My husband and I are used to working together - we've been creating educational software since 1992 and selling it in catalogs and through our online store on the web. Normally, I work on the business during the day, and Mike and I work together when he comes home from his day job in the evening. When we work together in our RV for a few hours in the evening, our chairs are about 3 ft. from each other. When we work together in RV all day together when Mike is laid off, the physical measurement of 3 ft. becomes the psychological measurement of 3 inches! ( Wanna know what that's like? Watch this episode in "Mad About You" with Carol Barnett and Caroll O'Conner". and you'll know what I mean. (If you click on the link, let the video do it's buffering one time thought without sound and then play the video).
So only one week after the inauguration, my pledge to be more Michelle Obama-like has deteriorated into more of a Tony Soprano personality,
stomping around the RV, exclaiming, "I've gotta get frickin' out of here. I've gotta get frickin' out of here!"
I figured out what the problem was though. The problem was silence, yes silence - my husband's absolute hour-by-hour, side-by-side-in-RV silence. Most of the time when I work alone, I have NPR on in the background when I don't have to concentrate; my husband is fine with that or with some music coming from iTunes on my computer. But sound coming into our one main room was not the problem I was having. It was the utter lack of sound coming out of my husband that bothered me. Don't get me wrong, I admire my husband's amazing capacity to sit monk-like and work for hours on end without talking. I, on the other hand, actually like to know every once and a while that the person I'm working next to is still alive and breathing.
It was different when my husband was in between consulting jobs before. Then, there would be recruiters would be calling every few hours and I would hear his his voice and even catch the drift of the job that was open. Now, there are no calls. (If there is one recruiter a day, we're lucky.) So there is silence, hours and hours of silence - the close encounter (or maybe un-encounter) of the worse kind.
I figured out a plan though. My husband agreed that in between his silent searches on the web, he'll every once in a while turn away from the computer toward me and say something like, "Oh, looks like they're hiring in Houston." Then a while later he can say, "Hey, there's something right here in Irvine." I told him he could even make stuff up, just so I don't go off the deep end - in silence.
I was put to shame for my behavior in the evening when we watched "Rescue Dawn," on a dvd that our neighbor lent us. Now there was a guy that maintained a positive attitude through adversity. And this was based on a true story of survival during Viet Nam. So I decided I needed to be as heroic as the main character. As long as there aren't any leeches involved . Seriously, if you haven't seen the movie, it's well worth renting.
