Being A Corporation

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively being a very good couple, a "corporation," as The Muse's grandpa apparently once said about us. In talking about how a couple's upsides and downsides should fit together, the post talked about how The Muse and I have similar views about movies and that's actually how we first bonded.

In thinking about it, I realized that maybe wasn't the best example. If people could be a really good couple just based on their tastes in movies, then maybe Siskel and Ebert would have made a nice couple. There's a picture for you. The Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker of movies as a couple. I thus realized that I needed a better example. Luckily, I thought of one: our family's trip to Hawaii last spring. That was a pretty good example of The Muse and I making each other better, I think.

I started talking about going sometime around this time last year, I guess. The Muse said that would be great, if I would organize it. Now this kind of thing calls on two things that I am decent at: (1) doing research until the subject is ground down into a very fine dust; and (2) bugging people I don't know to find out about stuff. So I did a bunch of research about the resorts where we could go, decided that I didn't really like those options, put an ad on Craig's List for a condo when we wanted to go, got a couple of responses, noticed that they linked to a Web site where lots of people offer their condos, found a condo that looked good at the time and roughly the price we wanted, called the owner to find out about the beaches around the condo and what stuff was in the condo, got the contract to rent the condo and made the deposits and stuff. I went through a similar process with airline flights and ended up booking us on an airline that we had never heard of that flew direct from Oakland to Maui. All of that worked out pretty well.

So, then we get to Maui and it's kind of rainy. Apparently, we caught the very tail end of a storm. We decided to go to the beach the next day because, well, it's Maui and that's why you're there. As soon as we get out on to the beach, all I can see is what looked to me like big waves breaking on the beach. This frightens me, triggering my whole-honed instinct to worry about the kids. We went into the ocean and I just wanted to hold on to the kids as tightly as I could. I couldn't see what The Muse saw, which was that, if you just went out beyond where the waves were breaking, there were nice swells on which you could just float. After some effort, The Muse convinced me to take the kids out there. And, after that, things were great. The adults had fun, the kids had fun. It was good. It took me a while to get used to looking at swells that were higher than my head and realizing that they weren't going to break on top of me, but The Muse got that. She's much better at stuff like that than me.

The trip to Hawaii therefore seems like a pretty good example of how couples can be corporations. You make each other better, taking turns balancing your strengths and weaknesses. OK, there's a better example. Sorry about that lame one a couple of days ago.