10/17, 8:00pm—Austin TX, South Lamar

I was informed by a few people who understand me well that today was National Pasta Day, which is definitely a made-up designation, and also if you believe in yourself then every day can be National Pasta Day. But it planted the idea in my head of going to the Olive Garden for dinner. Kat is in town—she got in late on Sunday night, in advance of Dio’s surgery on Tuesday morning—so we had ourselves a proper, fancy Olive Garden date.

Or not so fancy. We were already down south for a few reasons. One was to visit Dio, who is at the animal hospital while he recovers from what ended up being a more taxing surgery than expected, for the dumbest possible reason: His problem with the bad poops was not, the vet who performed the surgery believes, a result of the now-removed liver tumor. Instead, it was because he swallowed a large part of a tennis ball and had it stuck in his intestine. Which is extremely gross, and also a fully convincing reason that a dog might have a few months of gastrointestinal distress. Honestly, I’m just glad he didn’t die.

He wasn’t in great shape today, though. They excised the tumor and then, while operating, noticed a mass inside of his intestine which they discovered was the tennis ball in question—so they cut that open and took that out, too. That’s two different internal organs that got cut up yesterday, not to mention the ongoing irritation of having a fucking tennis ball in your intestinal track. The vet advised us this morning that it would be a couple of days before he was ready to come home, and suggested that we come in and visit him, since most dogs are pretty freaked out at this stage. And Dio was—they had him on a painkiller (fentanyl, some real shit) and, in lieu of a cone, put him in an oversized tank top they tied around his back end to keep him from pulling at the stitches—so when they brought him out and put him in a room with us, he basically staggered around like Charlie Sheen in the midst of a bender, spaced out and distressed. After about ten minutes of soothing voices and long, slow pets alongside his back, he finally calmed down and lay on the floor. But then he started pacing again. It was hard.

But he’s okay, and the vet didn’t seem to think that it was unusual—especially for a husky, which is a notoriously sensitive breed around this sort of thing. We may be able to bring him home tomorrow. If not, we can visit again. And we were fortunate in that we had an appointment with our therapist a few blocks from the veterinary hospital right as visiting hours ended. (Kat and I have been seeing the same therapist for years, sometimes individually and sometimes together—it’s weird, but it works.)

So that helped. We didn’t spend the entire hour talking about our poor dog, but it’s therapy and real-life shit and I’m not gonna go into the details in an Olive Garden newsletter. More relevant is the fact that, at the end of the session, we went to dinner at the location near her office.

There was a wait for the restaurant, and the bar area was full—not so much as a pair of seats next to each other at the bar. I put my name on the list and we sat in the waiting area. 30-35 minutes, the hostess said. Things were stressful—Kat was hungry, I was anxious about it, it seemed like there were a hundred people ahead of us in line, it was kind of late on a Wednesday so the fact that there was a wait at all, let alone a long one, was surprising—so we did that thing that you sometimes do in a crowded space where the piped in music is playing a big band cover of “Wonderwall” and you’re trying to figure out if you can snag a bar table before your name eventually gets called, and dicked around on our phones for a while. But dicking around on your phone while you are with your partner who currently lives halfway across the country feels bad, too. It’s how things spiral: You start with rushing to visit your sick dog in the sick dog hospital, then you’re a few minutes late for therapy, then there’s a wait for dinner at the Olive Garden and you start to question your choices as you look at Twitter even though you can do that anytime and she’ll be back in California on Monday.

It’s easy to get lost in a cascade of petty anxieties, is what I’m saying.

Eventually, though, a table opened up in the bar, and before it was even bused clean, the hostess called my name. We sat in the proper restaurant area, and cheered up as our server arrived at the table. Kat had a cheap glass of wine that was billed as “white”—no other descriptor necessary—and we both started to relax.

It was hardly the first time we’d been stressed out in an Olive Garden together. We’ve been married for 11 years now, together for two more before that. We’ve been stressed out in all sorts of places together—the mall, the zoo, the airport, London and Paris and New York, you name it. Which means that it’s not that difficult, at this point, to salvage a stressful night and turn it into a pleasant one. Our server, a fella whose name I forgot to get, arrived with the wine and asked if we wanted any appetizers. We did not, but we placed our orders: Angel hair pasta with five-cheese marinara and crispy chicken fritta for her, spaghetti with marinara and meatballs for me.

Another facet of being married for a long time is that you learn to indulge each other’s quirks. There is a 0% chance that Kat would have found herself in an Olive Garden tonight, or really any other night over the past 13 years, were she not in a relationship with me. But she is, and she’s a good sport, so she goes with me relatively often, a few times a year at least, when we’re both full-time residents of the same city. It is definitely a thing she does for me, not a thing she does for herself, but I do believe that she actually likes the angel hair-and-crispy chicken combo, that eating it is not a responsibility she takes on solely for the sake of our marriage.

And we just talked and ate dinner. That’s the thing about being married to someone who is right for you—the conversation is an infinitely renewable resource. Even when your overall circumstances are more stressful than usual, and you’re at the end of what turned out to be a pretty rough day, and you spent half an hour in the Olive Garden lobby trying not to just stare at your phones—once you get going, it’s all still very easy.

The server came back and asked if we wanted refills. We both said yes. Kat asked for the exact same thing, with no intention of eating it at the table but rather a plan to take it home. I decided to call an audible and had cavatappi with meat sauce and Italian sausage.

The small second portion nonetheless came with two sausage links, and I decided to pick at the pasta and eat a little bit of sausage. But Kat was telling me about the project she wants to work on next, and it was fun, and I ended up picking at all the pasta and about half of one of the sausages. When our server returned, I was finished and he asked Kat if she wanted a box. He didn’t ask if I wanted a third portion, and I wouldn’t have said yes anyway. Instead, I handed him the pasta pass and a debit card to pay for Kat’s meal, and we settled up quickly.

Kat goes back to California on Monday, and our budget is still stretched thin. Fortunately, the pasta pass is already paid for, which means I’m likely to get a lot more use out of it. The dog will be home soon, and the next time he insists on eating something large and round, I hope it will be a meatball.