Even after 10 years of marriage, I’m always amazed by some of the more subtle dynamics that come with meshing your life with another human being.  How a quirk of one person coincides and conflicts with another person’s quirk.

Take Kile and I, for instance.  Kile is the sort that doesn’t deal well with interuptions.  He has a notorious one-track mind and when he’s involved in one project, he doesn’t want to “change horses midstream” and switch to another project.  Even if it’s not necessesarily something he’s enjoying doing.  He prefers to finish what he’s doing before doing something else.  He’s got great focus, that way.  Once Kile starts working on something, you can count on it getting finished.  Maybe not in a timely manner, since he’s also something of a perfectionist.  But you can rest assured that one way or another, it’ll get done.

Me, on the other hand… well, I am sorta the opposite.  It’s not that I don’t finish projects (well, at least not all the time), but rather that I am more prone to multi-task.  Whether it’s an enjoyable endeavor (such as reading two books at once) or not so much (start emptying the dishwasher, then take out the trash and then going back to the dishwasher).  This scattered approach to chores and such comes in handy when staying at home with two little kids.  I can knit a few rows of my latest knitting project and then put that down to change a diaper and then check email and then knit another row and then post to a message board then write a paragraph of a blog post and then upload some photos and then let the dogs out and then fix Liam his lunch and then nurse Evie and then lay Liam down for a nap and then run a load of diaper laundry…. you get the picture.  It is VERY rare that I have the opportunity to sit down and start something and finish it without any sort of interuption.

Now, where these quirks conflict is when my affinity with multi-tasking causes me to question why Kile cannot do the same.  It doesn’t help that my “talent” (as it were) also means that I’m rather impatient (I also like how “rather impatient” makes it sound like I’m just a little impatient.  SNORT).  I’ll give you an example of something that happened the other night to illustrate this.

I had purchased some haircolor at the store and wanted to color my hair on Saturday night.  I had mentioned this to Kile earlier in the day, that after we got the kids to bed that I’d like him to color my hair for me.  I asked him because he does a much better job than I could on myself and he generally doesn’t mind helping me out.  (Plus, he knows how much money it saves him to have me do this at home versus in a salon.)   I typically take my shower right after putting Evie down in her crib so that the rest of the evening is freed up for watching TV and reading blogs and knitting.  Now, Kile typically plays “Halo” on his desktop up in the loft after he puts Liam down.  He’ll usually play for a 1/2 hour or an hour.  The two schedules work well together.  Except when they intersect.  As they did the night I wanted to color my hair.

I put Evie down and then approached Kile at the computer, where he’d been playing for about 10-15 minutes at that point.   He was in the middle of playing a particular map, and as always, rather absorbed with it.  He plays with headphones on and I always have to get his attention so he can hear me if I try to talk to him while this is going on.  I mentioned I was ready for the hair coloring.  He indicated he’d be done in a minute.  I continued to watch him play for another 5-10 minutes.  I got tired of standing there so I thought I’d go downstairs and get the hair color all ready to go.

I was looking at the instructions and started to think that maybe I should just color my hair myself.  I didn’t feel like waiting around another 15 minutes for Kile to finish his game.  I knew better than to expect that he would just stop playing in the middle of a game.  Such an occurance would likely signal the beginning of the apocalypse.  It was already 8:30 and Harry was waiting for us so we could all watch “The Dark Knight” together.  I didn’t want to get started with the movie much later than 9:00, since it is a rather long movie.  So I grabbed the haircolor and went upstairs with it.  I even walked past Kile in the loft but I don’t think he even noticed me, so intent was he on the game.  No big.  I just went into our room and got to the business of coloring my hair.

I even turned on the “Destroyed in Seconds” marathon on Discovery to watch while I waited for the haircolor to develop.  I did as best a job as I could do.  It is a little easier to color my hair while it’s this short.  It’s when my hair is long that I really have a hard time.  I tried my best to get all the roots and saturate the ends.  At the end of my 15 minute waiting period, I turned on the shower and got ready to hop in.  About then, apparently Kile had heard the shower start and he came in the room.  Apparently, he thought I was skipping the haircolor and just going for the shower.

“I’m downstairs, ready to color your hair.”  He looks at my head at this point and notices it’s all gooped up. “Wait, did you already color your hair?”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to wait anymore.  I wanted to be done by nine.  Harry is waiting for us to watch the movie with him.”

“Oh.  Well, I was going to color your hair.  I’m all ready to do it now.”

“Oh well.  Too late now.  See ya downstairs in a few.”

And that was that.  My nose wasn’t terribly out of joint, because I recognized that my impatience was in direct conflict with Kile’s inability to switch projects.  It wasn’t so much even that he was playing “Halo”.  If he had been rewiring a ceiling fan, it would have been the same story.  There would be no way that he could stop what he was doing to color my hair and then go back to it when he was done.  That’s just not the way he works.

The good news is that I recognize this and am fairly tolerant of it (to a point, of course).  I imagine that if I were less understanding that we could have some major issues on our hands.  Thankfully, coloring my hair isn’t a major issue.  Life goes on.  Disaster is averted.   Heh.