Allocation of Household Duties: SAM (part II)

It's time for another edition of Sam's Household Duties.

• Making juice
• Remembering room measurements
• Translating cake ideas into actual cakes
• Pointing out Inefficiencies in Everyday Life
• Changing the size of the computer desktop (but not changing it back)
• Being every baby's favorite
• Being in the edges of pictures

• Intercepting and interpreting meaningful glances during conversations with in-laws
• Defending the accused and then elaborately and convincingly backtracking when informed that I'm not interested in their possible mitigating circumstances and merely want to be told that I was totally in the right and very unjustly used
• Creative Interpretation of dreams
• Comprehending and then standardizing strange proportions and multi-angle perspective in my "drawings," into viable design plans
• Making alarming faces through the windows while waiting for the car's gas tank to fill
• Managing Netflix queue
• Chasing people up the stairs
• Explaining trendy internet phenomena, though not participating in them 
• Assuring me that what I said in the preceding social setting wasn't really that stupid
• Replying "But I love it!" when I comment on the nerdiness of my laugh
• Apologizing for forgetting to start the dishwasher when I forget to start the dishwasher
• Saying "We really need to ______ [get the oil changed, go in to the doctor for a Physical, set up a Roth IRA]" in a tone of Great Earnestness and Significance and then crossing the item off his mental to-do list for another four months with as much satisfaction as if he'd actually done it
• Breaking into song when appropriate
• Being Outraged when appropriate
• Cutting very thin apple slices
• Causing me to collapse with laughter by picking names out during movie credits and Saying Them
• Pointing out inconsistencies in various prevailing public attitudes
• Understanding what I really mean, even when I don't quite say it right
• Reducing things to their graphable essentials (and then graphing them)

And while we're on the subject of Sam . . . I'm so lucky, to have that rare gift: someone capable of both understanding and elevating who I really am, someone who I am both endlessly comfortable with and endlessly fascinated by.  Whenever I begin to feel overcome by insecurity and confusion, I have someone that pulls me back and lets me---helps me---be who I want to be, and feel like things are clear again.  Let me quote Matthew Arnold: 

But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ’t is not true!

Only—but this is rare—
When a beloved hand is laid in ours . . .
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur, and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth forever chase
The flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,

And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.

And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

Happy Birthday, Sam dear.  I'm not really me until I'm with you.