living with me

Let's take a moment for you to be grateful you are not poor Mr Renn.

He gets more than he bargains for every day he's married to me.  

I must be exhausting.

The other night, I found him reading the Ensign and asked him what he'd read.  He made the mistake of telling me that the story that had stuck with him the most was X.  I immediately hounded him to find out why that story had stuck out to him.  How did it make him reflect upon his own life and choices and the world within his influence?  Was there anything about it that stuck out to him because of something he's struggling with or working on or wishing for?  I went on and on and he, being one who doesn't function well after about 7pm gave me a startled, glazed-over look and said, "I just liked the story."

Then I went off on an angry tangent about how consuming stories purely for entertainment and not gleaning some value from them was not the best use of one's resources and how so many problems in the world today result from people wanting to be entertained without putting any effort of their own into their relationships with the stories they encounter.  

Now, I believe all of these things and will defend them in any adult conversation, but pouncing on Mr Renn when it's past his prime functioning hours is undoubtedly unfair of me.  I do it a lot.  I think it has to do with a shortage of adult conversations in my life.   I have a brain that never slows down, is always analyzing and asking questions.  This is a big part of why I'm such a night owl.  Getting a brain like mine to shut down for the night is a big project.    There are lots of downsides to this part of me.  My mouth and my fingers can never keep up with my brain, and it causes a lot of tripping over myself.  I do very poorly in social settings because I fail miserably at small talk.  Plus my voice is so darned miniature.  But the biggest downside of my inquiring mind is how impatient I can be with people who are content.  It makes me awfully hard to live with.

I'm sure every human out there has quirks that make them tricky to live with, so there's no perfectly ideal situation to be had.  Still, I often think that Mr Renn had no idea what he was getting himself into when he pretended so well to stay awake through our late night conversations when we were dating.  Did he really think that my need to talk my head off at night would go away?  Sometimes I think he really did.  Poor man, I am a handful.  One-on-one meaningful conversations are a staff of life for me and I'll probably never stop seeking them out and craving them like mad.