5/15/09 – Friday

Y’all, the Comment-Answering Extravaganza will be back as of next Friday. Several people have said that they miss it, so what I’ll likely do is answer comments in the comments (I do adore my new threaded comments!), but since plenty of people don’t really go back and read the comments, I’ll cut and paste them into Friday’s entries from here on out.

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Warning: possible Grey’s Anatomy spoilers ahead. It’s just the engagement of one character to another. It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, but I thought I’d warn all y’all. If you’re less than a month behind in your Grey’s Anatomy viewing, you should be okay.

Dear Dr. Phil,

Oh, Phil. Phil, Phil, Phil. There was a time when I watched every one of your shows with wide-eyed enthusiasm but after, say, the first year and a half your overblown nonsense made my head hurt and I had to stop watching. How many times can a person hear something along the lines of “A wet dog won’t hunt!” come from your mouth before they start to suspect you’re just opening your mouth and slapping words together and pretending they mean something?

So I’ve avoided your shows and I usually skip past your column in O, the Oprah-Worshiping Magazine, but imagine my surprise when I ran across a column in the most recent TV Guide. The “Is It Just Me?” columnist felt the need to pose the following question:

Is it a bad sign that Meredith won’t wear her engagement ring on Grey’s Anatomy? Mer didn’t want to don the heirloom bling that once belonged to Derek’s mother. “Does it bother you that I don’t want to wear it, because I could?” she asked before placing it on the bedside table. “I don’t want you to wear it – you’re not a ring bride,” Derek conceded. Sounds bad to me. And Dr. Phil agrees!

(We’ll not address the fact that OF FUCKING COURSE Meredith and Derek are going to end up divorced (if, in fact, they actually get married in the first place) because hello, how else are we to whip up some drama?)

And you, Dr. Phil, do you have an opinion? Well, of course you do, the day you don’t have an opinion on something is the day we discover that wet dogs WILL hunt, despite your assertions to the contrary.

You had this to say:

“The ring is not just for you. It’s for him,” says Phil, who watches the show with Robin, his wife of 32 years. “It’s what he wanted you to have. So rejecting it is rejecting a part of him. With Meredith, this is a bad start. Why didn’t she just say ‘I love you and I’ll marry you, but let’s go pick out one that I want’?”

Okay, so let’s see if I have this right. Meredith said “If you want me to wear the ring, I will” and Derek said “Nah, you’re not the ring-wearing kind. Whatevs.” Where in that discussion did you get the impression, O wise and bloviating doctor of bullshit, that Meredith’s issue was with the ring itself? Because what I got from those words – granted, I don’t have a degree or a semi-popular talk show, so I might be talking out of my ass (I often do; hey look, there’s something we have in common!) – is that Meredith isn’t so much the jewelry-wearing type. And Derek knows this because he pays attention to these important facts, and he knows it would be out of character for her to wear rings, and I am sure he appreciates her offer to wear the ring anyways, but he’s okay with her not wearing it. He knows that her failure to wear the ring he gave her is not a rejection of HIS VERY SOUL, but a rejection of the annoyance of wearing a ring.

Derek does not so much strike me as a man not in touch with his feelings, Dr. Phil. Did I miss the tear-filled eyes and the glance at the camera wherein he was thinking “Dr. Phil knows how I REALLY feel about this!”? I’m fairly certain that if it deeply bothered Derek that Meredith doesn’t wear the ring despite her acceptance of his proposal, he’d say “I would really like it if you wore the ring like you just offered” and Meredith would wear the ring and then she’d resent him and then they’d get divorced and she’d throw it in his face, like “You know I can’t stand wearing rings BUT YOU INSISTED ANYWAY, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD!” and he’d be all “YOU SAID YOU WOULD IF I WANTED TO!” and then passionate kissing and the divorce would be canceled ’til next time Sweeps comes around again.

Also? Hi. Meredith is a SURGEON. And surgeons have to scrub the ever-loving shit out of their hands before surgery, and Meredith would have to take the ring off, scrubscrubscrub her hands, and then put the ring back on. Except probably she could NOT put the ring back on because the diamond would cut through her surgical gloves, so she’d have to hand the ring off to a medical student, who would immediately lose it, and then?

DIVORCE. Obviously.

So I think you’re full of shit on this one, Dr. Phil.

BUT. Let me tell you a story, and you can tell me how soon this particular couple would be divorced. Because I know how you like to leap to conclusions given only a two-sentence summary of a couple’s problem accompanied by an outline drawn up by the office intern.

There’s this couple. We’ll call them, oh, Bobyn and Ed. Obviously they are NOT anyone I know, just some people I heard about. On a message board. Or something.

Back before Bobyn and Ed got married, back before they got engaged, back when they were only living in sin (and only had three cats (!!!)), they discussed the possibility of getting married. And a woman can often tell when a proposal is drawing near, so Bobyn began casually mentioning her ring preferences.

“Nothing fancy,” Bobyn said. “A small diamond. But definitely not gold. White gold or silver. Possibly even platinum, but NOT yellow gold. Right?”

“Okay,” Ed said. “Gotcha. Whatevs.”

And time went by, and Bobyn mentioned thirteen thousand more times that yellow gold was not her thing. I mean, obviously, if it were a family heirloom or something, yellow gold would be okay. But Bobyn was just really not a yellow gold gal, it just wasn’t her thing.

So when Ed went out and chose a simple engagement ring with which to propose, of course first he looked for a diamond solitaire, and he looked carefully at all the diamonds to check out the color, cut, and clarity. And when he found the prettiest, clearest diamond ring, he bought it.

And it was on a yellow gold band.

Bobyn liked the ring well enough, aside from the fact that it was yellow gold and she? Not so much a yellow gold girl. She wore the ring until she had weight loss surgery and the ring became too big (or rather, her finger became too small), and then she put the ring in her dresser drawer, intending that when she reached her goal weight she’d have her engagement ring – and her matching gold wedding band – sized to the correct size.

I am certain that this is the point, Dr. Phil, where you would jump in and declare that Bobyn’s failure to wear her engagement and wedding rings were a cold-hearted betrayal of Ed. That Ed’s heart surely broke a little every time he looked at Bobyn’s left hand and saw no ring upon her finger. That despite his assurances to the contrary, he cared very deeply that her left hand remained bare.

And then, last Christmas season, Bobyn – who kind of missed wearing her engagement and wedding rings – came up with a good idea. She’d see if she could find a ring in the silver or white gold family, have it sized to fit her, and wear it. And she would choose the ring herself, because Ed does not care about jewelry in the slightest. OR SO SHE CLAIMED.

So Bobyn stumbled across a Vintage 1950’s Diamond Engagement in White Gold ring on a web site. And she liked it quite a lot. It wasn’t expensive at all, and it was actually already a size 6 1/2. She ordered that ring, and then she surfed on over to Overstock.com and bought a white gold wedding band to go with the engagement ring.

And they arrived, and Bobyn wears them sporadically – she LOVES her rings, but she takes her rings off when she’s washing dishes (and she washes dishes a LOT) and sometimes they hang on the hook over the kitchen sink for a couple of days before she spots them and grabs them and puts them back on.

Obviously, though he hides his pain very well, Ed must be DEVASTATED first by Bobyn’s rejection of his heartfelt gift, and secondly by her refusal to consistently wear the engagement and wedding bands she coldheartedly bought to replace the originals.

My question for you, Dr. Phil: since divorce is clearly in the future for Bobyn and Ed, should she have a lawyer on retainer already? Is it time to start deciding who gets which cat?

Breathlessly awaiting your reply,

Robyn And3rson.

PS: Also, they sleep in separate bedrooms. Do you think they’re just pretending to have any kind of marriage at all, and we should all just pretend to believe the lie they’re living? Or should we call them on it? I mean, they’ve been married for nearly 11 years. Isn’t it time to end this lie??

PPS: Also also, Ed once said “If you’re not going to wear the yellow gold engagement ring and wedding band, we should sell them and buy more chickens!” Was he joking to hide the tears in his heart?

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Scheming.

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“Is it… SNACKIN’! TIME! yet?”

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Previously
2008: “Yes, that’s correct. I AM the man.”
2007: Random pictures.
2006: Mystery solved, I guess.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: So far, I believe she’s ahead in the fart wars.
2002: That damn PTA. I will NOT be suckered in again by them, damnit!
2001: Realtors.
2000: New eyes, new hair – I’ll practically be a whole new woman!