Micawber's Law

Something is awry in the universe.

Mr. M, my chosen companion on life's journey, my best friend, cycling coach, personal bike mechanic, vitamin guru and all-around favourite person, is not normally a chatty man about the house. But he's inevitably seized with a mysterious impulse to talk whenever I sit down to blog. (Or so it seems to my fevered brain.)

It's almost uncanny. I can cook, read, eat, and do housework in serene quiet. He remains unaffected, busy with his own guy-ish concerns. But once let me park my behind in the desk chair to type a blog post, and - like a cat who hears a can opener - he rushes to my side, vociferating as though he hadn't seen me in years.

(He displays the same tendency to loquacity when I'm trying to design jewelry, with the added refinement of doing stretching exercises just within my field of vision. Depending on hormone levels and the time of month, this can and sometimes does result in murderous impulses on my part. Mercifully I don't act upon them.)

I know Mr. M doesn't do this of malice prepense. Perhaps he equates sitting at the computer with mindless surfing, with killing time, and surmises that I'm therefore free to attend to conversation. And jewelry design - for me a quiet, yet intense, internal struggle with the muse as I seek to bring beauty and order out of a chaos of stones - probably looks to him like nothing more than a pleasant messing about with beads, not requiring attention or deep thought.

Maybe it's simply coincidental timing. Unfortunately, our apartment, though spacious, contains few rooms. Unless I can learn to work with distraction, my only hope is to blog and design when he's not around - which isn't very often.

You've heard, I'm sure, of Murphy's Law, which posits the following:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

I'd like to propound a variation to this, which I shall call Micawber's Law. Here it is:

My husband's desire for conversation is directly proportional to,

and concurrent with, my desire for quiet
to pursue a creative endeavour.

In fairness to Mr. M, I must admit that if I tell him I need solitude and quiet, he obliges instantly.

And there's a flip side to Micawber's Law. My desire for conversation is directly proportional to and concurrent with his desire to fall asleep at night.

Thus the universe maintains its equilibrium.

P.S. Micawber's Law is not immutable. I wrote this entire post with only two short interruptions from Mr. M. The second one included a kiss. So I really can't complain.  :)

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