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Yesterday one of my acquaintances from law school misspelled a word.  It’s the sort of thing that bright and capable people do every day.  I mean, afterall, who among us can spell “hors d’oeuvres” without thinking it through a little?  If not for spellcheck I would have gotten it wrong right now.  For the record, I left out the “u”.  My friend spelled it “hors doivres”.  The problem was that he did it in an evite to a political event for which he is the candidate.  And then sent it to potential financial supporters.  Oops.

So, I had to ask myself, do I correct him or let it go?  I’m pedantic.  Grammar is a passion with me, but not like chocolate.  It’s like pasta; it sustains me.  I’m loving that I got a semi-colon in that sentence.  What was birthed by my mother was polished by prep school.  I talk street slang, but I write the Queen’s English.  It goes so deep that a few years ago when Ebonics was classified as a language, I found myself studying the grammar of Ebonics in an online directory.  There are rules about when to drop or keep the possessive apostrophe “s”.  Google it - it’s really out there - and I wanted to get it right.

If this was an evite to a purely social function I would never have alerted my friend to his mistake.  But this was a political event meant to gain support both of the voting and monetary kind.  I put myself in his shoes.  If I were trying to present myself as capable in the professional world, and made a mistake while doing so, I’d want someone who I knew for ten years, and whose support I already had, to tell me about the error before anyone whose support was not as secure noticed.  I opened my big mouth, via email, as gently as possible.

I received a reply to my email right away.  It indicated he was making the correction.  He said that ”boys from Brooklyn”, of which he is proudly one, don’t know such fancy French words.  I agree with him.  Entitlement to that excuse is absolute.  No matter how high a person climbs, the Brooklyn stays with you.  It’s a good thing.  The Brooklyn in someone keeps them grounded.  No matter where you come from in Brooklyn, even if it’s the best parts, there’s a roughness to you that says you’ve seen things.  You know things.  Not fancy French things, but real things.  Things like that a television with a picture does not need to be replaced no matter the size.  Or that the best food comes out of the rattiest places.  And this is Brooklyn, so ratty isn’t an adjective, it’s a description.  That graffiti is art, and that the Manhattan skyline viewed from the promenade is background art.

My father left Brooklyn in 1962 when he crossed the bridge to Manhattan to go to Columbia College.  He never lived in Brooklyn again, but every time he orders cawfee or tells me “listen to yaw mutha”, I know he never left.  In the summer of 1984 we visited Paris.  We had booked a compact car from the rental agency, but they were out of compacts, and gave us a big silver Mercedes instead.  Of course, the first thing my father did when he got it back to the hotel was set off the alarm, and as he’d never driven a car with an alarm before had no idea how it started or what would make it stop.  But once we got past that, we all piled in and took off down the Champs-Elysees.  I was only ten, but I knew what needed to be said.  “Dad, you’ve come a long way from 602 Avenue T.”

The hardest part of marriage, at least for me, is not being angry.  You can be hurt and upset and even raise your voice on occasion.  You can be angry in the moment.  But once the moment passes, so must your rage.  Try to hold on to the rage, and you will find yourself googling your state name with “divorce law” to find out whether your husband gets half of your 401(k).

I remember fights my parents had when  I was young.  Fights that could last all night, or two days.  If you brought up the subject of the fight a week later they could still get steamed.  They, or my mother, had an inability to let things go.  My dad could walk it off where my mom couldn’t let it go.  I have worked to make sure that, at least in most cases, I do not take either approach.  I have found that if I step back and breath, whatever seemed so important just goes away.

When I get angry Josh sometimes tells me to stop repeating myself.  If I’m doing that I know I’ve gone into the bad place and I need to just stop.  If I have a point, and I keep repeating it, he drowns me out like white noise.  If I wait for a quiet moment, and clearly state the problem once, I get heard.  This pattern is still new to me and I’m struggling with it, but I think it’s working.  I know it’s better than getting and staying angry.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t make me really furious sometimes, because he does.  We’ve been watching Celebrity Apprentice.  One of the celebrities is Tito, an ultimate fighter.  He dates Jenna Jamison, one of the most famous porn starts alive.  Tito is rich and has a hot girlfriend.  I could see being envious of him in the “boy Tito has it good” type of way.  A few weeks ago when we were watching, Josh said ”if I had a multi-million dollar company and was dating Jenna Jamison I wouldn’t be complaining” which is totally different.  All I could think was “if you were dating Jenna Jamison then you’d be cheating on your wife, and she’d make sure you were complaining”.  I really wanted to yell.  I’ve been in an insecure place about my body - I didn’t need to be reminded of how far I am from the ideal.  Instead I just said that I was having an insecure moment, and that the comment hurt me for that reason.  I felt inadequate.  Could he please focus on the good other people have without wishing it on himself?  It worked.  No fight.  No anger.  Point made and apologies on both sides - I apologized for being so sensitive and he apologized for hurting my feelings.

I have lost my mind to anger in recent memory.  When we flew back from Savannah and our bags went to Chicago I was angry with the customer service we received, and then angry at Josh for not doing something about it.  I wound up storming around the airport for almost an hour before I went back to normal.  Part of my anger was definitely that I wanted Josh to step up and take care of things, but the bigger part was probably that I had PMS.  I hate admitting that.  If Josh had said to me “is this because of PMS?” that would have sent me into a tail spin.  But, alas, PMS is a part of life.  I didn’t realize how bad it could be until I went off the pill.  Boy, this sucks.  Here I thought I had control of my life, my anger management and my personality and all along it was thanks to little pills that controlled my hormones.