Spouse has a habit of locking on to an album and overblowing it on continuous repeat from a Bluetooth speaker he walks around the house with until I have become a snarling, rabid animal. “What’s your problem?“ he always asks, annoyed with me, as if there’s nothing wrong with his submitting me to Hybrid Theory for 10-12 hours at a time 6 days in a row and counting.

But, after years, last week I finally cracked through the thick skull and got him to stop playing so much angry boy music and to move on to a new album when he gets through the last track of another.  Suddenly, how lovely it was to be in our house. But it last only until he was driving somewhere and had the radio on and was reminded of the existence of Bad Guy.  He subsequently spent all of yesterday hunched over his laptop playing the video on continuous repeat, totally enamored with the phrase, “Duh!”, which he had never heard before because I am older than thirteen and somehow the term was never deployed in The Big Lebowski, which is his other font of fabulous anglophone phrases.  (How many people can say that the first English sentence they learned was That’s what happens, Larry, when you fuck a stranger in the ass.)

Anyway, thanks a lot, Billie Eilish for teaching my German Spouse this fantastic phrase, which he can neither correctly pronounce nor accurately deploy.  Now every time I am effusing earnestly about some topic that causes me great personal pain, like the shallow, sordid, selfish state the world is in today or the fact that all my relatives are as frustratingly senseless as chickens even though they are all old enough to know better and to have grasped what their shenanigans are putting me through, he just cocks his head and looks at me and says, “Daaaaaaaaaaah!” like he’s some gleeful Russian rubbing salt in my wound.

It’s almost enough to make a girl wish to go back to the endless days of Linkin Park.