Read Online If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon by Jenna McCarthy - Free Book Online Page A

mode? Is the remote sensor window blocked? Do you want to restore factory settings? What’s the square root of 4,309,782, who was the eleventh president of the United States, and if I offered you a million dollars, could you define the word the ?”
    Go Zen, I tell myself as I randomly answer YES and NO to thousands of bewildering questions. “ Now is the PVR on?” it asks at one point, and I think I hear it sigh. I start to feel the way I always do at the optometrist when he asks me to cover one eye and tell him whether A or B looks sharper, clearer, better. My personal theory is that since they look exactly the same it is unmistakably a trick question, a way of seeing if you’re paying attention. “Yes,” I tell the remote control this time. “Now the PVR is on!”
    Suddenly—and I am not just saying that for dramatic emphasis, believe me; it really does happen out of nowhere—the impossible happens: The television set turns itself on. Surely this is merely a miraculous coincidence and not the result of something I’ve done. If it’s the latter, I’m actually bummed—because it’s not like I could reproduce the winning sequence if you held a gun to my head.
    Slightly shaken by this unexpected turn of events, I begin scrolling through the online TV guide, which features incomprehensible portions of the titles of the roughly one thousand shows I have the luxury of choosing from. I’ve made it to 277 when the phone rings.
    “You’re still awake?” Joe asks. I look at the clock and it’s more than an hour past the time I normally turn in.
    “Oh, yeah, I was just reading,” I lie. I refuse to admit how I spent the last several hours.
    “I was just going to leave you a message asking you to record something for me while I’m gone,” he says. “It’s super easy. Want me to walk you through it?”
    “Can we do it tomorrow?” I ask. “I’m exhausted.” And if I have to look at that godforsaken remote again tonight, something is going to get broken.

“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
    My husband has this awful habit of pulling out back hairs with his fingers while we’re watching TV. He just reaches behind his neck to his back and yanks them out one by one. We’ll be sitting there watching True Blood when all of a sudden the couch jerks with this crazy force of him pulling his back hairs out! He doesn’t have a hairy back, just a few stray hairs, which he only feels the urge to remove when we’re watching TV together. It is beyond gross.
    DEILIA
     
     
    This may come as a shock to you, but it is universally accepted (by most people with penises at least), so you might as well get used to it: Once a man has pressed the power button on the TV, he is officially “watching it,” for all of eternity or until he manually turns it off himself, whichever comes last. (Power outages don’t “count” as an active act of disengagement, either. Just so you know.) You might think because he is fast asleep, has gotten into the shower, or just boarded a plane for a twoweek business trip on another continent that you might then be free to change the channel or—if you’re feeling really ballsy—turn the thing off entirely, but you’d be wrong.
    “Did you turn off the TV?” he’ll ask in a terrifying Hannibal Lecter voice.
    “Well, um, yeah, I did—” you’ll stammer, confused.
    “I was watching that!” he’ll roar from the puddle of drool/ steamy bathroom/faraway tarmac, frightening the bejesus out of you because you’d have bet your last dollar that you were well within your legal/marital television operating rights when you assumed control. Do not even try to rationalize with him by pointing out that he was unconscious or in a different time zone, because the conversation will turn preschool on your ass before you can say Hanna-Barbera.
    “Honey, you were not watching that,” you’ll say with a small chuckle, as if you are both mature adults who can laugh and admit when they are