Delegation

It’s nice being in a relationship where you know you can count on the other person’s strengths to compensate for some of your weaknesses. Being able to cooperate and delegate helps reduce stress and builds bonds of trust and affection. For example, I love cooking, so I do most of the meals for the household. My fiancee is more particular than I am about how clothing gets cared for, so she handles the laundry. I’m meticulous about money, so I take care of making sure that the bills get paid on time. She likes houseplants, I don’t mind driving long distances. She takes care of the high-energy, spleen-venting, vitriolic rants, I mow the lawn. It’s an equitable distribution of responsibility.

Ok, some background first. Tuesday night we were driving into Ann Arbor to meet some friends when we were rear-ended at a stop light. We were bumped into the intersection, so I coasted through and pulled over, fully expecting the folks who hit us to do the some once the light changed. Instead they, and the people behind them, took off through the red light and drove away. We managed to get the lisence plate number for the second car, but not the one that hit us. It took about an hour to get a police report filed, and the officer we spoke with told us that there was very little they could do without the plate of the car that had actually hit us.

So I was really angry about this. At the time. It took a couple of hours for it to fade to a resigned irritation. A sort of, “It sucks, but what can you do about it?” attitude. It’s a pain in the ass, both financially and from an inconvenience standpoint, but neither of us were hurt and the car is still drivable. I’m upset, but not full out angry. I’m not going to dedicate my life to hunting down the people who hit me. It’s not a glowing white-hot lance of fury that is going to define my existiance from this point onwards. In fact, if my Fiancee hadn’t written such an eloquently pissed off rant about it, I probably would have just kind of mentioned it here as a sort of background “thing that happened.”

There’s just no way I can compete with her call for karmic retribution, so I’m not even going to try. (Yes, I know I’ve linked to it three times. It’s just that good.) She’s got it covered. I don’t need to worry about it. I hereby delegate all spleen-venting about the incident to her. I’ll stick to what I’m good at.