My wife and I have worked out a system.


During the week, we're both pretty busy. She keeps herself occupied with work and attending law school at night and waking up at the asscrack of four AM every morning. Meanwhile, I wake up later and stay late at the office most evenings, and play 'fat old man sports' like softball and billiards when I have the chance. Also, I watch a lot of football on TV. And eat Cheetos.


Clearly, I'm getting the better end of the deal so far.


With all of this running around higgledy-piggledy, we sometimes don't see much of each other during the week. And while we do our best to catch up on the weekends -- one recent Saturday conversation started with, 'So how was your summer?' -- we don't want to chalk up the work week as a total loss, relationship-wise.


So we've worked out a system.


Just before my wife leaves for work each morning, she comes back into the bedroom, gently wakes me, and gives me a kiss goodbye. That's her job in this system. My job is to wake up, kiss my wife -- without drooling on her clothes, apparently -- and chirp, as cheerily as possible, 'Have a good day!' Then she heads off to work, and I go back to sleep for three more hours.


Again, I would seem to be getting the long end of this particular stick.


And mostly, it is a pretty sweet deal for me. First, it's my wife who's responsible for initiating the process. We tried doing it the other way once, where I'd wake her for a sweet kiss goodnight before slipping into bed in the wee hours of the morning. That proved to be problematic. According to my wife, a shadowy figure looming and making puckery kissy noises at her at two in the morning can be 'startling'. At least, that's what I gleaned from her shouting, 'Whoooohaaaaaah!!' and beating me over the head with her nightstand lamp. So in the end, I'd say we were both startled. But only one of us was bleeding. This is why we don't have goodnight kisses at two AM any more.


All is not sunbeams and fuzzy bunnies in the morning version, either. Yes, I appreciate that we steal a moment together, however brief, in the middle of our hectic schedules. And getting back to sleep is no issue -- no sane human should be awake before eight in the morning, anyway. When my wife leaves, I glance at the ridiculously early time on my clock, and laugh my way right back to dreamland.


There is one problem with our arrangement, though -- the method my wife has chosen to wake me. I call it the 'Chinese Poking Torture'. She picks a spot, ostensibly depending on which awkward position I happen to be dozing in. It might be my shoulder, or my back, or the top of my head. Once the target is selected, she gently, with one finger, pokes it.


Then she pokes it again.


And again. Poke. Poke. Poke.


Now usually, I'm dreaming when this poking starts. So my slumber takes an odd twist as my feeble brain attempts to reconcile this repeated prodding with whatever's happening in my dream. I've interpreted it as being bumped, pushed, tapped, punched, landed on, tugged, and, in one rather 'startling' case, shot in the chest. Luckily for us both, my nightstand lamp was out of reach.


I suppose I can't complain about being awoken with a poke -- even if it's not that kind of 'poke'. At six or so in the morning, I'm lucky she doesn't use a backhand across the chops to stir me. At least, that's what I feel like doing to people when I'm up at that hour. If our roles were reversed, she might wake up with permanent marker drawn on her face, an atomic wedgie, and her hand in a bowl of warm water. It's not that I'd want to do those things to her; it's just that I'm cranky before nine o'clock or so in the morning. And before seven, I'm downright evil.


Consider, as an example, the day last week when I was actually awake before my wife came in to poke me. I decided to gently, lovingly suggest that perhaps finding another way of waking me would be preferable. As I lay there, facing away from her, I could sense her approaching my backside with her pointy finger poised to poke. Just as her digit descended towards my derriere, I flung myself around, jumped to my knees, and grabbed at her hand, shouting:


'IF ANYONE'S GONNA TAP AN ASS AROUND HERE, IT'S GONNA BE ME!'


I'd like to reiterate at this point that a nightstand lamp upside the head really hurts. You'd think I'd learn these things the first time.


To add insult to the ensuing injuries, my little stunt didn't have quite the effect I was hoping for. True, my wife doesn't wake me by standing over me and jabbing me with a finger any more. No, now she stands across the room, and pokes at me with one of my golf clubs. Not only am I awakened just as rudely, but if I try surprising her again, I'll get a nine iron to the noggin, too.


So in the end, as always, she's got the better deal. Maybe there's something to this 'early bird' crap, after all.

My wife decided we should join Netflix. Right now, in 2007. That's just how hip and bleeding-edge we are. Next thing you know, we'll be buying ourselves cell phones and motorized vehicles and trying out that 'indoor plumbing' thing all the kids are raving about these days.


Still, it's better to have joined the party late -- very late in this case, like when the host is flicking the lights on and off and cleaning up the empties -- than to have never joined at all. My wife says she's tired of people asking her, 'Ooh, did you see that movie?,' and always having to answer:


'Nope. Never did.'


I told her she should just do what I do -- lie. It's not a pop quiz, after all. If you say you've seen a movie, your friend isn't going to ask you which character jumps off a bridge in the scene after the car chase involving the circus clown in the hearse.


("It was a trick question! The car chase had an ice cream truck; you never saw the movie at all, you big fat liar. Liar!")


But the missus doesn't approve of my methods. She wants to actually be able to discuss the movie with other people. In her mind, that means engaging in critical discourse about plot progression, dissecting the motivations of each character, and waxing poetic about comparative cinematography. For this, apparently, you need to actually see the film first.


(For the record, I like to discuss movies, too. The way guys discuss movies, like this:


Some Guy: Hey, you see that movie?
Me: Yeah.

Some Guy: What'd you think?
Me: It was okay. But dude -- that chick.

Some Guy: The one with the boobs?
Me: Yeah. She was hot!

Some Guy: Yeah. Kick ass.


My way doesn't actually require either of us to have seen the movie, or even heard of it before. Frankly, the movie doesn't even have to exist.


Because hot chicks with boobs kick ass. Some truths are universal.)


Personally, I'm okay with joining the Netflix horde. I'm a little concerned that the mailman will have another reason to sneer over his glasses at me when my choices arrive, but with any luck they won't plaster the names of the movies all over the packaging.


("'Teenage Mutant Nympho Turtles', eh? Go figure. Freak.")


But I think my wife's overlooking one teensy but rather important point. The reason we don't watch many movies, as a rule, is that we generally don't have time to watch movies. And not just the 'spend an extra hour driving to the theater and barfing up popcorn' kind of movies, either. We usually can't cobble together an hour and a half of spare time to watch movies in the comfort of our own house. I've got six movies, right now, TiVoed from HBO that everyone on the planet has seen. Except us. And they've been there for weeks.


("You haven't seen 'Pirates of the Caribbean'? Or 'Lord of the Rings'? You poor, backwards little man. Doesn't your cave get pay per view?")


So now we'll have an entirely new way to not watch movies that we wish we'd seen. First, we'll miss them in the theater, then we'll ignore them on HBO, and finally we'll leave them on our coffee table until we accidentally mistake them for coasters, break them, and pay thirty bucks for each DVD broken. And we still won't know who jumps off the bridge, what sort of vehicles are in the big car chase, or whether the clown ever makes it back to Vegas for the big show.


All we'll know is that the hot chick with the boobs kicks ass. I guess it'll just have to do.

A few days ago, my wife asked me an odd question:


'Hypothetically, if we were to move someday, where besides Boston might we end up?'


I spent the next twenty minutes badgering her about why she'd ask me such a thing. We're not moving anywhere any time soon -- as far as I know -- and haven't discussed in detail any plans to do so. So I wanted to make sure the question was really hypothetical, and that her company wasn't transferring her to Nova Scotia or Guam or Nebraska or some other foreign country.


"I freeze my testicles off here in Boston every winter, and by summer it's just warm enough to grow them back."


My jangled nerves thus soothed, I tried to answer her question. That's where it gets a little complicated. I know from past discussions that she has 'exceptions' on where she'd be willing to move. She's essentially outlawed the West Coast or anywhere across an ocean as being 'too far from our families'. That leaves most of North America, from the Rocky Mountains east. That's a lot of territory, and she was asking me to -- hypothetically, of course -- pick out a few possible someday destinations in that wide swath of real estate. For argument's sake.


Fine. I just have a few 'exceptions' of my own.


- We spent an awful lot of time in the 'Atlantic States' region, back when we were busy growing up and going to school and being poor together. We've worn that area of the country out. So, no moving to Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, or western Pennsylvania.


- Also, my family vacationed a lot in the Carolinas when I was growing up. It's a nice place to visit, but it's sticky hot for, like, nine months out of the year. I don't look good with a shiny forehead. No sale.


- I'd move to Mexico, just for the adventure of living in a foreign country. Only, my Spanish isn't so good. I'm afraid I'd get us bilked out of our nest egg, or inadvertently lose my wife in some barrio poker game. Really, for her own safety, I'm going to have to nix Mexico. And, for that matter, Miami.


- We're not going anywhere with hurricanes or tornados. Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Kansas -- all out. If my house is going to be dismantled and strewn about the neighborhood all willy-nilly, then it's going to be because our Super Bowl party got out of hand. Not some stupid windy act of god.


- Speaking of wind, the gusts here wreak havoc with everything from my hair to the newspaper to the leaves in the yard. And the only place windier than here is Chicago. So I'm crossing it out.


- We could move somewhere else in New England -- Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, western Massachusetts -- but all those places are sitting there now, and we never visit them. Apparently, we're just not interested.


- We interviewed in Saint Louis together once. And we've never spoken of the incident since. It's possible there are warrants still outstanding. So Missouri -- *bzzzzzzzt*.


- Neither of us is big on guns, high school football, or eating our own weight in cow parts. So clearly, Texas is out of the picture. Also, there's the no guns and I can't grow a crazy looking hermit beard. So Montana's not an option, either.


- "Who da ho?" "I-da-ho!" Who wants to live in a state that's the punchline to a bad joke? Not me, that's who.


- I've long said I'll never live in another state with a compass point in the name. I've tried that, and it wasn't so great. So bye-bye, Dakotas.


- Parts of Canada are nice, but let's be realistic here. I freeze my testicles off here in Boston every winter, and by summer it's just warm enough to grow them back. If I went any further north, I'd never see them again. So no Canada. Ditto for Maine, parts of Michigan, most of Minnesota, and upstate New York.


- Then there's New Mexico -- it's a 'dry heat'. I hate dry heat. If it's hot, I'm going to be wet. I sweat like an overweight trucker strapped to Richard Simmons' back during a workout. And if I'm going to be wet, I want other people in miserable humidity with me. New Mexico -- and Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, if you're listening -- you're off the island.


- I couldn't live in Iowa. Just look at it. A little bitty pudgy state all squished between these long, lanky, wide-open states. Iowa's like the marshmallow of the lower forty-eight. Not for me.


- I'm just not going to be happy if there's no major league baseball where I'm living. I don't ask for much in a neighborhood (see above), but there'd better be a ballpark I can drive to. Sorry, Tennessee, Nebraska, and Arkansas. You just don't have the right equipment.


- New Jersey. New JERSEY?!? I don't think so.


- When the nukes finally start flying, where do you think the first big red 'X'es are going to be? Manhattan and Washington, D.C. And I've already seen the Statue of Liberty and the Smithsonian. I've got no reason to hang around one of those towns waiting for the mushroom cloud. Or Delaware or northern Virgina, where all the fallout mutant zombies will be.


- Philly's a nice town, from what I hear. Of course, the people there once chucked batteries at Santa Claus. What in god's name do you think they'd do to me? I don't plan to find out, that's for damned sure.


- Just look at Wyoming. It's a box. If I wanted to live in a box, I'd have become a starving artist and lived over a subway grate. You could be a little creative with those borders, Wyoming. You, too, Colorado.


- When we lived in Pittsburgh, points north of us would get 'lake effect' snow from Lake Erie. We'd get six inches of the white stuff, those places would get nine and a half feet. Now look at Michigan. The whole freaking state is a lake effect. And my shoveling muscles are way too old now for that bullshit. Not gonna happen.


So, once I'd explained those tiny few very reasonable 'exceptions' to the missus, we could get down to thinking of a suitable place to move. Theoretically.


I suggested Utica, New York.


She said no.


Okay, I'm flexible. Allentown, PA.


Not interested.


Peoria, Illinois?


Hardly, she said.


Well, fine. That's the end of the list. If she's going to be so picky about it, then I guess we'll just have to stay in Boston. I tried to meet her halfway -- but the woman is just unreasonable. Honestly, how do you even deal with someone like that?

I toddled off to bed pretty late last night. It was maybe two, three in the morning -- my wife had been in bed for at least three hours, and was sound asleep. I tiptoed in, trying not to wake her, and slipped into bed beside her. She was rolled onto her side, facing me, so I decided to give her a quick hug before snuggling down for the night.


'Cause I'm a romantic son of a bitch, that's why.


Anyway, I leaned over, put my arm around her and gave a little squeeze. But something didn't feel quite right. That's when I realized that I wasn't holding her side, and that she wasn't completely turned facing me. She was actually lying more on her back, and I'd basically just reached over and copped a feel. Honked a hooter. Mangled a melon. Let my fingers do the nipplin'.


Well, first off, I was a little embarrassed, of course. I mean, really -- we're married and all, but how rude, eh? She's lying there, sleeping peacefully, and here I come, charging in like a rhino with a stiffy, grabbing breasticles all willy-nilly, without even so much as a 'How you doin'?' I should at least buy her dinner first, right?


Never mind that I really didn't intend to be groping in her pumpkin patch, like a lecherous Linus on Halloween night -- it's the appearance of the situation that I was worried about. And I half-expected her to shake herself awake and say, 'Can I help you with something?' Or maybe 'Not tonight; I had a headache when I went to sleep three hours ago, so step the hell off.' Or even 'What, are you trying to dial Radio China? Unhand my tit and go to sleep!'


(Which is just ridiculous, frankly. Honestly, who says, 'Unhand my tit!' nowadays, anyway? I think that sort of thing went out of style with the whole 'damsel in distress' thing. I'm pretty sure you're obligated to use words like 'knave' and 'verily' anytime you use 'unhand my tit' in a sentence. I'll have to check on that.)


But none of that happened. As a matter of fact -- and pay attention, because this is where the story gets good, at least if you're me, which none of you are, so really, you can go back to only pretending to pay attention at this point -- nothing happened at all. She didn't smack me, or say anything, or even move. I'd like to think that she let out just a little 'Mmmmmmm...' -- you know, in a sultry kind of lippy-licking way -- but no. She didn't. Would've been fun, but no. I can't back that up.


Still, the fact that nothing happened is pretty cool, if you think about it. This tells me one of two things -- either she's a deep enough sleeper that a little bit of boob-batting isn't going to wake her up, or she was awake the whole time and completely let me get away with it, maybe because it seemed accidental. Which it was. This time.


But either of those two explanations opens up some very interesting possibilities for experimentation on some otherwise boring late nights. I'm still mulling over how I'll distinguish between the two hypotheses. If I can find some other way to determine she's asleep one night -- like whether she pees if I dip her hand in warm water, maybe -- then I can reach in for a little diddle-diddle-diddle to see whether that wakes her up. Or, if I think I can get away with 'accidents', I could try bumping into her in unexpected and erotic ways all over the house. Who knows where the limit is on that front, eh? I'm gonna have to find some excuse to stop wearing pants, if I really want to put that theory to the test. And you can bet I'll be working on that. This should be an interesting spring.

On Thursday night, I got home around twelve thirty. So yes, technically I didn't get home on Thursday night at all; I got home on Friday morning. Yes, you're very clever. Now stop interrupting, Poindexter -- I'm telling a story here.


When I arrived at home, I was pleasantly surprised to find my wife on the couch, still awake. Normally, she's out cold by eleven thirty, on the couch, futon, or bed. By twelve, she's usually drooling. And by twelve thirty, she's often dreaming, and talking some sort of nonsense in her sleep. She hates that, because I get to tell her about it later. It's the one time of day when she makes as little sense as I do. I dig that.


So, she was up, and watching Law and Order: CI. We watch a lot of Law and Order around the house -- and honestly, who doesn't? Not because it's good, particularly. It's just that there are fifteen different flavors now, and it's on nineteen hours every day on thirty-six different stations. How the hell can you avoid it? What are we going to do -- watch Friends reruns? I don't think so.


I have this theory, though. I think my wife has a Pavlovian response to Law and Order. She makes it through the 'law' part okay, but 'order' is like a vatful of sleeping pills. As soon as the D.A.s step in, she zonks. I've always wondered whether she has horrible nightmares, because as far as she knows, none of the felons and murderers on those shows ever get brought to justice.


(And yeah, her induced narcolepsy isn't in response to food, so it's not technically a Pavlovian response, strictly speaking. But it still involves drooling, so it counts. That's my story, anyway.)


So, I was quite surprised to find her still conscious well after midnight. Just then, I looked at the screen and saw Vincent D'Onofrio and Chris Noth onscreen at once. So I asked:


"Oh, is this that two-hour special where they have both CI teams on the case?"


My wife gave me a pained, desperate look, barely able to lift her tuckered head off the couch cushion.


"Is THAT why it's taking so long?"


Poor girl. She never realized it was a double episode, and had been lying there for an hour and a half, waiting for 'law' to give way to 'order', so she could get some sleep. A couple of minutes later, one of the D.A.s showed up, so she was off to dreamland, only an hour and change later than normal. Man, it must be a burden to be a slave to a trigger like that.


On a completely unrelated note, now that I've finished my post for the night, I'm tired and sleepy-eyed. Ring the bell, doc; I'm off to bed. G'night.