can't i just have a normal hug?

there's a new epidemic in the world of hetero relationships*, and it's called, for lack of a better term, "over-excited affection." boys, it seems, have a hard time administering affection that's not either:
a) bouncing up and down
b) picking their girlfriends up and tossing them (nicely, but still tossing)
c) poking in inappropriate places/at inappropriate times
d) grabbing or squeezing all manner of body parts

Now, it's understandable that boys like to show their affection in a variety of ways, but when it's done in one of the above ways 90 percent of the time, it's also understandable that a girl's gonna get annoyed.

I myself am often a victim of a, c, and d, with an occasional butt slap thrown in. early on in our relationship, RL stopped hugging me normally and started hugging me while jumping up and down (with weird sound effects). When i asked him for a normal hug, he said "come on! this is the deluxe hug! you're so lucky!" the other day i asked him again and he complied. for about five seconds. then he says "boorringg" and starts bouncing again.

now the "deluxe" has come to mean any sort of bouncing that RL does, and my least favorite is the i'm-still-sleeping-and-RL-is wide-awake deluxe. usually he does this because he wants me to wake up, and sometimes it works. My favorite is when i wake up to him standing over the bed with a wild-eyed look on his face and his body poised to jump on me.

when discussing this with my girlfriends, including Sara over at
Dating Tales, we realized that one of the issues is that you have to laugh when someone is bouncing/poking/grabbing you, which naturally means that the boys think we're enjoying it. Which we're not. But laughter is the go-to response that we fall back on, and sometimes we just can't help it.

So what's a girl to do to stop the over-excited affection onslaught? More importantly, why do boys have to be so difficult?


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*i have no idea how this is playing out in other types of relationships, and it may very well not just be limited to the heteros i know. it does seem to be kind of a straight boy thing, though.

my bf, apparently, is 12 years old

But he's cute. Which is good. Because on Wednesday he decided to wake up at FOUR O'CLOCK in the morning to drive an hour and a half and stand in line for three hours to ski two runs at Arapahoe Basin, the first mountain to open in the United States. RL was wearing a pumpkin costume, which got him some good coverage in the Denver Post. In one of the longer quotes, he decided to rub winter in my face by saying something like "summer's over!" it's funny because when he was saying that, i was still sleeping warmly and comfortably in my bed.

Just in case you need a visual:

In other silly bf news, he got an original Nintendo for his 30th birthday last week. I was excited because i thought i could relive my childhood too, but then he bought Skate or Die (sp?) and Commando, which i never played (i was rooting for Tetris and Bubble Bobble). Then the other night he called me from work saying he was going to be late because he had just bid on Excite Bike on eBay and he had to wait for the auction to close.

Aside from the primitive graphics and music that are fun to laugh at, for some reason Nintendo is really easy now that we're adults. I'm still trying to figure out if this has something to do with an increase in our intelligence or just an increase in familiarity with technical gadgets. Or maybe it's easy because RL, somehow, remembers all the secrets that we worked so hard for when we were little.

Actually, as we speak he's trying to conquer Mario Brothers for the third time in three days. Excuse me, I've gotta go help him out.

...my dear, i don't give a damn

being the super-anal grammar and language person that i am, i always notice when people say things repeatedly, or wrongly. when RL and i started dating he said "to tell you the truth" a lot, which i thought was funny. when i pointed it out he stopped doing it. i sure hope you're still telling me the truth RL!

he also said, "least we forget" until i corrected him. apparently all of his life he'd been laboring under the assumption that the least we could do is not forget.

my current boss' name is frank. he says "frankly" a lot. as in "frankly, i think the design isn't what we need right now." it's like he's using himself as an adjective. like, what other way are you going to do things but frankly? i wonder if he notices the inherent irony. i do things tee-plately. how do you do them?

one of my professors is moroccan, though he's lived in the states for awhile and is a working journalist. for the most part he's got the language down, but there are always a few words he just can't pronounce right. my cohort and i sit in class and make notes of his weird pronunciations and then compare after class. the other day he was telling us a story about a coroner, but the way he said it sounded like Tony Danza ordering a mexican beer. Cor-OWN-er ("Hey Angela, go get me a coroner."). it was hard not to giggle in class.

but my absolute favorite saying of this professor is the substitution of the word "gouge" for the word "gauge." as in, "think about your surroundings and gouge your stories appropriately." i'm sure he doesn't even think about it, but the word takes on a totally different meaning when you pronounce it this way. does this not happen in morocco?

and it's got some hip music, too

on the heels of britney not being fat, let's all take a moment to watch Dove's new internet ad about caring for your daughter's body image. it's like they heard my cries! at least somebody's paying attention.