Boyfriend 101

Don't do this. Overheard in The Limited dressing room today:

girl: "Honey, do my hips look big in these pants?"
guy: "Kind of, but they look like they usually do."
(beat)
guy: "What? Why do you look upset?"

I'm sure they could hear the sound of me slapping my forehead nextdoor.

My Picks for '08

Yes, it's entirely too early, but one must find hope and solace where she can.

President: Hillary Rodham Clinton
VP: Barak Obama
Secretary of Defense: John McCain (see, I can show Republican love)
Secretary of State: Bill Clinton (he would ROCK this)
Secretary of Health and Human Services: Howard Dean (sweet Howie, how I love thee)
Secretary of Education: Carol Moseley-Braun
Secretary of HUD: the constantly underestimated Al Sharpton
Supreme Court nominee: Perhaps someone with judicial experience
White House Spokesperson: Jon Stewart (wouldn't you start watching press conferences?)
Ambassador to Greece: Me

To this ring, I thee wed.

I can go off on diatribes about many aspects of weddings based on archaic traditions. While most normal people see them as sweet and time-honored traditions, I do my usual "looking into things too much" that causes much eye-rolling from all those well-adjusted people in the world: the white dress (women being valued for their virginity); the father giving away his daughter to the groom (exchange of property between men); the name change assumption (who else renamed people? slaveholders); the insanity that There is Love wasn't retired with the 70s. But I've discovered a wedding tradition I can get behind: the ring. Give me a little sparkle and I become a traditional girl.

I just picked up my wedding band from the jewelry store and have five hours until Jimmy gets home and repossesses it until the wedding. He demands that I don't wear it until the big event, but he's got to leave the house sometime, and when he does, that sucker will be right back on. Really, it'd be tragic to not wear it with my engagement ring; it'd be like parting two lovers meant to be together. It'd be spitting in the face of love itself.

Jimmy also chose his wedding band recently. He wasn't nearly as excited about the process as I was, naturally, and asked just how excited a guy could get about a ring. I explained that if the hottest woman in the world came up to him at a bar, he'd have to look at her, then look at the ring, and pick the ring. So it was either finding a ring he loved or being handcuffed to the house. He became more interested in shopping then and found one he really liked. (Although when I asked which was prettier, his ring or Eliza Dushku, I totally sensed some hesitation.)

As for me, I'm now considering a separate ceremony between myself and my ring. Our relationship is only hours old, but off to a beautiful start. Oh, there's love. There is love...

The Cynical Bride

When it comes to weddings, I admit it. I can be snarky. Cynical. Easily nauseated. It's easy to dismiss the pseudo-drama of it all. Call it feminism, call it snobbish, but so often the giddiness over bridal magazines and china patterns makes me queasy. I'm not talking about all weddings, but just those that give the bride that crazy glint in her eye when discussing centerpieces. As someone who's saving and longing for my return to grad school, I want to cry when I realize that with the time and money some women devote to wedding planning, they could have a Masters in their chosen field.

So even though I've been with a great guy for many years, I assumed marriage wasn't for me. I'd be the Goldie to his Kurt. Not just the wedding rituals scared me, but also the expectations of the institution: the submissiveness, the passivity, the evenings spent in front of Wheel of Fortune. I'd hear women never referring to their husbands by name but by "hubby," or financially successful women exclaiming, "Oh, he'd KILL me if I bought those shoes!" I wanted to spend my life with him, but geez, I didn't want that. So we did what people like us do: we moved in together.

But a funny thing happened on the way to shackin' up. Having him as a roommate made me want him as a husband. We make a great, if not odd, team. We share the chores, write little notes, and have a weird penchant for National Geographic documentaries on architectural catastrophes. We talk to our dogs more than sane people ought, and he laughs when I express everyday emotions through song or dance (my theory is that people in musicals are always so gosh darn happy; maybe the rest of us are missing out). But it wasn't the happy or silly moments that convinced me he'd make an amazing husband. It was the bad times that really showed me what a great man he is. He listens and assuages when I stress about things that haven't happened yet (my specialty); he's seen me delve into despair and stuck around to see me out of it. When we argue, we fight fair or apologize quickly. He's a man -- and it's a life -- that I want forever. When I realized that I wanted to marry him, the idea was no less radical than had I invented the institution itself. I'd like to say that the discovery was full of hearts and flowers, but for every utterance of love was a, "Holy crap, are we really doing this?"

And holy crap, we are... in just three weeks. But I still don't "oooh" over invitations (they're just paper, c'mon), I still read that the average wedding costs nearly $30k and cry a little. Bridal magazines only make me want to elope with their million synonyms for fiance: darling, honey dear, shnookie pie. Please.

So in the words of ol' Frank, we'll do it, but we'll do it our way. My gown has no pouf, the guest list only has 14 names, "hubby" will never pass through my lips. It won't be about veils or cakes or "the perfect day." It'll be about celebrating what we've already built, honoring what formed long ago. It'll be a vow of forever, with a whispered, "Holy crap, are we really doing this?"

Good news/bad news

Good news: Starbucks once again selling gingerbread lattes! I'll be wired from now 'til the new year!

Bad news: President still a flippin' idiot.
"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and mislead the American people about why we went to war," Bush said. (11/10/2005)
HE doesn't even know why we went to war! The first two reasons turned out to be false (something about WMDs and an Al Qaeda-Saddam tie, remember?), so I think we're onto the "march for democracy" angle now. Hey, it worked in Vietnam!

I think I need something stronger than a latte...

My first, un-blank page.

At the beginning of each notebook I own -- you know, those notebooks that us wannabe writers have everywhere, full of little bits of everything, sketches, bad poetry -- I leave a blank page. An English professor once taught me that the first page of each notebook should contain a quote so inspiring, so profound, that it would guide the writer to greatness on the following pages. I spent a week searching for that quote before giving up. When the professor asked why I hadn't written on my first page, I told her: no matter how crappy the rest of my writing was, I could look back and see that anything's better than the one week I waited for genius and wrote nothing at all. It soon became superstition.

However, that was about ten years ago, and my writing habits haven't improved. So I'm taking a break from the notebooks and starting a blog.

This is a thing for me, the whole blogging thing. I'm a privacy freak. I make the ACLU seem cautious. While most people believe Armeggedon will begin with the rapture or religious war, I believe it began with e-mail. We trust e-mail with some of the most intimate details of our lives, even while knowing information transmitted online is about the least secure form of communication we have. Can't you see it? Someone learning to open all e-mail accounts to a public search engine? Every word typed in anger, each note written thinking that only two sets of eyes would see it? Wars sparked, marriages destroyed, friendships ended, all of us fired for what we really think of our bosses? The college population would be picked up at their dorms the following morning by parents with shackles. The less posted online, the safer. My theory is that we should only write/buy/post online if we are comfortable that our children will one day see it, because they probably will. Sure, this sounds like a scenario conceived by George Orwell with a screenplay adapted by Oliver Stone, but it's my thing. A privacy thing.

So blogging seems like the last thing I'd want to do. And that was always my excuse: do I really want to post my thoughts and rantings online, where they'd be Out There? But then the obvious struck me...

I want to be a writer. If my worst-case scenario was that my words would be read, then maybe my ambitions are misdirected altogether.

So here I am.

Next up... something to say... (starting off with a blank page would've been so much easier)