Another Larry David Moment
My husband is an overly logical person. I am not. I tend to run high on emotion and let creativity take its course. A few years back we decided to redo a child’s bedroom. It involved wallpaper. The boy and I went to the store and looked through wallpaper books until we were both glossy eyed.
Finally, a selection was made by my son. He chose a red, white, and blue theme. Navy with white stripes for the top half of the walls and a red and white stripe for the bottom half of the walls. It was perfect! I ordered two rolls of each and we headed home.
Within the week, the wallpaper arrived and we set to hanging it. It was torture, but once we got our groove going, it all seemed to fall into place.
Until we were about 3/4 of the way along the first wall. It was here my husband’s logic kicked in…”We’re not going to have enough wallpaper.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Then he started the drill of bombarding me with questions. You know the ones that make you realize you probably didn’t think things through, and after your first answer, you have to just maintain the moment! Yup…he wanted to know how we decided how many rolls of paper to buy.
I said, “We just bought two rolls of each.”
He told me “The math isn’t working out. We’re going to run out before we finish.”
“No, we aren’t.” I countered.
Then he scribbled some numbers down. Did I mention I zone out when numbers become involved? In high school my geometry teacher asked me how I was going to carpet a circle if I couldn’t do the math. I replied, “I’m going to hope the circle is just big enough I can lay it on the carpet and cut around it.”
This wallpaper drama was the same concept.
I realized what my husband was telling me was the truth, but we were too far into this argument for me to concede.
“Math is over-rated! We have just enough wallpaper!” I brilliantly responded.
“Do you want to bet?” My husband countered.
“Nope. I wouldn’t want you to look foolish when your logical math doesn’t play out well.” I gulped hard.
Row after row the paper went up. The paste oozed out and I kept holding my breath watching the roll become thinner and pride was dissipating as my husband jovially reminded me that we weren’t going to have enough.
I had no choice but to argue that we would–though I doubted it myself.
In the end, we had a section that was about three inches by five inches where there wasn’t enough paper. I was not going down like this. I went through the scraps and put them in place like the final pieces of a giant jigsaw.
My husband said, ” I told you so.”
I continued arguing for the sake of argument, in Larry David’s elegance, “We had JUST enough!”
To this day, it’s still being debated.
What’s something you’ve argued about just because you refused to concede?
This post is part of the Warner Bros. Curb Your Enthusiasm Campaign. I am being compensated for participating.