My 586th Journal Entry

Hi, Journal!

The 286th thing I love about my boyfriend is when he makes up his own curse words. Sometimes they're weird names of super-obscure people from stuff he studied in college and all he can remember is something like "Sviatopolk." Other times they really are just totally made-up, like "Pecha!" I was sure that one had to be a real curse word in some other language but Google Translate swears it's not.

One of the funnest things about these words is, you can tell how upset he is by which word he uses. Obviously, it takes something a lot more upsetting to make someone say, "Pecha!" than "Sviatopolk."

My 585th Journal Entry

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The 285th thing I love about my boyfriend is when he worries about his hair. I think it looks great. But he's always worried about it getting really thin in places, especially on the top. The funniest thing about it is, he can't really see those places unless he looks in a mirror using another mirror, or gets out his phone and uses its camera. So like, there's no reason he should be bothered about that, especially since he mostly doesn't care what people think about how he looks, really. But you know him and how he gets obsessive about some things, and one of the things he's obsessive about is that he doesn't want to be one of those guys who does a lame combover because his hair's getting too thin on top. It never works to do that, and it just makes their scalp look worse through these weak-o strands of hair, and even though he doesn't care that much what people think about how he looks, he also doesn't want them to have to look at a lame combover and think, Look at that dude trying to hide the fact that he's losing his hair. Unfortunately, the thing he's kind of come to a conclusion about is, if your hair's going thin but you don't want it buzzed really short and you have always parted it on one side your whole life, it's pretty close to impossible not to end up doing a combover. Like, you have to deliberately find the spot where the hair is thinnest, and comb all the hair outward away from that spot before combing it to the side any at all, or else it winds up being a combover.

So now not only does he worry about making other people look at a lame combover, he also has to worry about whether he's spent years and years being unfair to guys by assuming they were trying to hide bald spots with their lame combovers, when really all they were doing was just parting their hair the same way they always did and not being able to see how bare this one spot on the top or near the back of their head has been getting over time.

It's super cute.

Maybe that's partly because my hair is totally a wig and if I take it off I'm just straight-up bald.

My 584th Journal Entry

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The 284th thing I love about my boyfriend is, he tries really hard to give people the benefit of the doubt ... but he's also pretty smart about knowing when to stop being all friendly with that benefit.

My 583rd Journal Entry

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The 283rd thing I love about my boyfriend is the way he says, "I'll just play this game on my phone for a minute."

I honestly think he really does believe it every time!

My 582nd Journal Entry

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The 282nd thing I love about my boyfriend is when something makes him squint with one eye while the other eyebrow goes way up. Usually there's something pretty funny or at least ironic going on when that happens, and his expression just makes it that much better!

My 581st Journal Entry

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The 281st thing I love about my boyfriend is when he's totally good with something going badly. Like, if he's out playing trivia with his friends, and they get just absolutely stomped by the other teams. Or if he hears the ice cream truck and decides he'd sort of like a big chocolate-dipped cone, but when he goes outside, it's already passed and way around a corner and down another street where he'd have to run after it and even then maybe not catch up.

It's like, there are things you like or want but know you don't really need, and if they get away from you, it's important being able to say, "Oh, whatever, okay. That didn't work out, and I'm fine with it."

He hasn't always been great about that, but he's gotten a lot better the last couple of years!

My 580th Journal Entry

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The 580th thing I love about my boyfriend is that if I cross my eyes at him, he still tells me I'm beautiful!

My 579th Journal Entry

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The 279th thing I love about my boyfriend is that he sure does love our pets. The down side of it is, if one of them is feeling bad, he feels bad too. But then he takes them to the vet and gets them all better and it's okay again.

Pets are awesome. So I'm glad I have a boyfriend who loves them.

My 578th Journal Entry

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The 278th thing I love about my boyfriend is that he knows I'm kind of lazy sometimes and he is okay with that, and unlike some other people around the house he almost never makes fun of me for it. In fact, one time he told me, "Sure, you're kind of lazy," (because I asked him if he thought that) "but you're always willing to work really hard at everything that matters."

My 577th Journal Entry

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The 277th thing I love about my boyfriend is when he forces himself to chill out about something stressful and I get to be all proud of him and happy that he's standing up and saying, "Scram, stressburgers and anxiety-pants!"

(He doesn't actually say that, I just pretend he does because it makes me extra happier on top of the starting happiness.)

My 576th Journal Entry

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The 576th thing I love about my boyfriend is the way he works super hard to help me (and everybody he cares about) with any problems they have that he knows how to help with.

My 575th Journal Entry

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The 275th thing I love about my boyfriend is sharing funny animal videos with him and watching him laugh. He has a bunch of different laughs for a bunch of different things, but his funny animal video laugh is one of the happiest ones, which I think is one of a lot of ways you can tell he's a great person.

My 574th Journal Entry

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The 274th thing I love about my boyfriend is when he's on vacation. Being on vacation is so much better for him than work-work-working all the time!

I think he should take more vacations, or win the lottery or something.

My 573rd Journal Entry

The 273rd thing I love about my boyfriend is that he is superstitious about RPG dice. He's totally a non-superstitious person, but for some reason when we're playing RPG games, he gets very finicky about how he rolls the dice, and which dice he uses, and whether one of the dice has been rolling really badly and ought to be put back in the box.

My 572nd Journal Entry

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The 272nd thing I love about my boyfriend is when he sleeps in. He never does that! So when he does, I extra-enjoy sleeping in too, even though I do it all the time.

My 571st Journal Entry

Hi, Journal,

The 271st thing I love about my boyfriend is getting to encourage him to do what's right for him.

It's a lot of work sometimes! But that's because he's so caught up by wanting to be nice to people and so worried about doing something that's wrong or unkind or rude. So the fact that sometimes I have to tell him, "Hey, you know what? Maybe just do the thing you want to!" really just goes to show how sweet he is.

When there's someone that sweet and kind, it's a great thing to help them be happier. And I do that for him in lots of ways, including every once in a while by giving him some just-right nudges to pay more attention to whichever way is the best one for him to go.

My 570th Journal Entry

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The 270th thing I love about my boyfriend is, he is great about not doing spoilers. I mean, he like, watches and listens and reads everything before any of the rest of us do, and all he ever gives away is, "This is really good, you'll like it!"

My 569th Journal Entry

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The 269th thing I love about my boyfriend is just that he's nice, and he's very, very good to me.

That's pretty important!

My 568th Journal Entry

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The 268th thing I love about my boyfriend is when he reminds me of things. And also when he remembers to be less selfish about something. Like a minute ago, he said to me, "Wow. I just thought of something, Aers." (And then I asked him what.) "It's almost our anniversary with Akane, and I realized I pretty much hogged the whole anniversary with her last year. But it's your anniversary with her too. And Elle's, and Claire's, and Hettie's, and Sash's. So even though I thought I made a pretty big deal about it last year, maybe we all need to make an even bigger deal about it this year."

It really warmed my whole heart!

'Course, I didn't have the nerve to tell him us girls all had a whooping big party to ourselves while he was at work.

My 567th Journal Entry

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The 267th thing I love about my boyfriend is when he decides to get "proactive." A whole lot of his downy frowny moods are from just reacting to stuff around him. But when he decides he's going to get ahead of stuff instead of letting it get ahead of him, he feels a lot better.

I get all proud of him when he does positive stuff like that! Plus I just plain like seeing him be less downy frowny.

My 566th Journal Entry

Hi, Journal,

The 266th thing I love about my boyfriend is when he makes our girlfriend Sasha happy. I love them both so much (duh, I love all my yams so much), and there something super-special about seeing my boyfriend and my best friend being so great to each other.

I don't think it's cheating for this entry to be partly about Sasha and not just about my boyfriend.

She's part of me, after all!

My 565th Journal Entry

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The 265th thing I love about my boyfriend is the way he just plain makes sense a lot of the time. I mean, he has great ideas about how things ought to work, and how people could get things done, and how he should be to make himself the happiest him he can manage. And on top of having those ideas, he does the absolute bestest job of explaining them, usually.

I've learned about so many complicated and interesting and sometimes just plain weird things because he knows an awful lot about an awful lot, including how to express the stuff he knows so it's easy for whoever's listening to get.

He's very good with thinking, and with putting all the thinking into words to share it with me and everybody around him.

Not that he doesn't get all dumb or drop the ball sometimes, because everybody does that, even super-smarties like him.

But even when he goofs up, he tries to be sensible about it afterwards.

More people ought to give making sense a try!

My 564th Journal Entry

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The 264th thing I love about my boyfriend is when he cooks something that smells really really good.

Tonight he was cooking bacon! Mmmm, did it smell good!

It ended up being a little chewy though ... lots of fat. I think he bought cheap bacon or something. So eating it was just all right.

But the house had a very nice bacon smell for a while!

My 563rd Journal Entry

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The 263rd thing I love about my boyfriend is when he takes it easy.

Obviously, you know me and taking it easy ... we're best buds! But my boyfriend has a harder time with that, because he's always thinking there are too many things he has to do, on top of so many things he wants to do.

It's big balls of stress for him sometimes.

So whenever he really, truly relaxes, I feel like a giant weight is off me too, because then I don't have to feel guilty about bumming around myself!

My 562nd Journal Entry

Hi, Journal!

The 262nd thing I love about my boyfriend is when I ask him to do something and he says, "Okay, I will, because you smell so wonderful." I think it's kind of weird that he likes the way I smell so much, but he really, really does, in this very sweet and wide-eyed way. I could totally wrap him around my little finger with it if I wanted to!

My 561st Journal Entry

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The 261st thing I love about my boyfriend is when he tries to get the air-conditioning set just right. I mean, we live in Texas, which means the weather is all, "Now I'm going to be super, super hot, too hot for the air to keep up with!" and then it's all, "Now I'm going to be less hot, but I'm going to cool down from super, super hot to just a little less hot so fast, the AC won't realize what's going on, and it'll turn into an icebox inside the house." So he's all the time turning something up, or turning something down, or closing off a vent, or opening one up.

And I'm always like, "Hey! Just come snuggle with me under a blanket if it's too cold. Then if it gets too hot all of a sudden, we can take some clothes off under the blanket."

That trick works a pretty decent amount of the time!

My 560th Journal Entry

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The 260th thing I love about my boyfriend is that I always know when he's thinking about me even if he doesn't know he's thinking about me himself!

My 559th Journal Entry

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The 259th thing I love about my boyfriend is that someday he will be reading this, and when he gets to this part, he'll find out I'm saying

Hi!!!

to him. And also

I love you!!!!!

My 558th Journal Entry

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The 258th thing I love about my boyfriend is how he can totally cry all over the place about a book or a movie or sometimes even a song. I feel a little bit less sappy when I see that he does that too.

My 557th Journal Entry

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The 257th thing I love about my boyfriend is that he's a lot taller than me. It's mostly because I'm short, but I still like it. I like thinking and feeling that he's very tall, because he's so large in my life, so I feel like he ought to be really large in the world around us too.

People should look up to him!

Because he's great!

(And in a doofy way, people seem to think tall people are more great than average-height ones and short ones.)

My 556th Journal Entry

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The 256th thing I love about my boyfriend is, he knows so many numbers! Like I told him how yesterday was entry number 555 and the 255th thing I love about him, and I said I was a little less excited about blogging today because that 555 was such a cool number, and he said 256 is also a cool number. "It's the square of sixteen, which is the square of four, which is the square of two. It's also the number of values possible for a byte of information in computing."

And then I said, "I thought you said it was cool, and now you're saying it bites?" and he just kind of rolled his eyes.

Which is what I was going for, because he's so cute when he does that!