Eating peanut butter straight out of the jar when we don’t have anything else for a snack.

Saying “awesome” so much, especially to, like, town board members and senior citizens.

Talking about my newfound respect for a woman’s biological clock and how much I love babies while drinking at weddings.

Getting mad at the local NPR station when they are playing their weekend music shows and not talk radio, because that’s pretty lame.

Opting for reruns of “Dharma and Greg” instead of taking the dogs for a walk.

Losing an earring every single time I wear earrings, it’s ridiculous.

Skipping straight to the entertainment news on CNN.com.

Thinking somewhat negative thoughts about myself, for instance, thinking I’m lazy and don’t work hard enough, or that my hair doesn’t look very good, because first of all, I work pretty hard, and also summer is a great time to let you hair go sort of wild.

Maybe watching “The Today Show,” I don’t know, I’m disenchanted.

Letting open bottles of wine go bad.

After getting out of work today, J and I opted to spend our Friday night at the mall, doing a little last minute shopping. We’re going to Chicago tomorrow for our friends Priya and Andy’s wedding and wanted to update our regular wedding attire. I wanted some new shoes because the adorable red heels I wore to the last wedding I attended made me sort of want to die the minute I put them on my feet - those heels and way they arched my heel like 10 inches off the ground. Fashion is sometimes pain, I know, but it’s not cool to kick your shoes off ten minutes into the wedding. You wait until the end, when everybody’s tipsy on champagne to go barefoot. Everybody knows that.

J wanted to get a new dress shirt so we headed to a couple department stores. At the first one, a regular mishmash of ties and watches and shoes and perfume displays and not-very-helpful salespeople (so terribly mediocre when compared to The Only Department Store One Should Ever Set Foot In) something happened that, unfortunately, seems to happen to us a lot.

We got approached by a stranger, also shopping for dress shirts, who looked in our direction, chuckled, and asked J, “wedding season?” When we laughed back, because, hey, that’s right, it is wedding season and we’re all out shopping for some dress shirts, isn’t that funny? We smiled and told him, “Yeah. We’ve got one this weekend,” and kept searching for that perfect hue, and then guess what happened? The guy, our new friend for Christ’s sake, asked us where we were from. We sort of stopped in our tracks and told him, but that was when my “huh this is weird” antenna started acting up. I love talking to strangers. I love their stories and jokes and their random comments, and because I love meeting new people, when I meet one and talking to them gets a little odd, I immediately know something is up. I’m practiced in this art.

After we talked geography, he wanted to know what we did for a living, all the while so friendly, so casual, and that’s when I decided it was time to drop the bomb that, ok, we were gonna keep on looking for that shirt! Nice to meet you! Have fun at that wedding! And that’s when he made the all too familiar move. He didn’t reach for a gun or ask us for money - he wanted to know if either of us had or card, or maybe he could give us his, so we could “keep in touch” (after all, we’d known each other all of two or three minutes) because he was working in a “business” that had some “opportunities for young couples” which is 100 percent southern-speak for “You guys should join my church.”

In a swift and graceful manner that made me proud, J told our fellow shirt-buyer that we were actually moving at the end of the summer - oh man, too bad! - but that it was nice to meet him and we got out of there. While walking away from the store, through the mall, observing the crowds of primped teens who had materialized in the last hour, we talked about how that always seems to happen to the two of us, whether we’re together or alone, and I told J I thought it was the way we looked, particularly our eyes, displaying some kind of naive, open-minded, amazed-at-the-world attitude that those church recruiters and others who prey on the general public just love. It doesn’t matter that we won’t take them up on it, that the minute we’re alone again we’re all “What the hell was that about?!” - they look at us and think, “perfect.”

Which is precisely why, when all was said and done, I convinced J we had to go to Nordstrom. Because at Nordstrom, first of all, when you need someone to measure you for a dress shirt, they measure you for a dress shirt in a matter of minutes and not only that but they ask how you are doing, and furthermore, the entire place is an oasis of calm. The organized displays. The tasteful lighting. The too-expensive jeans and spring dresses that no one, ever, pressures you to buy, even though you’re circling like a vulture, because they respect your limits.

Perhaps most importantly, I was fairly certain we wouldn’t be approached by strangers trying to get us involved in “business” ventures in Nordstrom. And of course, we weren’t. We instead had a very nice conversation with the young salesman who pointed J towards a lovely green shirt, the kind of green shirt I’ve been wanting him to buy for ages because I was so sure he’d look incredibly handsome in it (which he did).

The conversation was mostly the same. Where we were from, what we did, but the sentiment was entirely different. He joined us in a few laughs, but over actually funny things like when J locked himself out of the dressing room. When I asked how long he’d lived in the area he told us that his family had moved down here from New York several years ago because his father was sick and they wanted him to spend his last years in a nice place, with nice weather, and even though he couldn’t do much anymore, he’d gotten a lot of good golf games in while he could.

I know, I know, the mall is no metaphor for life or anything, but honestly, I left feeling pretty amazed about the small world in which we live, the great diversity and the brief, but touching, moments. How easy it is to connect when you really mean it. Sure, you might say the mood was inspired by a visit to my favorite store, but I think it was more than that. Although seriously, their shoe department is reason enough to get up out of bed every morning and live another day.

Because I’m a little tired lately (have been covering a lot of lenghty meetings for the newspaper and, having pretty much recovered from my little stint with the flu and consequential disastrous ear fluid incident, have, God forbid, been you know, up and about doing stuff, and not resting as much as I had become accustomed to on the couch) and because I therefore, don’t have the energy or the desire, really, to write anything that interesting about my own life (unless you guys want a detailed rundown of last night’s Chatham Board of Commissioners meeting, which, come on, I know you secretly do) I decided to turn to one of my favorite sources of information, and The Best Speller In The World, my father.

Last month my parents went on a two-and-a-half week trip to Italy - with stops on the way there and on the way back in Paris - spurning the usual feelings of jealousy I deal with when they jet off to some exotic locale and J and I remain stateside and maybe order Chinese food or something if we want a special treat.

The neat thing about this particular trip was that my father chose to use his BlackBerry to email us about every minor detail of the vacation (my mother chimed in every now and then, too). I’d be sitting there paying bills online and receive three new messages in rapid succession about some amazing meal, or beautiful view, or an encounter with the locals.

Here are some of the highlights:

From: Fred Rotondaro
Date: Apr 5, 2007
Subject: We are sitting in an 1 table joint called Doro’s

In an alley.
With a guitarist and an old broad who sings old songs most beautifully.
Supposed to be one of the best fish places in town
Wejll soon know

From: Fred Rotondaro
Date: Apr 7, 2007
Subject: Hello

Mesdames and mister each had prosciutto and mozzarello followed by pasta and seafood which was ezxellent but nowt quite as good as the pasta-safood which mr had that afternoon in annacapri which may have been the finest pasta seafood he has ever had.
The entre was local grilled seafood
Mesdames concluded with lemon cke and express– mr with eppresso and cheese
Then to the hotell bar for drinks with the rest of the euro trash
The dad

From: Fred Rotondaro
Date: Apr 8, 2007
Subject:

Your mother is trying to kill me. The church is a few hundred meters from the hotel, mostly uphill. Mom is dashing up to make the ten o,clock mass as I muddle along behind. We find when we get there the mass starts at 1030–but at least we get seats.

The women in the church and those we’ve seen in Naples divide into two types. Older, over 50 , mostly shorter and stout. The younger women, under 40, many tall, slender, obviously conscious of their diets and their appearance. Italy has been prosperoud while these younger women have matured and it shows.

Suerb lunch at da gemma where they know us now. All the window tables overlooking the water were reserved but they gave us one anyway. It’s my personaliity. Charming.

We have walked to another hilltop point. Punta tragara. M and d are eating a lot but so far I have lost 1 kilogram, 2 lbs I think.

The end

Dad

From: Fred Rotondaro
Date: Apr 9, 2007
Subject:

Yes, I think your mom is trying to kill me.
Our boat for postano leaves at 630 tonight. So we have several hours to kill.
What to do? Rest. Sit by the pool. One last splurge of shopping.

No. Mom wants to walk. Preferably uphill preferably going nowhere.

My legs hurt. My ass hurts. And still we walk.

From: Fred Rotondaro
Date: Apr 9, 2007
Subject: Our last day in capri

Now for a boat ride round the island
A tip for travellors.
Don’t schedule an excursion the day of departure. Too many things to do with limited time. Breaks the mood of leisure–but we are. Now on the boat and beauty abounds.

M and I just kissed as we went thru the arch where legend has it, lovers must kiss–on the lips, the boat guide says:
THE WIND FEELS WONDERFUL.

Walked around. Capri for a few hoursas we wait for our boat to positano. Mom walked me into the ground searching for every possible hill.

More to come.

From: Fred Rotondaro
Date: Apr 13, 2007
Subject:

Today we are off to vietri to buy ceramics.

We are on the streets of Vietri.
Mom is lost. She wants to compare another shop and set off searching. I have no idea where she is. Vietri is always like this.

From: Kathleen Rotondaro
Date Apr 19, 2007
Subject:

We are sitting at her Tour D’Argent looking out on Notre Dame and the bateaux mouches gliding up the Seine. They just turned the lights on in the restaurant and it is almost dark–very beautiful. The only discordant note is that I think homeless are living on the quai opposite from the restaurant:

Love,
Mom

From: Fred Rotondaro
Date: Apr 19, 2007
Subject:

We asked the waiter and he said they were “vacationers”, but we don’t believe him. It is pitch dark now and they are all still over there.

Last night, while watching some reruns of, you know, our Favorite Show Ever, J was playing around on the internet and came across something truly astonishing which led us to a few more truly astonishing things.

He was doing a search on the SVU character Casey Novak because I think he has a crush on her, even though he never says that, just continually says how “awesome” she is, but we all know that that means, and he found this blog, this amazing blog allegedly written by the fictional Assistant District Attorney.

Because I’m pretty sure the Assistant District Attorney, should she have a blog, would write things like this March 11, 2006 post:

overflowing with cases

omg there r so many cases i have to get done this week its not even funny. i just thought id come and say hey to all of you. so tell me whats been going on the last week or so?

I don’t know about you, but I pretty much thought this was the greatest thing we had ever stumbled upon. Unfortunately Casey hasn’t updated in a while, because she’s been busy with all those cases probably, but the good news (that’s right, it gets even better) is that it turns out lots of people on SVU have blogs.

Olivia Benson, for instance, has one, and it turns out she is pretty stressed out about life (”Secretly, I’m falling apart”), and Elliot has one, too.

I don’t know who the people who put their heart and soul into writing these things are, but I’d like to thank them. I don’t even know what I want to thank them for, exactly, but basically - for being geniuses.

The other night while exiting the building where he works, J fell down some stairs and ended up spraining his ankle. By the end of the day when I went to pick him up it was pretty swollen, so he came home, got on the couch (thus, officially taking over my territory) and we put his foot up on some pillows with an ice pack to try and reduce the pain and inflammation.

It felt pretty good to take care of someone else instead of going off about my clogged ear for the 12 billionth time but needless to say the novelty wore off and soon I, too, was lying down. I got on the floor and put my head on a pillow, first on one side, then the other, trying to see if either reduced the congested feeling or the ringing, which is slowly driving me insane.

When we awoke the next morning we were both a little grumpy, neither of us having received any sweet relief during the night. J hobbled out to the car so I could take him to work, and I got in the driver’s side at the same time and maybe because neither of us was in any mood to, I don’t know, pay attention to anything but ourselves, we ended up hitting our heads together really hard while situating ourselves in the vehicle. And we pretty much didn’t talk for the rest of the ride.

The good news is that this was a low point and despite the fact that we’re still fighting our individual wars, we’ve each gotten a little more optimistic. Sure, as a unit we can’t really walk or hear that well, but we’re pretty sure that eventually things will be ok. Also, thank God, the couch is big enough for both of us to lie down if we cooperate and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this marriage it’s cooperation. And the power of take-out food, which has also been incredibly helpful during these trying times.

I emerged from my haze of fog today, my illness that pinned me to the couch for the past seven days, to return to the world of normalcy, maybe do a little work, maybe have some conversations with people that are not J or the dogs, or talking to the characters on 90210.

I’ve been feeling better, sort of, save some major congestion in my right ear, which means I can’t really hear anything except this high-pitched ringing sound it’s causing, and when I went to the doctor this morning she looked in there with her little ear-inspecting instrument, and she laughed, and said “Woah! You’ve got so much fluid in there!” and I laughed too, because apparently I had so much fluid in there it was kind of funny, and then I asked her what I could do about it and her expression turned more solemn and she said “you just have to wait it out.”

So I’m opting to, you know, get off the couch while I wait it out, and returned to the newspaper office today and stopped over at Panera Bread to get some lunch and I was waiting for my soup and salad, standing there, cringing at everyone, trying to make them understand that I was there but I wasn’t exactly all there if you know what I mean because I can’t hear out of my right ear for Christssakes, except I CAN hear my my own voice, and other noises I might make, like swallowing, very loudly, like I’m in some cavern, and how is a person supposed to live like that? And I noticed this guy who works there, who is always very friendly, just chatting it up with all the customers and I squinted my eyes a little and realized he looks kind of like my gynecologist and then because I really wasn’t feeling up to snuff, I think, I started to wonder if maybe he WAS my gynecologist and that I’d just never recognized him because in the doctor’s office he’s always wearing a lab coat or whatever, and today he was wearing Panera clothes.

I couldn’t believe it and thought about how it probably wasn’t good that my gynecologist was moonlighting at Panera Bread because, first of all, how come he wasn’t making enough money at his practice? What kind of place was I entrusting my reproductive organs to if the doctors have to get additional part-time jobs at local eateries? Also, if you’re a reputable doctor, wouldn’t you find that kind of job - the kind of job where you’re handing out samples of freshly baked cinnamon buns out to strangers, which is exactly what this guy was doing - beneath you? Not that a job at Panera is beneath anyone, believe me, I love those guys who make me my You-Pick-Two combo meal with soup, salad and an apple as a side, it’s just that, you know, I figure it might be beneath a doctor. A good doctor anyway.

After standing there frowning at the guy for the brief period before they called out my name to let me know my to go order was ready (see? another reason I love it there, your food is ready in a flash) and then really, really thinking about it, I realized that the Panera employee was undoubtedly not my gynecologist, they just looked a little bit alike. Which, honestly, is also kind of weird.

Anyway, what I learned today is that it might be another good week before I’m feeling back to my normal, healthy, non-delusional self. And that’s ok. I’ve become incredibly awesome at “resting” (watching as many episodes of “The Girls Next Door” as is humanly possible and all our movies on DVD, over and over again).

Last night I decided to make some dinner for J and me, because I was just getting to that stage of being sick where I still wasn’t feeling that hot but was also getting bored. I decided to make soup, specifically Pasta Fagioli, which is this traditional Italian soup with pasta and beans and is one of the four or so things I can make pretty well without messing it up or stressing out. Plus, soup. I figured that would be good for me in my state. A cure in the form of food, I thought.

This soup, it takes a long time. You sort of add things little by little, letting it simmer for a while. The recipe I use comes out of a cookbook compiled by Italian-American women, and always yields a ton, a whole, huge pot and we can eat leftovers for several days.

It was almost done, and of course it was after 9 pm, as J and I can’t ever seem to get it together to eat dinner earlier than that, and I tasted the soup and decided it needed more salt, so I picked up this cylindrical container of sea salt we got at a gourmet store one time. I think we’d meant to give it to someone for Christmas or something because we don’t normally go around buying gourmet salt for ourselves, but we’ve been using it, and the thing is the grains of this particular type of salt are kind of big, and tend to stick together, so you really have to shake the container to get anything out, and I don’t know if it was maybe because I was sick and a little more easily frustrated than usual, but I couldn’t get any salt out and began shaking really hard and before I knew it the plastic top had dislodged from the container and all the salt, all of it, had fallen into the pot.

At this point I started screaming “Oh no!” and J ran into the kitchen to see if maybe I’d hurt myself or fainted and I had to tell him that I’d shaken the salt container too hard and poured all the remaining salt into the pot and, of course, he started laughing, because I mean, I guess it was funny. It was, it was funny. I don’t know if it was more or less funny than what we did next - J decided we could maybe resolve the issue with science, by draining all the broth and rinsing all the pasta and soaking it a little to remove the salt, and then trying to save it with tomato sauce. So we did all this and settled onto the couch and had each taken a few bites before we sort of put our bowls down and admitted, “It’s still pretty salty, isn’t it?”

So just so you know, just in case you ever accidentally stir your entire three-quarters full container of sea salt into your dinner, don’t bother trying to save it, because we’ve tried and it doesn’t exactly work. And since it was already so late and we were tired, we just sort of broke off a few pieces of some really good bread I’d bought to go with the soup, ate that, and then polished it off with some jelly beans left over from Easter. I’ve accepted at this point that we’re never going to be culinary experts, exactly. But we know every restaurant in town.

When I got home from my trip Monday afternoon I very quickly succumbed to some sort of sickness I must have picked up on one of the many planes or trains or subways I’ve been on in the past few weeks - the kind of sickness I feel I’d never otherwise get except for the travel, spending a lot of time in small spaces with the multitudes, observing humanity, including sharing their germs, compounded by my body being not quite up to fighting strength due to a rather hectic schedule.

This is the kind of sickness I feel people only get in sitcoms, a kind of vague mishmash of symptoms, including fever, sore throat, coughing, headache, chills, nausea and aches - the kind of thing you see some actor playing out on screen and say, “It’s never really like that when you get sick.” Except for having the flu, which I’ve been lucky enough to avoid since childhood, my sick spells are usually more pointed, more specific. A head cold. Food poisoning. A sinus infection. Not everything all at once.

Because I realize that this is a clear signal my body is sending me to just sit still for a few days (and because I can’t really do otherwise without falling over) I’ve done a completely decent job of staying home sick the past couple of days. Watching movies in bed, sleeping a lot, drinking lots of fluids, barely moving. Trying to let myself heal. Trying to stay upbeat, which is rather difficult.

Around 4 am this morning, for instance, I woke up with a piercing pain in my right ear, the demons clogging my system having decided to take up residence there for a while, I suppose, resulting in an earache that lasted for several hours. An earache, for Christ’s sake! I never even suffered earaches as a youngster, as so many children do, but I now understand why they cry like that, those poor kids - the pain - and the next time I see a child plagued by ear infections I’m going to go right out and by him or her a pony.

Because I am sick, and therefore a total pain in the ass, I sort of passively woke up J - who has been an absolute angel - by kicking my legs about in bed and moaning quietly and proclaiming that my fever was back and not only that but I had an earache and also I was dying. He turned over and told me that everything was going to be alright, that I had to “fight this with a positive attitude,” before he drifted back to sleep.

I lay there in bed a few moments, contemplating throwing another tantrum, this time with wildly flailing limbs and proclamations about how “this just isn’t fair!” but I realized that, actually, it is fair. I’ve had an amazing time of it lately, seeing friends and and family and traveling, and if the payment is nothing more than sitting around the house watching movies and daytime television for a few days while being alternately very hot then very cold and sometimes not being able to hear out of my right ear, well, I can handle that. And I can even try, as J suggested, to handle it with a somewhat positive attitude, or at least stop the moaning. Ok, at least stop the moaning in the middle of the night. There’s no need to stifle my complaints, to try and be all that positive in the middle of the day, really, when there’s no one around to hear me.

I went up to New York City this weekend, and stopped over at my parent’s house in D.C. Thursday night, and because my mother was out of town on business, my father and I decided to go get dinner at this cute, happening pizza place in Georgetown.

We were standing at the very crowded bar, drinking a glass of red wine together and started talking about how we both tend to be a little neurotic when it comes to our health, you know, thinking we’re dying, when in reality, we’ve got a muscle ache or something.

My dad decided to tell me a story about this one time he’d gone to have his yearly physical, and the doctor had detected a tiny bit of blood in his urine, but opting to be “delicate” in his recounting, he leaned in and told me, “there was blood, you know, in my wee-wee?” the only problem regarding this delicate recounting being that we’d gotten really into the conversation, into laughing at ourselves and he told me about his “wee-wee” in a sort of gruff, fake-whispered-but-actually-incredibly-loud voice, which, needless to say, attracted the attention of some of the bar customers, many of whom looked like they might be out on a first date. But what really reeled them in, stopped all their conversations was when my father told me, naturally, he’d assumed be was dying of some rare disease, and I asked him what had actually been wrong, and he, having lost all sense of decorum and realization of the fact that we were in a public - a really public - place, told me that, of course, it turned out he was fine, that the doctor - and this he shouted - leaning back, making fun of himself, glass of wine in one hand and a piece of bruschetta in the other, “It was MY PROSTATE. JUST A LITTLE ENLARGED! ‘NO BIG DEAL’ THE DOCTOR SAID. MY PROSTATE!”

Last night, after a long day for both of us, J called me at about 9:48 p.m. asking if I could pick him at work since the buses had stopped running. He asked me with urgency in his voice and because we have a strong marital bond I understood, so I raced to my car and towards his building, where he bounded towards me and jumped in, then I did a quick turn and pointed the Civic towards home, where, yes, a late dinner was sort of in progress, and the bed was made and comfortable, but most importantly? The television was already tuned to NBC and thanks to our efficiency we’d only missed a few minutes of the new episode of “Law and Order: SVU,” and that, my friends, is teamwork.