Whenever I see a crescent moon, I think of it as God’s thumbnail.
This is because I’m a child of the ’90s. I watched “Angels in the Outfield” a lot growing up and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s buddy in that movie, J.P., referred to a crescent moon as such. That innocuous observation has stuck with me ever since.
Fast-forward 20 years and I’m sitting in a restaurant parking lot with my girlfriend after having dinner with her parents one evening. Looking out the passenger window of my car, she commented on the night sky.
“I’ve always thought crescent moons looked like the Cheshire Cat,” she said, gazing up at the slim orb hanging in the darkness. “You know, like when he’s disappearing and all you can see is his grin.”
I tilted my head to get a better look out the window. Alas, all I could see was the tip of the Almighty’s finger.
I may not have seen eye-to-eye with my girlfriend then, but that’s been the exception to the rule. In fact, it’s kind of staggering how much of her terminology and such I’ve appropriated since we started dating.
For instance, I never knew that there was a term for the girls on Instagram whose feeds are comprised entirely of bad selfies with music lyrics in the captions and pictures of their Starbucks cups. As this is something I see on a regular basis, the term “basic bitch” has entered my lexicon in a big way, courtesy of my girlfriend.
I also use this term’s male form – “basic bro” – just as much, if not more so. Honestly, it’s hard not to utter it every time I drive by a house in my addition owned by a Jai Courtney lookalike who keeps a beer pong table standing at all times in his garage, which is decked out in Notre Dame football and Chicago Cubs memorabilia. Ugh.
And speaking of driving, I had no idea there was a term for exceptionally convenient parking spots. My girlfriend refers to such spaces as “princess parking” and now I can’t think of them in any other way. I’m still trying to come up with a more masculine form of this term, though I suppose “prince parking” would do.
(Or “Fresh Prince parking.” Couldn’t resist another ‘90s reference!)
Some of my girlfriend’s behaviors have even rubbed off on me. She’s remarked in the past how she’ll wear a pair of jeans multiple times before throwing them in the wash. As someone who typically wears an article of clothing once and then discards it in the clothes basket, this was a revelation to me. I’ve adopted her laundry strategy and am happy to report that the occasional stain hasn’t caused my OCD world to come crashing down on me.
There’s also her love for the Dave Matthews Band. We’ll be seeing Dave and Co. perform at the Klipsch Music Center in Noblesville this summer and I honestly couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been listening to the band more often than I ever have before.
All these things have led me to this realization: Our significant others are with us, even when they’re not. When you spend so much time with someone, that person has a way of rubbing off on you. The assortment of things you absorb from them congeals into a mental version of them that you carry with you at all times. It makes me think of Gaius Baltar in “Battlestar Galactica” and how he saw Six the Cylon, his former lover, in his head throughout the course of the series.
While I didn’t realize this on the night my girlfriend and I were in the parking lot, I did a few nights later, when I looked up at the moon and saw a phantasmal feline, grinning back.
EVE OF STEVE 