GPS voices and couches and shopping fatigue

We finally settled on a couch. We finally made this complex decision by equitably splitting up the marital duties. I watched the Michigan football game, got slightly buzzed, and took a two hour afternoon nap. Meanwhile, S made pizzas and bought two couches while I was sleeping. Then, she came downstairs and woke me up to tell me that she had purchased them. Like most afternoon naps, I woke up from this one feeling like someone had been hitting me solidly with a wooden post for the past hour and that a gremlin had been stealing my sleep. Needless to say I groggily congratulated her on the purchases and tried to go back to sleep in a futile attempt to attain actual rest.

Friend: Can you choose the different GPS voices?
M: Yes.
S: You can choose British, Australian, American English, male or female.
M: The problem with turning on the female one is I always disregard the instructions. She doesn't know what she's talking about.
Friend: That's what I expected to hear.
S: Yeah, we have this great idea to make a GPS that interacts with you like a real person.

So we ended up with a nice new couch with a chaise. And yes, I did have to say at one point today that if I heard the word chaise again that someone was going to die horribly somewhere in my vicinity. I'm not exactly patient when it comes to making decisions. I blame biology.

Ex: (Buffalo herd capering by).
M: (Charges into buffalo herd wielding a large rock attempting to brain (I do love that term) everything in sight.) And yes, occasionally when you charge into the buffalo herd they all escape, but more often than not you at least end up with the satisfaction of having attempted to brain something.

Other Ex: (Buffalo herd grazing peacefully)
S: I want to eat, but I'm just not sure how to go about it in the right way. Does that little calf look the best to you? His haunches seem a little slight, and I notice that the mother seems particularly protective.
M: Grunts in disapproval.
S: Are you sure you really want to do this? We could wait for nightfall and set up an elaborate trap with maybe some of our fellow cave men friends braining them with large rocks as they attempted to go through that small pass.
M: Grunts in frustration.
S: I mean, I think it's the best way but maybe we should pick on a juvenile one instead of the baby to increase the odds of sustainability.
M: Grunts signifying "Ah dammit the whole herd just left for greener pastures.

Other GPS ideas.

Female voice after a wrong turn: Are you lost? Perhaps you should pull over and ask for some directions.

Male angry voice: Did you really just miss that turn? I'd like to say something like, "When possible make a u-turn" but you'd probably just fu-- that up as well. Do you think I like being trapped inside a machine? If you rub me three times...sorry, this apparently devolved into I dream of Jeannie.

I think the above passage pretty much illustrated the essential differences between the sexes. I'm going to write a book about the differences between men and women, loosely based off men are from mars and women are from Venus. Seminar announcements to come soon.

M: I've been watching a lot of television lately because S has been gone.
Friend: Yeah me too.
M: Turning on the television is kind of like having a spouse.
Friend: You should write a book about marriage.
M: Really?

I also would like to know if any research has been done on the extreme pain that shopping inflicts upon my body. It's one of those cliches that we've grown up with,"Oh men, they just don't like shopping. Hah, hah, silly men." But let me tell you that I literally get a headache after about twenty minutes of wandering through IKEA and also begin to feel extremely tired. And I could make a joke about being a petulant child, but I literally begin to feel ill while shopping. The counter point is that if I'm shopping by myself and know exactly what I'm getting it can be a pleasant experience. But, shopping with only a vague idea of what you are going to get or just to get ideas would have appeared as a level in Dante's Inferno if he'd have had the forethought.

The real long and the short of the couch lesson is that I suspect that I've been misled at some point along the way about what a good decision making couple looks like. I purport that part of learning to compromise is occasionally letting your spouse make a decision without any of your input at all. The real act of compromise afterwards is figuring out how to struggle through the real hard decisions that you have to make together. In general I'd say that the lesson that I learned is that I'm a pretty flexible person. And even though a small part of me dies inside when we buy a wire bed frame instead of a solid one, I'll still probably be able to sleep on it. And after a week or ten years I won't even bring up that awesome bed frame that we could have had. And it's best to just save my breath for something that's really worth arguing over like whether I misplaced my bag after work or whether S "cleaned it up" read: hid intentionally to punish me. Life's too short to sweat couches.