Emily's Anniversary Guest Post

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Today, July 19th 2016 is the anniversary of two equally important historical landmarks. The first is the second anniversary of my marriage to my wife Emily, who at this point has yet to either file for divorce or drop a bowling ball on my head in my sleep, exceeding all expectations of how much stupidity a person is expected to tolerate. The second and perhaps more momentous being the one year anniversary of the launching of a stupid blog full of crappy illustrations and third grade humor that plays fast and loose with the rules of civilized grammar and the proper use of a semicolon on a regular basis; this being one of those times.

About a month ago Emily suggested that she write a guest post for the site. Seeing as it was close to our anniversary, and always being down for content that I don't have to create I told her she should write something that I'd use on our anniversary.

For the record, I had no influence or prior knowledge of what she was going to write, so this could really just be like six paragraphs about what a huge sack of crap I am or an overview on the migratory patterns of the eastern migratory earthworm or something. With no further waffling about, here is Emily's post as it was given to me with no editing or review on my part. Maybe she'll use a semicolon.

As Matthew and I are about to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary, I've been contemplating on the last two years and how things have changed for us and our relationship in that time. As a proud wife, I am so happy for him for starting this blog in honor of our lives together. And, any free time spent off of his Xbox is a win for me in my mind. When he said I could do a guest post on Adventures in Husbanding, I thought of the perfect idea to post on for our anniversary.
As we were preparing for our perfect wedding two years ago, Matt, not being a very religious person, still agreed upon a Catholic wedding for us. Growing up in a Catholic church, it was important to me to walk down a long aisle escorted by my father and sitting through the hour and a half of Catholic traditions, even if it meant that all of our guests wanted to fall asleep during the ceremony. 
However, part of having a Catholic wedding ceremony though is that you can't get creative with your wedding vows. You have to follow a set of vows that they provide for you. We were kind of fine with that though because then it's one less thing to remember or screw up on the day of your wedding. Afterall, I had watched the TV show, Friends. I didn't want to have a Ross moment where Matt or I said our ex's name up at the alter instead of each other's. Although, Matt's ex is also Emily, so he could have said the wrong person's name and would we never know in the end…
Anywho, two years into marriage I realize how bland those vows kind of were. Not that I wouldn't vow to love Matt in good times and in bad, in sickness and health, etc., etc. However, with time, your relationship progresses, you live together, and you really learn about your partner's flaws and your own flaws too. So, if I had the chance to go back to our wedding day and write vows more representative of our relationship, here's an idea of what mine might have looked like:
  • I vow to only wake you up by setting the dogs loose on your head when I feel you are sleeping in too late, especially on Saturdays when I'm working and you have off.
  • I vow to scream in a life-threatening manner to alert you of the presence of a bug in our house and demand immediate capture of said bug, forcing you to drop whatever it is that you are doing that second, even if you're "on the pot" as they say, to come and rescue me.
  • I vow to only have life dreams that put us in a quarter of a million dollars in debt for us to have to pay off until we are like, a billion years old.
  • I vow to always keep us financially aware. Afterall, I am the one with the quarter million dollar dream. But, you will have a really awesome present coming your way when we get all of the debt paid off when we are a billion years old and I can finally afford to get you a really awesome present. 
  • I vow to always freak out when the dogs do something cute (which is pretty much all the time!) and make you take pictures of them on your phone because my phone doesn't take pictures anymore because it's so filled up with pictures of the dogs doing something cute.
  • I vow to always make my baked goods with reduced fat, whether or not the recipes calls for it, and then get offended when you call everything "dense".
  • I vow to always worry about your health. You can expect to be looked at with partially judging and partially worried eyes when you eat things like hot dogs and bacon cheeseburgers.
  • Other the other hand, I vow to never make lentil sloppy joes, EVER again. It’s just not worth it that much.
  • Lastly, I vow to be in a state of constant noise by singing and whistling, in practically a professional manner if you ask me, at home and then, be super quiet and sweet when we are out in public so that all of your friends think you married the most innocent and sweet person on the face of the planet. Then, when you try to convince them otherwise, I put on my bashful doe eyes so they think you are crazy,
I also took it upon myself to write a few of Matt's vows for him too. (I guess I should have put a vow in there about needing to have at least a little control over everything we do.) They would look a little something like this:
  • When asked simple questions by you, I vow to always respond with in a stupid and/or sarcastic manner. For example, if you ask what I am doing, I will always respond, "Beeswax None of Yours, Inc."
  • I vow to always make us late for events by using up all of my time I should spend getting ready complaining about all the time you will take to get ready. And then start getting ready five minutes before you want to leave, underestimating how much time I will really need. 
  • Then, when we finally do leave, I vow to get angry when you call me out for us being late but still blame it on you because of how much more total time it took for you to get ready in the end. 
  • I vow to constantly play with the tuft of hair on my beard that hangs off of my chin as a nervous habit. Then when it grosses you out and you finally can't take it anymore and say something about it, I roll my eyes and begin playing with my eyebrows instead.
While these vows wouldn't be considered very traditional, they are real. I wouldn't take back my fairly fancy, Catholic wedding, and the proper vows I made to Matthew on that day. They were appropriate at the time, and still are, but now that Matt and I have been married for two years, we have had a lot more real-life experiences than what we had pre-wedding. There have been many broken sinks, talks about what Star Wars should have been, and so, so, so many dog farts. These are the things that shape the marriage and change the relationship. So much has obviously changed in two years. I can't wait to see what our vows will look like in many more!

Well, I mean sure that was a real and touching representation of our love and life together, showcasing how we interact and react to one another as a married couple. But not a single semicolon to be found. I'm a little bit let down.

Also, since I only got four vows to Emily's nine up there, I've taken it upon myself to round off my list with a few additional ones of my own.

  • I vow to offset your anxiety driven frugality by forcing us to purchase the occasional frivolous thing, go out to dinner or partake in some other such money spending activity that serves no other purpose but to be enjoyable. I also vow to round the cost of everything we have to spend money on down by at least 50 dollars so that you don't constantly have a stroke about our finances. 
  • I vow to tell you you are having a skinny day and that your butt looks good a minimum of twice a week in perpetuity so that you don't constantly complain of being fat when you weigh 100 lbs.
  • I vow to tolerate the fact that for some reason you call the TV remote control "The Box" and that your term for underwear is "squares" like some sort of complete animal maniac who just decides to come up with names for stuff that have no sensible correlation to their form or function.
  • I vow to be cool about it when you burp like a swamp demon any time you drink milk even though you act like it doesn't happen in public.
  • Finally, I vow to support you in the pursuit of your dreams even if they plunge us into a nearly bottomless pit of debt from which we may never fully claw our way out of. I vow this because I believe it is so rare for a person to truly find the thing in life that calls to them, and the fact that you have found yours is worth the untold years of eating shitty ramen packets for dinner that are ahead of us.

Happy Anniversary Emily, Happy first year Idiot Tantrum, and thank those of you who have been here reading the utter tripe that I have been plaguing the internet with for the past twelve months. My unhealthy need for your attention and approval is what gets me up in the morning.

Obligatory Pokemon Go Post.

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Did you think I wasn't going to write about it? Please, it's like you hardly know me. Plus I'm pretty sure if I dont write about it a bunch of huge guys in Team Rocket outfits come to my house, kick my ass, and take away my nerd street cred.

 Granted, it did take six days to turn out a post because I've been too busy trying to become a Pokemon Master to sit down and write, but shutup.

So, Pokemon Go has been out for almost a week now, though it's only been vaguely playable since about Friday. Needless to say I've literally done nothing else besides walk around my town trying to catch Pokemon and not think about what the bill for my data plan is going to look like at the end of the month.

If you don't know what Pokemon Go is you either just found out about the internet today and somehow this is the first website you went to, or you are some kind of an asshole who doesn't like fun or things that are awesome. You probably also hate like, pizza parties and the laughter of children. Whatever your excuse for not knowing what Pokemon Go is, go look it up now or just get out, I'm not explaining it to you.

Now that the soulless fun hating robots who were never programmed to love or understand the human experience of awesomeness are gone the rest of us can have a chat about the game that will undoubtedly lead to us all becoming dirty migrant pokemaster woods people who eventually die of not going to work and getting hit by a train trying to catch a Charizard. Despite all of our impending and unavoidable deaths at the hands of this phone game at least we'll die in great shape. When your family has to come and identify your body the coroner is gonna be all like "I'm terribly sorry for your loss, but if it's any consolation they had some seriously bitchin' calves and glutes." Then you parents will be all "They walked fifteen miles through the woods to catch a Diglett once." 

First off, because it's important: My starter was Charmander, because Bulbasaur is the Hufflepuff of starters and I always used to take Squirtle back in the day so I thought I'd change it up. I also went team Valor because what else would you pick? If Bulbasaur is the Hufflepuff of starters, Valor is the Gryffindor of teams.

 
 

Now that I've pissed off anybody not into Pokemon and insured that nobody will ever think I'm cool again after making fifty-seven Pokemon-Harry Potter mashup references in two sentences, I can get on with talking about the game.

As someone who was at the perfect age for the Pokemon craze when the first games came out back in 1996, I am of course drowning in nostalgia boners for this Go and all the fun I'm having exploring towns around me looking for various wild Pokemon. I caught a Scyther the other day and it was like, I don't even care what happens the rest of the week, this is all I need out of life.

 
 

Primarily my experience roaming around playing Go has been incredibly positive. In the week since this game came out, not only have I discovered two public parks in my area that I never new were there, I've gotten double the normal amount of cardio I usually get due to riding my bike, walking the dogs and running around playing. It makes me remember why I was always so skinny as a kid and now I have to go to the gym seven days a week or I get whatever the man version of a muffin top is. 

Most astonishingly, considering I'm usually an antisocial grump who fears any contact with any stranger and most casual acquaintances outside of a context I am prepared to see them in, I probably had more conversations with random people I bumped into on the street on Saturday alone than I have in the past five years combined. On top of that, I actually walked away from those situations feeling happy and not wanting to go back to my house and stay there for the rest of the month playing Overwatch and keeping the curtains shut.

All that being said, I'm sure that once the initial shiny newness and glow of getting out in the fresh air as worn of we'll all realize that the game is ruining society and destroying our mental states at a rate never before achieved by technology up until this point. You are a lying Grimer-Orgy attendee if you tell me at least once playing this game you haven't yelled "FUCK!" after the third Pokeball in a row misses a goddamn Rattatta. I accuse Pidgey's mother of being a whore every time one breaks free while I'm trying to catch it. It's going to become a real issue.

Besides making me unreasonably aggressive towards small pretend monsters, and the fact that it apparently started a gang war over night depending on which team you chose, there's also the fact that it is definitely going to get me arrested. A few days ago a gym popped up on my map in the area I was passing through. It was only a couple of blocks of a detour so I headed over that way and figured I'd see if I could beat whatever trainers were there and take over. Nothing wrong with this plan except that the gym was centered on a playground for small children. Not even like, a playground located in a public park that has some benches or hiking paths or even a pavilion or something nearby that a person who was not a small child themselves or the guardian of one could pretend to have any business nearby. Just a straight up playground in a development in the middle of a lawn with nothing around it.

In order to be able to fight and potentially take over a gym you of course need to be close enough to it in real life to register your location. A hundred feet or so does the trick usually. This means that if I wanted to take that gym, I was going to have to be a fully grown, bearded man, creepily inching closer and closer to a park with his phone out as a group of ten year olds hang out on the swing-set.

Nobody ever became the very best, like no one ever was by shying away from looking a bit like a pedophile though, so I did what needed to be done. I'm probably on some neighborhood watch list now, but I'm the gym leader of that gym. So you know... worth it.

I figure I've got about a month, tops before it stops being socially acceptable to post constant pictures of Poekmon I've caught, or somebody gets stabbed in the liver over a Mew and ruins the fun for the rest of us, so until then, I'll be out there trying to catch 'em all.

55 down. Should only take me the rest of my life to get the rest. right?

 

Idiot Tantrum

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What's happening? Where am I? This isn't the site I thought I was going to! I'm confused and scared and maybe just a little bit hungry for curly fries, I should probably go to Arby's later but also what is happening with this site?!

Fear not my easily upset and slightly unfocused friend. You didn't accidentally type one letter in the wrong place when trying to get to this web address and accidentally end up on a weird page that is just a random assortment of links to weird advertisements and possibly pornographic stuff. Adventures in Husbanding.com will from this point forward be known as Idiot Tantrum.com. We've (I've) re-branded ourselves (myself) in celebration of the (almost) one year anniversary of the site. Henceforth this site shall be christened www.idiottantrum.com! 

Nothing about the content is going to change. It's still pretty much going to be shitty cartoon, third grader humor, and stories where my wife gets mad at me for being about as practically useful as a topiary; The site has just been migrated to a new domain with a new web address and title that we (I) feel better fits the spirit of what the site has evolved into since it's beginnings last year.

Really it's just a move for the sake of having a zippier sounding name for the site, and a web address that is a little shorter and hopefully easier to remember. Bottom line it's a SEO move (he said as if he understood how search engine optimization worked). 

I put up a news bulletin thing here that you can check out which goes into a little more detail as to the reasons for the change. If, as I suspect, you do not care even a little bit, you can not click that link and go about your life. It's a free internet, you can do what you want, man.

Happy 4th of July. I'm Really Mad About a T-shirt.

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Before I met Emily I was a lot angrier in general than I am now. I've always had what one might call rage issues if one were to use the term in the absolute loosest of senses. I basically hate everything, but have the aggression and backbone of a small girl so I rage less in the traditional 'violent temper and poorly balanced mental state' way and more in the 'impudent nerd rage that spurs a person to write a strongly worded blog post about some completely insignificant bit of minutiae that nobody else gives a thimble sized shit about' way.  

If you are confused as to what I'm talking about, you'll likely understand when you get to rest of this strongly worded blog post about how I'm irrationally mad about a t-shirt I saw at a store..

I was going to start this post of by saying that one of the great things about Emily is that she really tempers that rage in me, but I if we're being accurate, it's not so much tempering rage as just keeping me from being too much of an anal retentive douche-dirigible.

In any event, in the years we have been together I have noticed that Emily has really mellowed me out when it comes to a lot of the stuff that I used to become pointlessly irate over. As the result of a steady combination of  telling me to calm the f%$k down and general apathy towards my idiot tantrums I have come to realize that sometimes I can just let things go instead of obsessively needing to make the universe understand the injustice of something stupid or shitty being allowed to exist. ( Side note: Idiot tantrums would be a great title for my book.) 

She's helped me realize truths such as: the percentage of my time I need to spend upset over the fact that the logo for those Speck iPhone cases looks like a puckered butthole is actually 0% as opposed to the 100000% of the time I spent upset over it before. ( But seriously though...like, how do people not see it?)

 

The point is, I don't worry about stupid crap nearly as much anymore as I used to, and generally I'm a much happier person because of it. There are still a few things I refuse to let go of, the Speck case thing apparently being one of them and another being the belief that every existing recording of that commercial they've been using since 1992 where you give your junk car to children or orphans or something that goes:

1800 KARS FOR KIDS,

K-A-R-S KARS FOR KIDS!

1800 KARS FOR KIDS,

DONATE YOUR CAR TODAY!"

 should be put on a rocket and fired into the sun. Generally though, I'm much less furious at the world around me now than I was five or so years ago.

HOWEVER.

Sometimes I can't help myself. I see or hear something that just stabs me right in the same nerve that Kars for Kids and their underground chop shop orphan cartel or Speck's anus marketing campaign does. When that happens the only thing I can do to quell the fury is bitch about it to people. Luckily I have this website which nobody reads but gives me the illusion of spreading my thoughts to an audience thus allowing me temporary peace of mind, so strap in.

This:

Is a thing I saw in a store while Emily was shopping and I wandered off to look at other areas because I got bored.

I'm sure everyone here already sees what it is that made me stop and take a picture of this shirt, because you are all smart, productive members of society. But somebody f*#$ing made it which means at least one person out there is not in the loop, so humor me as I describe in unnecessary detail why this shirt is worse than having a jar full of bees thrown at your face.

There are any number of things about this piece of self expressionary torsowear to be upset over, but like I said, I've mellowed out over time, so most of it can be forgiven.

Clearly this particular article of clothing is intended to be worn 'ironically-but-not-really' by some giant dude-bro at a 4th of July party as he pays homage to the founding of this country by shotgunning beers and disrespecting women or something, but seeing as I wear cat-tshirts and loud floral print button downs myself, I'll not cast stones in my house of glass and  poor fashion sense. And hey, I can appreciate a nice old timey historical portrait with sweet shades photoshopped onto it as much as the next guy.

I can even ignore the fact that the graphic is WAY too low on the shirt as if it were some weird pregnancy attire where you wanted the world to think your unborn baby was a sick party machine.

But Abraham Lincoln? Abraham- Log cabin living-slave emancipating-possibly vampire hunting- Lincoln?

What even happened? Did somebody just google "Presidential Bros", come up with that picture of A-bro-ham Lincoln and slap some text on it to meet a deadline? Any of the founding fathers would have been fine, but you'd at least think at some point during the six minutes it took to design that shirt somebody would have been like "Doesn't George Washington make more sense for a Fourth of July theme?" I'd even have taken "Hey, isn't this guy primarily associated with a completely different war and an entirely different period of American history than the one we are trying to reference?"

You've made a dumb joke shirt referencing America declaring independence in 1776, great. At least use the image of someone who was alive at the time for f*#k sake. Abraham Lincoln wasn't born until 1809 making him -33 years old at the time of the Declaration of Independence. That's like one entire Jesus worth of not being alive separating that guy from your shitty joke.

There has got to be some sort of process that this article of clothing goes through to go from being merely a twinkle in the eye of a historically illiterate graphic designer to on a hanger in Khol's for $12.99, right? How many people had to look at and approve this shirt for it to get to the point where it's in a store for me to take that picture? The answer is TOO F*#%ING MANY TO HAVE NOBODY BAT AN EYELASH AT THE FACT THAT THEY USED THE IMAGE OF A GUY WHO WAS BEHIND FIFTEEN OTHER GUYS THAT WERE PRESIDENT AND ALMOST FIVE DOZEN PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY SIGNED THE DOCUMENT THEY'RE REFERENCING. 

And look, before the internet tars and feathers me, I'm aware that George Washington didn't sign the Declaration of Independence and didn't become President until 1789 which technically means he doesn't fit the "party like it's 1776" theme but he's clearly the most logical choice if we 're going to take some measure of artistic liberty with our douche shirt. It's not like anybody gives a shit who like, Samuel Huntington was, so for the sake of the thing making sense that could have been forgiven. 

Clearly we don't give a crap about having any type of logical association among the images we put on our t-shirts so I've designed a few of my own:

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Now that I've gotten that out of my system I'll get on with enjoying the long holiday weekend. Happy Fourth of July, try not to let the little things in life give you stress poops like they do to me, and f*#k you if you bought that shirt.