marty is cold. marty is cold a lot of the time and in an impressive number of ways.

the first way is the simple and obvious way—she feels cold a lot of the time. you might come into the house where everyone else is walking around in t-shirts and shorts and she will be wearing a stocking cap or gloves or skiing under armor. i don't find this super aberrant as i think it is a side-effect of being skinny. alex, whose body fat percentage could make an nfl wide receiver jealous, suffers similarly.

a by-product of marty feeling cold is she feels cold, that is, to the touch. the classic is when i beat her to bed and am nestled in good and cozy and reading a magazine and she settles in and then reaches over and, in a loving gesture, sets a hand on my arm, chest or back. you can almost hear the frost spread in my skin before i can recoil like a slug to salt. and her feet, ha! there are dead folks who wish their feet were as cold as marta's!

a third kind of coolness deals with her beliefs. when she gets convicted about something if you're not on the boat or less enviably in the way, watch your ass. a recent case in point could be seen in the dishwasher, pictured behind marty above. when that picture was taken, our dishwasher was nothing more than a very large and expensive dish drainer. that appliance has been the scourge of our home for the last five years, a period of time where it has worked as expected for maybe a year, and then only after i spent about thirty hours researching the problem and subsequently fixing it (woo-hoo youtube), only to have it fail in an all new way three months later. marty, completely disgusted with how rapidly the machine repeatedly fell into disrepair refused to buy a replacement (1), until a month ago, where she did a bunch of research and got us a wicked awesome bosch machine that seems like a real champ.

the night before the installer was to come, and i was doing dishes by hand for the last time (hopefully!!!), marty apologized to me. i asked why. she said that i suffered most from her war against our dishwasher as i ended up doing the lion-share of hand-washing over this multi-year period. and it occurred to her, only now, after five years AND the night before our return to the the modern era, that it was a kinda shitty deal for me as she never really asked if i was cool with her line in the sand. my answer, as always, was, "always".

in the end this is what saves marty: awareness. in the end, awareness, is what saves all of us from our foibles. being aware of how we are cold or inflexible or prickly or distant or odd or broken. it's the people who don't get or admit their rough edges and blind spots that make them hard, sometimes impossibly, to be with.

and for all my excitement to use our new dishwasher, the first night we got to use it, alex did the dishes. it turns out that he has been waiting to take up that chore until we got a proper, working dishwasher and now that we had one, he was going to assume the task. so i guess i'm double-saved from dishes.

(1)
once in this period marty did get fed up, saved up some money and bought a dishwasher. before the installers got underway they told marty there was a problem with our setup and we would have to get a plumber out here to update some things. marty asked how much that would cost. the man told her a couple hundred dollars. marty absorbed the number with her head down.

MARTY
take it back?

INSTALLER
what?

MARTY
take the washer back. i don't want it.

INSTALLER
well, look. we can come back after the plumber comes and put it in then.

MARTY
you can't do that because i'm not having a plumber come out. i was told it would cost me this much to get a working dishwasher. i agreed to that. now you're telling me it doesn't cost that much, it cost this much and that is not what i agreed to.

INSTALLER
why don't we put it in the garage while you think about it.

MARTY
i don't need to think about it. take it away.

INSTALLER
perhaps you should call your husband and ask him what he thinks.

that man and that comment cost me three more years of washing dishes by hand. thanks brah.