Accidentally Awesome?

So the perfect picture to go along with this post would have been of someone using a q-tip to flip someone's eyelid inside out. But I kind of want people to actually read this blog, so maybe it would be best to keep the gore factor down.

VanderVision Tip of the Day #1: Do not confuse being gross with being awesome. This is a surprisingly common mistake. Please be advised that grossness and awesomeness are mutually exclusive.

I turned to my trusty friend Google Images and asked it for pictures of a q-tip. It responded with a gagillion pictures of a rap star. Umm. You got to choose your own stage name and you chose q-tip? Dude. The English language abounds with awesomeness. Explore it a little more thoroughly, m'kay?

Next I tried "q-tip swabs." Much grossness. Don't ever google that. EVER.

So instead, I chose a picture of a quote (is that picture worth a thousand words, or only twenty-eight?), that relates more directly to the actual topic of this post: Marriage.

My VanderMan and I have been married for . . . OUCH ---> what my brain says whenever I attempt to do math. Eleven years? Something like that. And it's been relatively happy, except for a few brief periods of one or the other of us being idiots. 

Happy+Idiocy=Not Happy.

Ouch. Again.

In the early days of our marriage when we were living on pasta and grilled cheese sandwiches in a mildly scummy apartment in Oregon somewhere, I had one of those brief periods of idiocy. It was the worst kind, in that I felt like I was in the right (I wasn't) and that he was being absolutely horrid (he wasn't). It stands out in my memory because 1) we haven't had many fights, 2) I realized how wrong I was ---> hasn't happened terribly often either and 3) it was all because he wanted to flip my eyelid inside out with a q-tip.

I have no issue with blood and gore. A childhood friend of mine has a surgeon for a dad and he once showed us pictures of various cancer surgeries. I just calmly remarked that they looked like various types of jam. And yet, I can't STAND to see an eyelid flipped inside out.

I'm weird. Yep.

But Neil was at Optometry school and needed to practice flipping people's eyelids inside out. Shockingly, volunteers were in short supply. He came home from school, so relieved that he had a wife who would be supportive and helpful. Except she wasn't (the jerk) and refused to let him anywhere near her with a q-tip. There may even have been a locking of the bathroom door involved, although details are fuzzy.

Much aggrieved, Neil went to school the next day, having only been able to practice haphazardly on himself. I woke up a couple hours after he left (lady of leisure, that's what I was), only to discover that my eyelid had swollen to about five times its usual size. I went in to the eye clinic at Neil's school where he watched GLEEFULLY as one of his professor's inverted my painfully swollen eyelid. With a q-tip. TWICE.

My life has been filled with such ironies. Like when, in my skinny days, I complained loudly how overweight people should just not eat so darn much (I now have a binge eating disorder I battle daily) and how depressed people should just get up and do stuff and stop whining so much (I battle depression daily as well).

It just goes to show . . . sometimes we need a little thwack upside the head to remind us that awesomeness is a choice we have to make, every single day.

VanderVision Tip of the Day #2: While it is possible to be awesome accidentally, it is far more enjoyable to be awesome on purpose.