Magnetic Attraction

I love Hughes for a zillion reasons, chief among them is that he's a smart dude.  More often than not, he gets it.  (And if you don't know what it is, I really can't help you.)

Unfortunately for me, his intelligence may as well be in a different language.  He's an engineer--among the unique breed of people who speak math and technical minutiae, even while trying to describe common every day things.  A flower becomes a hermaphorditic water-soluble organic carbon form that does something something something.  (Truth be told, I sort of lost concentration after the use of the word 'hermaphroditic.')

"The Running Man" isn't a dance that I think I perform really well after a few beers.  It's actually a mechanical momentum shifting activity that includes extremities poised at right angles and moving at syncophantic something something.

And don't even ask me to translate the act of packing up a beach cart with all the crap required for three pre-schoolers; I tuned out after he assured me there was a place to stow a six-pack. (Chilled, of course.)

I am (was?) an English major.  (Evidently an indecisive one.)  My mind is much more analytical: read between the lines, extract meaning from subtlety, emotional intelligence, something something something.  My visual spatial skills are, on a good day, roughly equivalent to that of a catatonic howler monkey.

So you see one of the problems off the bat, right?  Our children are a cross between Little Man Tate and Forrest Gump.  With girly hormones thrown in just to make things interesting...

Fortunately, some of my bestest friends are engineers.  I lived with engineers in college.  I was exposed to their vernacular so that, even if I couldn't understand it, I could tune it out without being obvious recognize it.  I edited their papers and forced them to go out and party on weekdays.  They "edited" my bio homework and kicked my ass out of bed before noon.  It was, I think they would agree, symbiotic.  (Nice use of the technical jargon, no?  English majors are also referred to as stand-up philosophers... :) )

But, when it comes to marriage, the division of labor isn't quite that simple--particularly when breeding is involved.

Or, the critical task of choosing a TV show. Hughes tends toward the super geek cool choices like Mythbusters or Modern Marvels. Myself? I'm more of a Glee or Biggest Loser kind of girl.

I'll admit, I have my own inner geek. The Mythbusters where it took two armored tanks to pull apart the phone book?  That was good stuff... But I am realizing that watching "How do they do it?" with an engineer is annoying.  Really annoying.  Hughes sits next to me and shouts out 'the how' like some sort of engineering-textbook version of tourrette's.  There's an image of a building in silhouette.  "TAIPEI 101!"  and before I can even hear the voiceover, he's yelling something about mass dampers or some such which, as it turns out, is the punch line of this particular thriller.  (Question being something along the lines of how does it stand up.)

Me: Why do we watch this if you already know all this stuff?

(And how the eff do you know all this crap?)

Hughes: I don't know.  Why do we watch Game of Thrones when you already read the books?  Or Glee when you tell me continually what's about to happen to show how smart you are at sniffing out plotlines?

Touche.  

My point in all of this, and yes, I do have one (we English types like to call this 'burying the lead,') is that in marriage, its kind of nice to have a variety of skill sets in the house.  One to put together the theme and story lines for birthdays and Xmas, and one who can actually assemble all the crap said storyteller requires for said events.  Its like the two sides of a magnet: they attract each other.  Wonka Wonka

However, boy does it make parenting interesting...to say nothing of the nature of children bred from polarities.  But that is a story for another day.