My Final Rose, or why you should clean up your board games

This entry was inspired with encouragement from Fella who told me, “See, you still have funny stories even though you’re not single.”

Fella suffered the loss of a close friend this past week. (I promise this gets funnier.) Like most men, Fella handles grief by drinking excessively. This is fine, I understand. He’s usually asleep by 9:00 which leaves the television free for me to watch the Lifetime movies that I can’t watch when he’s awake. However, last night, he went too far.

I came home from teaching a class, excited to watch the Bachelorette finale. Because Fella was asleep (nice way of saying passed out) in the living room, I took to the bedroom and began to watch the long, drawn-out, ridiculous, why-am-I-watching-this mess that is the Bachelorette fi-nah-le, as Chris Harrison calls it.

Thankfully, we’re about to reach the end. Jojo is about to pick the less frightfully dull Stepford husband out of the two frightfully dull Stepford husbands that she has left. The limo pulls up. We see hipster brown shoes with hipster striped socks step out…

All of the sudden, there is a loud crash from the living room, and the TV goes black. I bolt out of bed, screaming, “Son of a biscuit, what happened?!”

Fella is sitting on the couch holding his head. Our tower of board games that we keep next to the TV toppled, lying strewn over wires, one of which had been connected to the back of the television but now has been ripped out. Clearly, Fella, who is a klutz on his most sober day, tried to stand up too fast and fell into the games, starting a chain reaction that ended in me missing the F-ING FINAL ROSE!! (Side note: Fella hates that we keep the board games out like that. We never play them. He says it looks like a college dorm room, and he’s repeatedly asking me if we can put them down in the basement. Possibly, this was part of his plan to get his way. *shrug*)

So what, you ask? Just plug the wire back in. Well, unfortunately for me, my landlord, the not-so-handy man had thought that it would be a great idea to wire our 600 sq. ft. apartment with a multiroom speaker system. Never mind that the apartment is so tiny that if you turn the TV in the living room up a notch, you can hear it in the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, the backyard, the neighbors’ backyard probably…well, you get the idea. As a result, and this is no exaggeration, there is a tangled mess of no less than thirty-seven wires that just sit behind the television. I was desperately trying to reconnect the cable box, but I didn’t know which wire was the one that had been connected to it. It was like trying to find your drunkass boyfriend amongst tailgaters in the Gillette Stadium parking lot…nearly impossible.

As I frantically kept trying to reconnect the cable, thinking to myself, “Just hold on Jojo. Please let the boring man drone on per usual and stall him while I set this up,” Fella, who has the memory of a goldfish when he’s drunk, sat on the couch, heckling me. See, he had forgotten that he fell, so he believed that the cable was just out, and that I thought that I was going fix it without calling the cable guy.

By then, I had had enough. I turned to Fella and yelled, “Fella!! THIS IS MY SUPERBOWL!! YOU HAVE RUINED MY SUPERBOWL!!” He looked at me wide-eyed as he had never seen me that angry before, and I had put it in a perspective that, even in his drunken stupor, he could understand. He went silent.

I was able to reconnect the cable, but by that time Chris Harrison was gushing about the most dramatic fi-nah-le we’ve ever had on the Bachelorette, and ABC had moved on to After the Final Rose. I had missed the proposal after all that work of trying to stay awake through Jojo’s candidates’ hokey songs and mundane speeches about how they didn’t know what love was until they shared a woman with 25 other guys and got to spend eight weeks thinking about her without distracting things like television, but with tons of booze at their beck and call.

In the morning, we were able to laugh about it. And, I have grudgingly forgiven Fella as he did have a rough week. But, I do have to say, he better make sure that I’m nowhere near the cable box on a certain night in February.