Wine Appreciation

Things are going very well with Ish right now, which I think no one really wants to hear. Drama, messiness -- yes. A nice couple being happy with each other? YEEEEACHHHH.

But don't go thinking there are no Issues or that The Crazy has gone and left me, because that would be utter foolishness. I long ago embraced my The Crazy, and it will stay with me forever and ever, rearing itself in different forms as I go through various life and relationship stages.

Yeah, I'll get to that.

In the meantime, we have moments like the one last night.

We were both tired, and working late. We were both sitting at our table with our laptops, hardly speaking to one another. We both had glasses of a fun-but-ultimately-unremarkable pinot noir.

While sitting there, I realized I had not effectively swished my mouth out with water following my "dinner."

I should not tell you this because it's really quite awful, but the truth of the matter is, when left to my own devices I do not really care about eating much or well. Because Ish was coming home so late, we agreed not to eat together but instead to "fend for ourselves." I don't tend to fare well in these cases.

Last night, I couldn't muster the inclination to go ACROSS THE STREET to the grocery store, so I just poked around the apartment until I found something that resembled food. I was thrilled to discover we had a bag of remnant noodles, and decided that would be just fine. I prepared them with a little butter and salt and nothing else. (Well, nothing else except carb shame.) And then when I realized that a cup of noodles might not be quite filling enough as my entire dinnertime meal, I ate a couple handfuls of organic cheddar cheese popcorn. (The "organic" making it healthy.) A complete and well rounded meal, no?

When Ish returned home, I learned that he had stopped across the street, and had grabbed himself a fancily prepared, ready-to-heat package of a lemon-butter salmon with rice pilaf.

One of us is obviously the grown-up. But the other one of us got to suck powdered cheddar cheese off her fingers for the rest of the night. (Score!)

And because there are these two big holes in my mouth where my wisdom teeth used to be, I have to be diligent about swishing and flushing those holes after I eat. (Kinda gross, but whatever.)

There we were, sitting all grown-up and boring at the table, working on our computers and sipping wine. And when I realized I hadn't swished, I considered getting up, going to the sink, pouring some water and salt into a glass, and swooshing it around in my mouth. Even though there wasn't anything actually in my mouth, and it's just something I'm supposed to do.

But then that seemed dumb. I mean, if there's not really anything in there, why should I bother getting up and going through all the motions of actually pouring water and salt into a cup? That's kind of a lot of work. What does it really matter if you swish with water instead of, say, pinot noir?

Well, and that's exactly what I did. I started swishing the wine around in my mouth.

Naturally, this caused Ish to look at me.

For a moment, you could tell, he saw his girlfriend swishing a wine he'd carefully selected around in her mouth and he drew the logical conclusion: that I was taking the time to really taste the wine and evaluate it. He smiled at the gesture, pleased that I was even paying attention.

But as he kept looking at me, and I, looking at him, continued to swish fairly vigorously. And I think it must have been somewhere around the time I swished the wine from one side of my mouth to the other, alternately bulging my left and right cheeks out that he realized I was not, actually, tasting the wine at all, but simply using it to make sure my empty gum socket wasn't hiding a cheddar cheese popcorn kernel.

Instead of immediately banging his head on the table, however -- which would have been an entirely appropriate response, mind you -- he simply smiled wider. His eyes were happy. He stared at me for a few lingering seconds, while I finished what I was doing (albeit a little more sheepishly now that I'd been caught).

He just said, "You're delightful." And went back to work.