No, I Liked It.

The other night, the girls and I took Wifezilla out to eat. As her name implies, Wifezilla is a ravenous carnosaur. Food has been known to fly when Wifezilla faces off with a slab of meat. I’m fairly used to it after nearly a decade of marriage, but when meat detris starts splattering all around me, I have to work hard at calming my heaving stomach.

Last weekend, in honor of Mother’s Day, we journeyed to our local Outback. Wifezilla usually orders raw steak, but that night she eschewed tradition, ordering some weird dish: sirloin steak slapped on top of a mound of mashed potatoes slavered with mushrooms in a red wine sauce. It had a name, Ma Somethin or Other, and Wifezilla tore into it like an enraged bear fresh out of hibernation.

Driving home, I asked her if she liked her meal.

“Yeah, it was good,” she said.

“It didn’t look like steak though. It looked liked chopped hamburger,” I replied.

“Yeah, it was chopped. I wish it had been a regular steak.”

“So, would you order it again?” I queried.

“No, probably not.”

“So you didn’t like it.”

“No, I liked it.”

“But you just got done saying you wouldn’t order it again. If you liked it, you’d order it again,” I reasoned.

“I liked it; I just wished it was an actual steak instead of chopped.”

“That means you didn’t like it.”

“No, I liked it,” she replied, a bit firmly.

I gave up at this point in fear of angering the Wifezilla. I had just seen Cloverfied the other night and didn’t want to unleash a similar rampage upon unsuspecting Houston.

A few days later, we sat down to watch Sweeny Todd. It’s a pretty good movie with a great setting and atmosphere. Midway through the movie, Todd starts seriously going to town on people’s throats. The movie shows the slitting in all its glorious, gory detail. At the first blood spout, Wifezilla hid her face behind her hands. Pretty much from that point on, she listened to the movie, but didn’t watch. As it was getting late, we stopped about an hour short of the ending. Not long afterwards, as we were getting ready for bed, I asked her if she liked the movie.

“Yeah, it was good,” she said.

“Pretty gory though, huh,” I guessed.

“Yeah. So gross.”

“Did you even watch any of the movie after he started murdering people?”

“Not really.”

“Do you even want to finish watching it?”

“Um, not really.”

“So you didn’t like it.”

“No, I liked it.”

“But you just said you didn’t want to finish watching the movie. If you liked it, wouldn’t you want to watch the rest?”

“I liked it, ok; I just didn’t like all that killing”

“But that’s part of the movie! You take that out, and it doesn’t ma—"

I cut myself off, arriving at the profound realization that my wife is a complicated soul.