On the Other Hand
by Tony Dawson

 

 

I married a contrarian and a procrastinator, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Love is blind, after all. On the one hand, no matter what I say or suggest, she will contradict me and come up with an alternative. Always. Without fail. After one typically frustrating exchange, I said to her, “God, I could strangle you sometimes!” and her response was “Nah, strangling me would be a bad idea. You’d be rumbled straightaway, be convicted and spend, at the very least, twenty years in jail. Anyway, (she always starts her rejoinders with ‘anyway’, another annoying feature of her discourse) you might even get hurt yourself. I would probably knee you in the groin while you were throttling me. It would be better to drug me with sleeping pills and then inject air into one of my veins to make it look like a heart attack.” Not a bad idea, I thought, grinding my teeth and clenching my fists. See how her contrarianism is designed to drive me to distraction?

 

On the other hand, she is also an irritating procrastinator. It doesn’t matter what it has to do with, whether it is paying a bill, returning a call, or updating the operating system on her laptop. By the time she gets round to any such task, there’s a surcharge on the bill for late payment, a possible opportunity to make some money is lost because she couldn’t be bothered to return the call and programs on the computer start to play up because she is half a dozen security patches behind. Whatever it is, she procrastinates and her procrastination leads to myriad arguments with me. I think she would have broken off her relationship with me by now if she didn’t keep putting it off.

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