Smartypants

What is the cure for jealously? Maturity? Resignation? Spreading it around and being generally (but more evenly) jealous of more people?

Does anyone consider him/herself a jealous person?

I know lots of jealous people—not one of them I.

Until yesterday, when I was furious at Sruli, frustrated with Sruli, exasperated and exhausted and just wanted to yell and yell and make him stop talking.

We were working on plans for our new summer camp and it hit me that he came up with the fabulously fun daily schedule, the cool plan for associations with other businesses, the better email to send to someone important and the better strategy for dealing with another someone important. Oh, and the name of the camp, too.

Grrrrrr.

I’m the one with the fancy advertising pedigree and a piano-top full of writing awards, idea awards—I mean, I actually got awards for ideas.

What do I do with this situation—and where do I hide the body?

I think being jealous makes you fat, too.

Stress, cortisol, it’s all bad.

Come to think of it, he comes up with lots of good ideas for our music business, too.

He observes, he learns, he puts things together.

He can surf the web like nobody else and found me English lyrics for this song I needed yesterday in 2 seconds after I had been searching and searching and kept getting this damned video of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.

He gets us fabulously cheap vacations.

I love hearing what he thinks about every single thing even if it’s a little too much about religion.

He has, naturally, come up with many wonderful diet solutions for me all of which would work if only I would really follow them.

(Eating wise mostly normal, BTW, but I am including one cider donut and one piece of blueberry pie, but it’s been a few days and I’m really, really eating much less. At today’s (excellent) Bar Mitzvah I barely ate and did not touch the yummy challah or the ice cream with a thousand toppings...)

I ask him every 10 minutes if I look thinner. He actually looks at me up and down before he gives his answer. It’s always a minimally optimistic yes.

He also found me free links to Mad Men, The Social Network, Sex and the City2 and a site that gets you amazing Coach bags for 66 dollars.

He also arranged for all my bills to be paid online and takes out the stinky diaper pail.

He will do anything for the babies, his daughters, my big boys, the dogs, the turtle, the fish and me.

His ideas are more advanced, his thinking more forward, and his philosophy more universal. He is really smart. The smartest person I know.

Which brings me to the smart way I figured out how to deal with it.

He works for me.