Mr. W’s foggy memory paired with my elephant one is gonna cause endless frustrations, I can tell. I’m already saddened that he doesn’t remember anything about asking me out 2 years before we first started dating, nor does he remember much about our first weekend together and much of our momentous first times.

Yesterday evening (Saturday), childhood friend Vicky and I, with a very patient and game-faced Mr. W in accompaniment, did one of our ritual 5-hour, 15-game Bingo sessions at our old high school. It used to be a monthly thing before she and I hooked up with the men we are with now, and we hadn’t done it together in years. (Yes, the venue is fraught with little old ladies on oxygen tanks cussing, and yes, I have won before; $250 a pop!) Not that our stopping was the fault of either of our men; we just couldn’t get our schedules to mesh and then gave up for awhile.
So at Bingo, the topic of the “Transformers” movie came up. Vicky said she’s never seen it, which I was shocked by, cuz this is the girl I grew up watching all the 80s cartoons with! We loved He-Man, She-Rah, GI Joe, the short-lived Rainbow Brite and Cabbage Patch Kids, and I think even The Care Bears before I decided I hated them cuz despite all their promised rescues of sad little boys and girls on the cartoon, they never came and rescued ME when I was blue. Vicky asked what we thought of the “Transformers” movie. Mr. W jumped right in and said he thought it was great, he liked it, and thought it was funny. This confused me because I distinctly remember that as we were walking out of the movie, we were in the long hallway immediately exiting the theatre room and he was on my right, I had said, “Huh. That was actually better the second time around” (since I thought it was pretty disappointing the first time I watched it with Vanessa and James when they took me for my birthday, despite what EVERYONE ELSE thought of the movie, which was give it blockbusting rave reviews). And Mr. W had said that he didn’t think it was great, either, and that like my first time, he had trouble staying awake. He’d thought the movie was confusing, didn’t know who the good guys and bad guys were, and generally didn’t think it was as clever or funny as all my friends had said. I’d said I didn’t catch a lot of the supposed funny lines, either, and he’d said that it was because the characters said a lot of stuff in passing under their breaths so if you weren’t really paying attention to the dialogue you’d miss it. So now at Bingo, I objected, “That’s not what you said when you came out of the movie! You said you didn’t like it.”
Mr. W argued, “No, I DID like it and I said that it was good.”
I said, “You said it was confusing and you had trouble following it.”
He said, “No I didn’t, I wasn’t confused, which I thought was good considering I had never even seen one episode of the original Transformers show. It was one of your other friends who didn’t like it.”
“EVERYBODY else loved the movie,” I said, which was the bond that he and shared over NOT being impressed by the movie, which bond I felt when he and I walked out of the theatre holding hands griping about the disappointment of movies being overhyped and underacted. I think he may have even said back then that the characters were superficial and underdeveloped and you don’t feel attached to them because of the way the plot moved, but that may have also been a comment made by someone else.
Well, we lost THAT bond now, I thought as Mr. W and Vicky went into, “YOU’VE NEVER SEEN TRANSFORMERS?” and Mr. W explained that he was way into adulthood by the time those shows rolled around and he wasn’t watching Saturday Morning Cartoons or after-school 3pm cartoons anymore.

After we came home, we watched another episode of Buffy and Angel on DVD and Mr. W went to bed. I couldn’t fall asleep as the above stupid, inconsequential, all-in-all meaningless discrepancy ripped out chunks of my brain and tossed them at me. I finally got out of bed and came to Mr. W’s laptop and did a search for the Transformers movie on my blog, and found where I’d written back in July that Mr. W had confessed his trouble staying awake during the movie. It wasn’t everything I wanted, but it was SOMETHING confirmed. I went back to bed, which motion woke Mr. W up and he looked at me and asked what was wrong. I didn’t want to talk about this at 4 in the morning, but since he ASKED, I said, “What makes you think something is wrong?” He said because I’m clearly wide awake. Since he was looking at me with his eyelids propped up, I went into a whole “You said blah blah blah blah blah! And I remembered that it was really blah blah blah! And I looked it up in my blog just now and it WAS blah blah blah!”
In the most anticlimatic way, he said “Hmm” twice, as if thoughtfully, and rolled over and went to sleep. I curled up around him feeling better and slept soundly, too.