Chicago, Ohio
Below me rests Ohio. Probably. I’m on my way to Ohio. But
I’m not. If I was 20 I would have been assured I was going to Ohio. But I am on
my way to Chicago. Which is in Illinois. Believe it or not this is a common
fact. I was never very good at geography and sometimes you just learn things
wrong. I realized my mishap in college. My boyfriend at the time was going on a
business trip to Chicago. When he returned home I asked how it was exclaiming I
had never been to Ohio before. He said neither had he. I laughed “oh ok there
buddy” bemused at his little joke. But he wasn’t joking. “No seriously I’ve
never been” he retorted.
“You were just there!” I shook my head. “I was in Chicago”
he said more gently. “Yes, Chicago Ohio” I said sounding the words out in my
mouth. Hmm I thought, that sounds a bit odd.
“Chicago is in Illinois” he said. “Does everyone know this?”
I asked. Yes. Yes they do. And somewhere deep in my brain I knew that too.
Scruff. McGruff. Chicago, Illinois 6-0-6-5-2. The little song from the
detective dog who you could write letters too. I am 30 and can still sing the
jig so why the song never jolted a thought of geographic location eludes me to
this day.
Some things are simple mistakes and some learning errors go
far deeper than a ditzy mistake. It was this same boyfriend who asked if I
wanted anything when he rose from the sofa to go to the kitchen. “Yes, I’d like
a sippup” I said simply. “What?”
“ A SIPPUP” I said louder.
He looked at me. “What are you saying?”
“I want a sippup, you know, one of the Capri Suns.”
“You mean a juice box?”
“Well it’s not a box exactly is it, it’s a juice bag.” We
were at an impasse. What followed was a discussion about sippups and me texting
my family asking “is this not a word?” I found out my whole family thought it
was a word. A sippup was actually a brand of juice boxes from the 80’s as it
turns out. You sip up the liquid. It is a brilliant name, but we used it like
Kleenex is to tissue and apparently the rest of the world wasn’t privy to this vernacular.
Details. It was at this point my boyfriend let me know its pronounced ES-presso
not EX-press. He thought it was a cute error but I was in fact wrong and may
want to course correct. As time went on I realized a few other words I had been
saying wrong. Up and Adam is in fact not the phrase. It is “up and at them.” I
prefer up and Adam. Because Adam was the first man and he had to get at
populating the world and what not and I just think that sounds better than
getting up and going at some ambivalent them.
I was his ditz. I haven’t gotten to be the ditz in a
relationship since. Like a moth to a flame, the ditzy dope males have flocked
to me every since. I am constantly educating, correcting, and let’s face it,
basking in the glow of being right more often than not.
When I left college behind and began dating other guys than
that first love the brain power really shifted over to me. If you want to be
the smart one in the relationship, dump the engineer who taught you calculus
with ease, who could spew off facts about the world around you, who could fix a
car engine, navigate without a GPS, and got hired by your college professor to
be an associate professor at 23 and move on to the guy who cries when you step
on the burrito that he left on the floor. I have made terrible life choices it
seems but moving on.
I began dating affable morons. The military moron cried over the burrito and thought I wouldn’t catch
on he was cheating on me when he literally asked “hypothetically if I made out
with another girl would you dump me?”
“What kind of hypothetical question is that?” I asked.
“I’m just saying if I like made a girl dinner for a date and
then made out with her would you dump me?”
“Oh my gosh are you that stupid to think I wouldn’t believe
this was a hypothetical? Who was it?”
“I’m not telling you her name.”
“Ok well yes consider yourself dumped.”
It was at that point I hung up and started dancing around in
my apartment yelling “he cheated on me!” I was ecstatic. That relationship had
dragged on far beyond its worth and I was free without being a bitch.
My lacrosse bro
boyfriend would spin in circles in rooms alone and didn’t vacuum his basement
bedroom because he figured it would get dusty again and then what? This meant
he would carry me everywhere so my feet wouldn't get dirty. To be honest it was delightful
and really got me to enjoy a princess treatment, but still a man should know
you can vacuum more than once. When we would go on runs together he would
pretend the lampposts, street signs, and other posts were lacrosse players and
he would shimmy and jive around them. He wasn’t particularly ditzy, but when
you consider we were running in the ghetto of Richmond at night and I needed
him as a form of protection and Don Quixote is busy fighting the bus stop sign
that sense of security that you’re not dating a dimwit is really lost.
The Russian was funny and couldn’t say many words like
itinerary. He was an athlete so his schedule for play and practice was often
referred to as an itinerary. We would work through the pronunciation together.
“I” I would say
“I” He would repeat
“Ten”
“Teen” He echoed
“Er”
“Er”
“Rary”
“Reeary” He stumbled
“Itinerary”
“I-teen-ner-rar- this is stupid word, schedule means same
thing” he would say giving up.
Eventually he got the word correct and he managed to stop
ordering a large cock everytime he went through a McDonalds drive-thru. He still had some hangover education from mother Russia, his home
for his first 16 years of life. I had to convince him that the sun was a star
and not a planet. “No” he would say “why would you name a star the Sun. The sun
is planet.”
All this leads to my little marshmallow. He is cute and sweet like a marshmallow,
super white, and cheerful. He is confident and adorable, has a beautiful smile,
and is generally always happy. He solved AIDs at 12 years old. Or at least credits himself with the treatment. He learned that the virus is in the blood and if you could just remove the blood with the virus then you wouldn't have the virus. Genius.
He tends not to delve too deeply into the how aspects of solutions. He devised a business where you could switch homes with someone else in lieu of a sublet, the caveat to this niche business was you'd have to find a person with the same lease as you who wants your furniture to swap homes with you in an area you both would prefer. Some would call this moving, Ky called it a business plan.
When I mentioned we could see a Frank Lloyd Wright house in
Chicago as a weekend adventure he responded “oh is it from a movie?” For
another person they may know the house in question and thought it was from a
movie. For Kyle I knew immediately he had no idea who FLW was. I don’t recall
learning who he was, its just one of those basic tidbits of American knowledge.
For two years with Kyle I have been trying to pinpoint where
his failure point was. Where the San Andrea fault gap in his education
began. Was it his parents? Was it his school? Was he
just not listening and the schools were actually fine? Were his parents trying
to make him learn things and he refused?
A certain blame lies in his high school. Math levels were a
whopping 37% (my high school was 92%) and reading levels were 64% proficient
(my school was 97%). Perhaps the reading levels help portray why when he asked
for an adjective that meant large (I knew where he was going with this) and I
said diminutive and he proudly declared he had a diminutive penis I just smiled
and nodded. “Yes babe, great use of the word. You’re nailing it.”
Its not just about Frank. It about an ocean of people,
places, concepts, and names that he is blissfully ignorant to. He once taped up
a room to paint and wanted to avoid accidentally priming the cabinets since he
didn’t plan to paint them yet. Fair enough I thought. He planned to paint them
in the distant future I assumed. He took a painstaking amount of time
meticulously administering blue and green painters tape to the plastic wood
cabinets and molding. Hours were spent taping. The remainder of the day was
spent painting just the walls and anytime primer did get onto the cabinets he
would diligently wipe it off with a cloth.
The next day he began to remove the tape. It was time to
paint the cabinets with primer. What the fuck Kyle I said. Why did you spend
all that time taping? “Because I didn’t want to prime it yesterday.” “Was your
plan to do it today all along?” I asked giving him an option to be logical and
realize how dumb it was to spend a day taping only to untape and paint the wood
with the exact same primer the next day as the walls which means you could have
taped nothing and painted everything and been better off. “This was my plan all
along” he said completely unaware how stupid it was. And he bopped onward.
He once said “ I bet you think I am always overthinking
things.” “No” I responded truthfully “When I think of your head I think of a
ping-pong ball bouncing around an empty fishbowl from one flitty thought to the
next.
Some of his ignorance is a sign of a happy life. When he
thought his dad had a skin cancer I said melanoma is dangerous because of it’s
likelihood to metastasize. He didn’t know the word and while I find that
shocking a biologist from Berkeley didn’t know a basic word of spreading in the
body, it is nice to think he didn’t grow up making hospital visits and
practicing saying leiomyosarcoma to doctors when asking about their family
history.
Other blips of his ditziness come from an astonishing amount
of confidence. People have often wondered what they would do if they switched
bodies with the opposite sex for a day. Men always say they would play with
their boobs, and women tend to say they’d pee standing up. And I think the general consensus would involve staring at yourself a great deal in a mirror and jumping around.
Not. Me. No. I would just walk around knowing I could be the
dumbest person on the planet and still feel superior and smarter than all those
around me. I would walk around with the unending well of confidence that men
seemingly draw from. I would state opinions as facts. I would state things I
think I heard without the standard female caveat of “I could be wrong but I
think I heard...”
I would be like Kyle and say “Berkeley is the best (insert any subject/sport here)." It wasn’t until Kyle was talking about his alma maters
business school after stating Berkeley was the best that I started to fact check. “I was in business babe, everything we did was through Wharton.” He
had never heard of Wharton which makes sense, he was a biologist. While
Berkeley is a great school, it is not the best, or at least not in everything. In the end these things don’t matter
at all and its not even worth the fight. Just take those facts with a grain of
salt regardless of the person’s gender. But man oh man if I was a man I would bask
in my wrongness that feels so right.
Kyle is also terrible at estimates and it adorable. Potatoes are not quite
the calorie pits like he thought, he was shocked when I informed him they are
closer to 100 calories than his 700 calorie guess. The blissful ignorance of a
man who has never veered towards overweight or never popped a zipper on a
prom dress the day before prom and spent the day fasting while wrapped in saran wrap or just stared in a
mirror plucking at a layer of fat before a beach trip. It must be a joy.
We were hiking in Zion National Park and looking at the
Angels Landing hike. The hike is known for its large drop off after a narrow
passage to the peak. Men are certainly known for estimating the heights and lengths of things a bit off, but I don't mind so much when he guesses my weight far too low.
He told me as a child his dad thought he was mentally slow
because he couldn’t tell the difference between strawberries and tomatoes. He
claims he knew the difference, but he just didn’t articulate it. And that
perhaps is the most brilliant part of his ditziness and the part of being a
dopey male I would enjoy the most. Even when you are wrong and you are
misidentifying objects your body rejects the fact you may be in error
and reassures you. Sure strawberries and tomatoes may share some adjectives of
both being red with little green tufts but
they are very different in flavor and uses. And yet he claims he knew the
difference he just choose to ignore it and continue calling it what he wanted.
Perhaps that is why men are less stressed than women. Even when they’re wrong
they have the confidence to claim they were right and you just didn’t
understand them.
Perhaps the sun is a planet and I’m just wrong that when I
think of planets exclusively as large celestial bodies. And perhaps there is a
giant potato that is 700 calories and I was wrong for limiting my calorie count
of a potato to just a normal ground potato and left out the possibility of a
state fair record tater. And perhaps Angels Landing is a mile in the sky I was measuring from the Earths core. And perhaps Chicago is in Ohio, no one knew
what I meant. Chicago is in the vicinity of Ohio. I know what I’m talking about, you just
don’t get me.
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