I'm not impressed by people who say they have a mixed marriage. Isn't every marriage a mixed marriage?
Take us, for example. My wife and I started dating secretly while we worked at the same company, and when we outed ourselves no one was particularly surprised. "Dude, she's like a girl version of you," they said. "That makes me look awfully narcissistic," I said. "Please, shut up now."
It's true, we're very alike. We found this out on one of our first dates, when we took the free bus to IKEA just to eat Swedish meatballs and watch planes land across the turnpike at Newark Airport. Alas, despite our mutual love of aeronautics and over-sauced meat, our marriage also constitutes an unholy union between two very different subspecies.
I am a dork. I'm the guy who memorized "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" before he saw it, because my best friend taped it for me off the TV. (Note: He did this by placing a cassette tape recorder in front of his TV's sole speaker. Which was monophonic. That's how old I am.) I can listen to Spike Jones and his City Slickers go "glug-glug" and "oogah" for hours on end. I spend idle moments thinking up words that become different words when you replace one letter with its adjacent letter in the alphabet. (Like "value" and "valve," or "heroes" and "herpes.")
My wife, on the other hand, is a freak, mainly because she likes to watch graphic surgery on the Discovery Health Channel. Recently, she sat transfixed for an hour while doctors very explicitly freed a woman from the clutches of a 200-pound tumor. Bloody organs were especially important to her after 9/11, when she coped by watching endless loops of heart transplants, skin grafts, and extreme surgeries for debilitating birth defects. She says she derived great comfort from seeing how much humanity has learned to fix itself. (If she'd heard about this show, she might have become totally unglued.)
I know what you're thinking: My god! What's to become of the children! It's a fair point, because we have no idea which way the little frorks will go. If we really wanted to find out, I suppose we could try a few experiments. Maybe we'll give Robert a butter knife and see if he 1) tries to give TwoBert a splenectomy or 2) starts banging on a cowbell and yodeling.
