I want to burn my house down.
Every year, I set out to burn my house down at Christmas. Well, that’s what my girlfriend tells people when we get around to talking about Christmas. She foolishly thinks I’m trying to burn our house down because she says I put too many lights into too few sockets and she thinks I will somehow cause a nuclear meltdown.
No amount of explaining will convince her that it’s impossible for me to burn the house down, not even reminding her that God has a plan and that we should believe God is protecting us. Rather than immediately arguing the excellent point I’ve made, she huffs, reminds me that I’m an atheist, and does more eye rolling. At least she didn’t say anything negative, so I’m right.
Right?
This year I wanted to buy a $400 Christmas Light show controller — complete with controllers and relay boards — and we’d have the brightest house in the city. Rather than worry about the cost, she wanted to know if it would burn the house down.
“Of course not,” I told her, “these things are done by professionals. They know what they’re doing, man. They’re not gonna make something that’ll burn down our house, you know?” Sensing a moment of weakness from her I added, “Besides, they highly recommended hiring an electrician to install more plugs around the outside of the house.”
She huffed and rolled her eyes once more. She was being unreasonable. I explained there were kits on the Internet that teach you how to make your own electronic controllers and relay boards for less than $40 and — most importantly — for an awful lot less than the $400 required to buy the professional-grade kit. She stormed off at the first mention of Internet do-it-yourself kits for less than $40. I don’t know why.
The website, well, it might’ve had some poor grammar and misspellings, but not all electricians can write in APA format. Even though the pictures contained beer bottles in the background, this was by no means disqualifying the legitimacy of the website, its instructions, or writers. No amount of reassurances that not all people can make really nice, professional websites seemed to make any sense to her. In fact, when I told her she shouldn’t judge a website by its cover, only it’s content, she laughed and made some flippant remark about how porn websites never have any covers and plenty of content.
Then she accused me of the unholy of all holies: being unreasonable.
Article comments
1 - Nancy
I look forward to your article written on how you burned the house down by overloading the circuits & various other safety violations, co-written perhaps by the insurance co. or the fire marshal. It should make for salutory (& admonitory) reading by the rest of us.
2 - Mike Paahana
cause my mother lived in it
3 - Pyro
BURN IT, BURN IT ALL!! BURN IT DOWN! DOWN, DOWN, DOWN TO THE GROUND!!