I love Dateline. Always have, always will.  In fact, that’s how we party animals have been filling most of our Friday nights for the past few months. Nothing makes me/us laugh harder than Keith Morrison’s facial expressions and enunciation patterns during interviews. I don’t care who you are, that’s entertainment right there.

Anyway, last Friday Matt had been out of town for work for a few days so got home that night a little later than usual and all we did was get take out and settled in on the couch together for “The Bathtub Mystery” I believe it was.

Matt, exhausted from his week of training, and stuffed full from La Mesa queso, falls asleep about halfway through this whopper of an episode. I, usually the one who fills the role of falling asleep early, instead, sat straight up for the entire 2 hours, horrified at the story unfolding before me.

Episode cliff notes:  Ryan and Sarah met, became friends then years later realized the other was “the one,” eventually moved in together, got engaged, got married. He loved sports and was the quiet one. She was the loud, social one. Sound familiar?! There were even more coincidences but I’ll spare you the rest of the background. What happens next is all that matters. One random Monday night, Sarah died in the bathtub!! He was downstairs watching TV and she supposedly got bored, decided to take a bath, fell asleep in the bathtub and drowned. It was a suspicious situation (damp hair, dry body when medics arrived, in addition to lots of other circumstantial evidence); some people think Ryan did it (he’s been found guilty in 3 separate trials actually), but other’s don’t. I’ll spare you the rest of the details, but bottomline is that she was lifeless upstairs for awhile while he was downstairs Monday Night Football-ing it up.

I was so scared that night I could NOT sleep!! For the next several nights actually. We even watched a much scarier Dateline episode on Sunday that didn’t really affect me as much, or at all. In fact, I can’t even remember what that one was about. So Sunday night I literally spent the whole night sitting straight up in terror, staring into the shadows and rationalizing scary noises that night. Needless to say, I had some time to think. I realized why I was so hot and bothered: This could’ve happened to me, to us!! Ahhh!!!!

And then it DID start happening. A few days later, we were laying on the couch trying to find something to watch (Tuesdays are a terrible night for TV!) and Matt turns it to X-Men 2. I don’t like movies like that so I tell him “I don’t want to watch this.” I give him a “reasonable” 30 seconds to change the channel to the movie I wanted to watch (No Country for Old Men) and when he doesn’t change the channel, I promptly get up and say, “Ok then, I’ll just do something else I guess.” And “I guess” was said in a tone that implied I didn’t want to be doing something else, ya know?

I went into the kitchen, uploaded a bunch of our wedding pictures to Facebook and then get bored and went to our bathroom upstairs. I figured why not be productive “I guess” – I was in the bathroom wiping away old polish from my nails and applying new. Matt comes up like 1.5 hours later, I’m sure only breaking from the movie because he has to pee, NOT to check to see what I was doing and if I was okay.  

But when he gets to the bathroom, that’s not what he gets to do. Instead, he gets to listen to me tell him about how I could have been dead in the bathtub up here the last 2 hours and he’d be none the wiser because he ignores me all the time! (In reality, I have never taken a bath in the 2+ years we’ve lived there and Matt gives me more attention than I could ever ask for). That night, though, probably due to lack of sleep – I was a little whiney . Ya, let’s go with that.  

I’m literally laughing thinking about it right now. Sometimes I’m SO RIDICULOUS. At the time, though, I sat there saying how he’d probably be found guilty in the trial and we might as well start calling each other Sara and Ryan and blah blah blah. He could have gone a lot of ways in that conversation but he just simply shook his head, smirked and said something to the effect of:  “I think you’re having an overreaction, Sara. (pause for emphasis) I don’t know why you don’t like comic book movies anyway.”

I busted up in laughter. It was indeed an overreaction, I mean, even as I was saying the angry words to him, I could barely keep a straight face but went with it anyway.  I just love that he calls me out on stuff and I’m so glad to have someone around who not only does care where I am at all times, but who always know just the right thing to say.