Trash Talk

My husband and I are pack-rats. Not the type that can be officially diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder that forces us to live between boxes and on top of junk, but fairly close to it. I've recognized my problem a while back and I try really hard to deal with it. I've managed to devise a system where I gather things for seven years, and after seven years - 80% of it goes to the trash. I'm getting close to the point of throwing away all my Computer magazines for Windows 98.

With some insightful look into my mood swings lately I realised that a lot of it seems to be linked to the state of our house. In an effort to avoid too many frequent confrontations with my husband I try not to ask him to clean the house every single weekend. He gets upset with just me mentioning the word "clean," claiming I don't seem to have good timing for asking him to do stuff around the house. I'll be damned if I could figure out when is a good time, because I've tried every single method I could think of to narrow it down to the hour. I make sure that there's no game on TV, that he's not in the middle of a video game, that he's not wiped out from work, and that he has nothing else to do and has declared it up front.

This week I have a couple of friends coming over to stay (more details will follow). With that being the biggest motivator to clean house, I convinced my husband to start with a drive to the municipality dump. But first we had to identify what needs to go. We found a nice space-taker in our laundry room in the shape of a cabinet which was stacked with junk (screws, nails, dog shampoo, plastic bits, paperwork from 1998, etc). As he handed me stuff to throw into the trash bags, he'd say, "trash"..."trash"..."trash." My excitement from getting rid of so much stuff was taking over when I said to him, "I love it when you talk dirty to me! Say it again!!!"

Last night we went out to grab a bite to eat and left as the place was about to close down. My husband took our plastic trays and drinks over to the plastic bags that were being wrapped up by the manager and said something to him. I thought he said something about "my wife..." and figured he was blaming me for not finishing the drink and not wanting to throw it into the plastic bags while it's still full of liquid. When we stepped out of the store I told him he shouldn't have blamed his wife. He looked at me strange and said, "What are you talking about?" So I said I heard him talk to the manager. He started laughing and said, "No, that's not what I said to him. I know what happened, you just heard me say the word 'trash' got turned on and could no longer focus and hear the rest of it."

Yeah, I get turned on by trash talk.