*uuuuurp*

Mike again. If I'm posting a lot that's not a good thing, because it means I have lots of time on my hands. For a guy who has a mortgage to pay and is completing a PhD, it means a monkey wrench or thirty are in the works.

So, yeah, another blog entry.

Katie and I are getting used to each other in all the little ways, including working to find the humor in the little funny remarks each of us might make which seemed oh-so-funny before we actually said it...if that makes any sense. You know, those little offhand jokes that seem like a riot in your mind, but then fall just a little flat when you actually make them? Yeah. So we're sort of finding out the nooks & crannies of each other's senses of humor.

Especially since humor comes with its grain of truth. I grew up reading Peanuts, and though I always found Charlie Brown a little lame, and Schroeder a dweeb (did you know that Charles Schultz actually drew Beethoven's music in the bars of those comic panels when Schroeder played?), and Lucy reminded me uncomfortably of my older sister Lisa, I had two main points of contact with that comic. First, Snoopy had a great imaginative life. (Snoopy's also the coolest cartoon character of all time, but that's a topic for another time.) I had plenty of alter-egoes for my solitary moments--still do, actually--but none was cooler than the World War I Flying Ace. I grew up thinking that real men drink root beer from a foam-topped mug, at a table covered with red checkered cloth, in a tiny cafe in France. The second point of contact was Linus' blanket.

Yes, I had a security blanket. I did all the usual disgusting things you might expect a child to do with it: chew it, stick it in my ear, and occasionally in my nose. So I could understand Linus' gig (though I don't remember ever sucking my thumb). Well, now I'm a grown man, and I do carry around a handkerchief, which comes in handy during allergy season...and I realized that I still have my security blanket. Damn it all.

So I was explaining this thing to Katie on the way back from the gym (she's getting some tonus in her upper arms! I'll turn that girl into a gym rat yet), while we stopped for some groceries (the local supermarket offers free coffee to shoppers, so I ALWAYS stop). I told her how the blankie was comforting, and even now, it's kind of the same way. Out of boredom I'll blow my nose when I don't really have to. That's as inane as it gets, of course, but it's no different from sticking a stupid piece of cloth in my ear as a three-year-old. Not quite a nervous tic, but just a satisfying ritual.

Which brought us to the matter of more basic functions...Katie has, like just about every woman with the man she lives with, learned to tolerate with some amusement, all the burping and farting I do. She's still marvellously discreet, and always will be. But she accepts that a man being uninhibited about that kind of thing is a genuine statement of trust and intimacy. So when I told her that a good belch is similarly satisfying, a kind of reminder that I'm healthy and robust...she looked at me a little strangely. "How could something so rude and offensive and basically disgusting, be satisfying?" her look seemed to ask.

Beats me. I've read some anthropology-type stuff about it, how bodily functions approximate the creative process...I don't disagree, but I guess I just haven't really embraced the idea yet.

Whatever, doesn't change that Katie has to get used to me. (It's easier now with the warm weather. We can leave the windows open.)