Punch a Hole In It

“That was delicious,” I said laying my fork and knife across my empty dinner plate.

“Yes,” Mr. Wonderful said gazing at the overhead lamp.

“I love cooking in our kitchen.”

“Yes.”

“In fact I love everything about our kitchen!”

“Want to punch a hole in the ceiling?”

In most relationships when I spoke to someone they listened and spoke back to me on that same subject. Because when the tables were turned and someone else addressed me on a particular subject they expected—and I complied—to respond to them on the same topic that they’d initiated. However after countless hours of field research and several years of committed study, I’d discovered that these normal rules of interpersonal, human communications practiced by billions of people around the world were lacking in the man I promised to love, cherish and talk & listen to… until death do us part. 

As a scientific person who relied on facts, I had collected numerous examples of our odd communications. Recently I told him, “I had a great meeting today.”

Mr. Wonderful replied, “The kitchen is too hot.” Since he changed the subject from my “good meeting”, I switched to his topic of “the hot kitchen”.

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” I said with a grin. 

“The lamps are all wrong,” he mumbled then beelined for the tool shed.

It’s hard enough talking to men but talking to one who wasn’t even in the same galaxy of my conversation was becoming increasingly difficult. To be fair to Mr. Wonderful, it didn’t happen all the time, just every time we were in the house, out of the house or together. 

Clearly something was brewing in his head and I thought if he would just talk to me about it I would understand what he was pondering and we could talk about it together. So when he finally addressed me over dinner with the question of, “Want to punch a hole in the ceiling?” I was in shock for several reasons: 1) He wanted to punch a hole in our redone kitchen ceiling; 2) He was talking to me! and 3) He wanted to punch a hole in our redone kitchen ceiling?!

I’m a fair minded person. In fact I’m sure that King Solomon himself, the fairest judge in ancient Israel, would totally agree with me on this point: My spouse was off his rocker. Mess up our lovely kitchen, which we had lovingly redone and that I totally loved by punching holes in the ceiling?! 

I stayed on topic and responded to my dear spouse, “No way!”

Mr. Wonderful proceeded to tell me he’d done oodles of research and discovered that LED lights were the coolest lamp option for a kitchen which meant that when they were on they would not contribute to the heat of the kitchen, thereby relieving us from leaving the hot kitchen—ever again. Also, LED light were highly efficient using just a fraction of the wattage of traditional bulbs or even the curly fluorescent ones. But I still balked. None of these features could convince me to make a disaster zone of my fabulous kitchen.

“I can put the LEDs on a dimmer,” he said.

“Yes way!” we shared a fist bump.

“I’m glad we talked & listened to each other about this,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“To get a saw to punch a hole in the ceiling,” I mumbled beelining for the tool shed.

As a scientific person, in my mind the most important fact about dimmable LED lights was: they looked cool!