Driving Miss Crazy; or, Joint Custody

I spent most of Friday night in the fogged-up backseat of a souped-up sportscar.

This could sound titillating if I were to, say, leave out the fact that it was not so much a sportscar as a two-door Chevy Cobalt coupe rental, and a bright neon yellow one at that, and maybe not souped-up so much as unfortunately burdened by an oversized and misguided spoiler.

Or the fact that the windows were fogged because it was, predictably, foggy and raining outside, because that's what it does outside every time we ever rent a car.

Or the fact that I wasn't sharing the backseat with a hot seventeen year old quarterback - - hold onto your bonnets, pedophiliaphobes, I'm a sixteen year old blonde cheerleader in this story - - but instead with one hundred-plus pounds of pressed particleboard shelving from IKEA, which M. and I bought on our way up to New Hampshire with the intention of folding the seats down and storing it in the car until we got back to Manhattan, except then the seats wouldn't fold down - - trust me, we tried, and hopefully no proud parents will be using the carseat attachment anytime soon, although they'd probably agree that it could just as easily be a folding-seat lever as a carseat anchor - - so we had to jam the six-foot long boxes into the main part of the car, which took some creative wrangling and gnashing of teeth and angry phone calls to Avis and venomous mutual glaring, but eventually we got them jammed, except then I had to sit in my petite backseat cocoon, which was okay with me because that way I could glare directly yet discretely into the back of M.'s skull.





The fact that I did not spend Friday night - - or Easter Sunday afternoon for that matter - - getting deflowered in the back of an I-Roc Z is not the important issue here.

The important issue here is that, with some cooperation and patience, M. and I managed to take an impossible situation and make it work.

And then we got home yesterday afternoon and managed to put together a forty-piece IKEA shelving unit with only the merest hint of discord, and one which was quickly squelched only two minutes into our project.

And if we can accomplish these two things in the space of forty-eight hours, I can't help but to assume that we are Simply Meant To Be.

Five hundred bucks worth of unreturnable booze purchased at the tax-free New Hampshire State Liquor Store - - combined with ten place settings, an abundance of glassware, a few heavy kitchen gadgets, the largest IKEA shelving unit ever to be assembled in a fourth-floor walkup and, after our impending wedding shower this weekend, what I can only assume will be a plethora of other assorted and expensive and mutually-owned items - - only reinforces the fact that they (or we) can (or had better) Never Tear Us Apart.