My Husband's Fixations

Maybe your husband is like mine. He’s fixated on a couple of things: the Chicago Bears, Star Wars, all things related to audio engineering, and Seinfeld. It is rare that I go through a day without mention of one of these things.

Chicago Bears. We are constantly re-living the glory days of the 1985 Superbowl season. Mr. Bean was about 10 years old when the Bears won that Superbowl. He remembers every painstaking detail of that season as if it happened just this year.

YouTube has old Saturday Night Live sketches of the Super Fans. Oh. My. I hear “Ditka!” and “Bearzzz” anytime one of his phanitical fan friends is nearby.

Star Wars. We have more boxes of Star Wars action figures than I care to share. We have so many that when friends help us move they comment years later on Mr. Bean’s extensive collection. We have a book that Mr. Bean can look through and point out the ones he’s missing. He takes them out of the boxes about once a year and fills up the entire living room, dining room, hallway, and part of our master bedroom with them laid out side by side leaving only room for tiptoe paths from the couch to the bathroom.

When Mr. Bean gets together with his brother, they play “Star Wars Trivial Pursuit.” They know all the answers so it isn’t any fun. Instead of just not playing, they made a new rule. Your answer must be EXACTLY what is written on the back of the card. If the answer is “Luke and Leia” and you say “Leia and Luke” you are wrong.

Audio Engineering. There was an audio engineering contest hosted by Neumann that would rank the best audio engineers of the whole world. Mr. Bean placed 27^th. *Applause* Yes, he’s a stud. Hands off ladies…he’s taken!

As proud as I am of this hunk-of-a-geek, I can’t help but get annoyed when we watch movies and he leans over to tell me the exact model of the microphone being featured. “Hey, look, that’s an U47 large-diaphragm vacuum tube microphone with a remote power!” Huh? I really don’t want to hear about the binaural head microphones and how much we NEED one anymore.

Seinfeld.

“But I don’t want to be a pirate!”

“I don’t have a square to spare.”

“No soup for you. Come back one year.”

“La, la, la!”

“You know the message you're sending out to the world with these sweat pants? You're telling the world: ‘I give up.’”

It is a shame that I know so many of these quotes considering I don’t watch the show religiously. Mr. Bean has all the seasons loaded onto his i-Pod so he can watch them whenever his heart desires. What kind of sick fascination is this? More importantly, why do I feel possessed to join him with the quote-fests?

(Posted with the permission of Mr. Bean.)