The Plinky Prompt today is wanting me to create a wild alien character for a science fiction story, complete with appearance, personality traits, quirks and life experiences. Huge sigh. Maybe the table topic is better? Not really. It says ‘what quality do you think is most important in a marriage’.
My horoscope for today tells me my mood is “annoyed”. Wow, they got that right.
So once again I am forced (FORCED, I tell you) to combine two totally unrelated topics. I’ve decided to write a self-help pamphlet for distribution in places like doctor’s waiting rooms where there is never anything fun to read. Although it can be a mood booster to pick up some random piece of reading material which explains how to cope with a perfectly horrendous condition that you’re pretty sure you don’t have. Or didn’t even know you could get, but you read it anyway and store the advice somewhere deep in your head for future reference, just in case. Which is of course what I expect you to do with the following.
WHAT TO DO IF YOU SUSPECT YOU HAVE UNWITTINGLY MARRIED AN ALIEN
1. Get him his own computer. Contacting other galaxies, or whatever it is he’s doing on there can seriously impact your virtual memory and toy with your sanity. Think aliens are deleting your programs and messing with your hard drive? You could be right.
2. Take separate vacations. Well, not ALL the time of course. But time away from each other is incredibly therapeutic. And who knows exactly HOW far away he gets when he’s off on his own. Let another planet deal with his quirks for a while.
3. Do NOT interfere when he decides to cook his own meals or do his own laundry or barbecue something for two hours, starting at 10:00 p.m. If he brings home white bread, just be quiet and let him eat it. And all those plastic containers of left-overs he stores so religiously in the fridge until the contents are unrecognizable? Don’t touch them, they could be toxic. Maybe he’s working on a formula for rocket fuel.
4. Never criticize how he drives. Take a tranquilizer if you have to. Go ahead and agree with him that every other driver out there is rude, stupid, ignorant and blind. And when he decides to stay behind a snowplow for two hours, that would be a great time to take a nap and dream about buying plane tickets.
5. Don’t sweat the weird stuff. Remember the time he burned the old water bed frame in your fire pit in the back yard? That’s just one of many perfectly normal alien activities that ultimately hurts no one and is best forgotten and not explained in any great detail to the neighbors.
6. Keep your sense of humor alive and intact. Do not be discouraged when you find something hysterically funny and he just stares at you vacantly. He can’t help it. Try to love him anyway.
Breathing Space 
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