I Can Do That!

I had a mis-communication with the petite red head the other day and in typical guy fashion I tried to fix it. First I sat and did a quick mental re-wind of the conversation just to make sure I wasn't hearing the voices in my head incorrectly. When I thought I had it right I slowed it down a bit and started listening for inflection.

This was difficult because total recall can sometimes be confusing. In my memory, we were sitting under the tiki gazebo on the deck, smoking little cigars and drinking something cool. As I was recalling the memory I was sitting under the tiki gazebo on the deck, smoking a full sized cigar and drinking something cool. Somehow the memory and reality momentarily merged and I ended up lighting my big cigar in the middle - where the end of the little cigar was in the memory.

So, having to my satisfaction retrieved the conversation, I concluded that I had completely misunderstood something she had asked me and that what she was asking was too important for me to have blown off. Oh, Oh. Trouble in Johnnyland!

So how do I fix it? The simplest way would be to ask her about it and then talk about it. The guy way of fixing it is to write her a long rambling email exploring not only what I think she may have been asking me but about several variations on the theme, as well. I told her about everything I thought she was thinking and everything I thought she thought I was thinking and everything she thought I thought she was thinking... You get the idea. Then, just for shits and giggles, I threw in something from a previous mis-communication. Just to keep it interesting.

Then, to keep it light, I asked her how her day was going. I didn't want her to think I wasn't being cool about the whole thing. You know?

And this is why I like the petite red head so much. She didn't care about how badly I was mangling things. She didn't respond to my volcanic eruption of blather. She simply said, "OK, you need to just sit on the deck and read and QUIT THINKING."

Which was pretty good advice and in typical guy fashion I accepted it as another project to work on. Already picking a cigar, wondering how much Cognac I had left and where I had put my Lives of the Later Caesars, I absentmindedly emailed her saying, "I can do that."

(She thinks I'm funny.)


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