Firefly

Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal

Things My Husband and I Have Argued About While Watching Firefly

By Lani Diane Rich

Before we get started, there’s something you need to know about my husband and me: We’re geeks.

And I’m not talking the kind of casual geek that’s popular nowadays, the person who enjoys the Lord of the Rings trilogy and plays the occasional hand of online spades. My husband and me?

We’re geeks.

My area of geekspertise is television. I did my undergrad in television, radio, and film back when ¾” tapes the size of your typical VW were the height of the new technology, and I started taping shows religiously about a week after the VCR was invented. Somewhere in my mother’s basement are piles of VHS tapes containing most of the episodes of Moonlighting, Northern Exposure, and The X-Files. When The X-Files launched a trend by releasing entire seasons on DVD, the skies of my world broke open with a thousand angels singing the hallelujah chorus.

My husband, he’s a fantasy game geek. He was on the Internet role-playing a text-based dwarf in 1991. He had first-person experience with Rogue. For Christmas one year, all he wanted was a copy of Deities and Demigods. He’s lost countless hours of his life to Ultima Online, and indeed only stopped playing when I told him I would take the baby and go far away if he didn’t. To this day, I think he’s okay with the choice he made, but we’re engaging a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. Just seems safer for all concerned that way.

Now when two people such as us get married, the geekitude increases...