spelled and served with a side of icing. I haven’t even touched upon the subject of sugar and how much Boss’s family adores sugar (her father is guilty of pouring real maple syrup on cake). Suffice to say that, for Boss, a spoonful of sugar helps a bowl of (sugar) cereal go down, fresh strawberries go down, coffee, and yes, spaghetti sauce.

I realized tonight, while Boss hungrily eyed me and the Cinna-stix box, that any culinary skills I may have picked up during my long years as a free wheeling single have been completely wasted. If I could perfect Cinna-Stix, Boss and I would be together. FOREVER.

To test my theory, I just called back to her and said, “Honey, if I could learn to make Cinna-Stix, would we ever get a divorce?”

She said, “Yes.”

I said, “What?! WHY?”

She said, “Because you’re retarded.”

Watching Boss sit down to play Wii is vaguely similar to watching the metamorphosis of cocoon to butterfly. Actually, more like Bruce Banner into the Hulk. And not so much vaguely similar as frighteningly similar.

Boss has a pretty even temperament. She neither gets overly excited nor overly upset about anything for long. And so, I’ve never really seen her downright drop her blob. That is, until we bought a Wii.

When I hand the remote controller to her, I can see her eyes glaze and fingers twitch. Fortunately, enough of her good sense remains before she begins that she tightens the wrist strap. She does not just flick to swing a tennis racket. She stands, bouncing from one foot to the next, eyebrows furrowed and muscles tensed, waiting…waiting to slam that remote into your head if you get too close. She turns into…John McEnroe. In the heat of battle, she’s near cold-cocked me and banged her hand more than a couple of times on a table sprinkling it all with obscenities and objections to calls of in or out.

She’s that person who will deliberately wait until you scratch your nose to bean a pitch at your head. And if you play a game that requires that you take turns, she will twitch with impatience and bark commands on how to do it right until it is her turn or I bark back that she’s turning Béla Károlyi on me.

Today, she sat down to play Ratatouille. It was like Joe Pesci was in my living room. Yelling, stomping, etc. And two hours later, she was curled up on the couch, spooning Little Filthy and you’d have had no idea that shortly before, she might have killed you if you stepped in front of the screen while she was attempting to swing over to a piece of cheese. Tomorrow, I’ll come home from work and find her calling the remote her Precious.