Dear Government, Regarding My Upcoming Wedding

Dear Government,

I'm getting married in a little more than two months, for some definition of the word.  I'm not sure whether we're going to sign on to your institution.  It seems wrong to me that you deny benefits to some couples and not others, even though we look reasonably like a hetero couple and qualify for the institution.  I'm lucky enough that K is willing to talk through the reasons for my reluctance and that we're in a financial position where I don't depend on any of the benefits of the institution.

So I've been doing some research about how we can start a family together, how we can designate each other as beneficiaries, how assumptions of paternity will figure in to how our children will be treated. I looked up and read a sample co-parenting agreement.  I've learned that surrogacy isn't always legal and that adultery laws can override the mutual consent of the parties involved (though apparently this isn't often enforced).

And after this research, I have a question for you, government.

I am an adult, and I am trying to put together a contract with another adult so that we can form a family.  We want to take proactive measures to ensure the welfare of our future children and make sure that we have signed an agreement that will sustain our happiness and stability in the (hopefully many) years to come, and we've found that the institution you've put together doesn't always suit us.  We're willing to put in the work to find a better way, and it won't cost you anything.

Why won't you let us?

Regards,
JP

I Don't Like Microwaved Spinach

I've been delinquent at posting.  Scold me if you must, but please note that I've been busy (and very excited about) starting up our wedding website! K tells me that my excitement is disproportionate but cute. I've never had a particularly good sense of proportion, so he has probably made a fair assessment*. But we have a pretty domain name and I made an image thing for it that reminds me a bit of Cinderella's pumpkin coach. No one shall dissuade me from my joy over this small triumph!

So, I've been busy over there.  I have also been trying to figure out how I'm going to sneak more vegetables into my diet, because they take work to prepare and eat and because, while they make me feel temporarily full, an hour later I'm ravenous again if I don't eat anything else.


Yesterday, I tried to make egg white muffins to sneak some vegetables in to my breakfast. It mostly worked, but took too long to make (20-30 minutes baking plus prep) and the muffins didn't come out of the ramekins I used for the test batch even remotely as well as I had hoped (so it was obnoxious to clean up).  So, today, I tried a variation, and this happened:

Poor soggy spinach.

Basically, I took 1/2 cup of egg whites and poured it over roughly a cup of chopped spinach and then microwaved it for two minutes while the bread was toasting.

I've never been much of a fan of cooked spinach**, and while the baked spinach yesterday was fine in terms of taste, the microwaved spinach became unpleasantly soggy. Far from inedible, in my opinion, but also far from "something I'll make again".  As with yesterday's experiment, my opinion is still "better to just make an omelet".

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could either fix the sad, soggy spinach or prevent the caked-on crumbles clean-up chore?
_______
*For example, I heard an ice cream truck go by yesterday. We never had ice cream trucks in our neighborhood when I was small: apparently, an ice cream truck had hit a child a few years before we moved here, and the local government banned them in response.  I ran to the window to watch it go by. K, watching me through the miracle of webcam technology, remarked, "I thought you were going to run out of the room and chase it down." I promised him that, in the interest of avoiding unhealthy foods like ice cream, I only considered it for thirty seconds or so.
**Except in lasagna. Because lasagna.

Proof of Partner: Entering Adulthood Next to the Right Person

K and I woke up Saturday morning at 7:30, took down and packed up our tent, and were on the road by 8:00.  Nearly four hours later, we arrived at my parents' house with the goal of making ourselves presentable before we went to our friends' wedding.  We had a plan: we would spend the next two to three hours struggling into our unfamiliar formal clothes, drive the last hour, check into our hotel, and have time to take our nap early before six, when we would arrive at the wedding.

We took turns in the shower, and then we diverged. He trimmed his beard while I shaved my legs. I put on a bathrobe and glopped color onto my nails; K pulled out his netbook and his tie and spent forty-five minutes failing to tie a Windsor knot.  After waiting for what I hoped was a suitable interval, I tried to towel-dry my hair, and the towel scored deep grooves into my attempt at nail polish.  I took it off, finished drying my hair, and tried again.

From the bed, K looked up from his tie.  "Do you even like putting on nail polish?" he asked me.

"Not really," I said. "But I'm supposed to be a girl, and girls are supposed to be able to take care of their hands and do their own hair nicely and so on."

"I don't care if you can't do your nails or hair," he told me, watching the frustration bloom on my face. "I still love you."

I paused with the brush in mid-air. "I know," I told him.  "I still feel like I should be able to do these things."

I try to cultivate these skills: the ones that don't come naturally to me, but the ones that may allow me to fit in a little bit better.  Theoretically, employers evaluate your merit based solely on your work performance; in practice, I feel like I miss some interpersonal-interaction targets because I'm too different.  I use different words, think about different things, participate in different leisure time activities*.  When I'm at work, I prefer to focus on work, but the package of professionalism includes appearance and the ability to find enough non-work-related common ground with the people around you to build relationships and trust. It means cooing over baby pictures, carefully remaining neutral when the people around you discuss television shows you wouldn't watch even if you had cable, and participating in office celebrations-- all while attempting to demonstrate your value and your focus on the work at hand. I can do it, but it takes effort.

Struggling with my hair and my nails in preparation for a wedding seems like practice for a career in which I'll have to do things with my hair and my nails on a regular basis, so I didn't give up. Eventually, I managed to stuff myself into a thrifted dress and a pair of heels I can't walk in.  We cut our nap to twenty minutes and got to the wedding ten minutes before the ceremony began.

Foreground: my foot (without the heels). Background: my dress.

It's the second wedding we've attended as a couple (out of only three I've attended as an adult.. The experience still feels new and a little bit weird: at the wedding, people treat us as a unit. The invitation arrived in a single envelope with two names, and the place card at the table shared the names, too. As neither of us plan to change names when we get married, we will see our names almost exactly as we saw them this weekend for the rest of our lives (barring disaster).


Perhaps attending weddings as an adult signals impending adulthood across other areas of my life.  The feeling resembles the one I had the first time I signed a brand new rental agreement-- K and I had elected to room together as a matter of convenience, and reading through the paperwork, placing a security deposit, and signing every page of a twenty-page document seemed like an adventure. (The semester I rented space with a couple of guys, filling the vacated room of a guy who had taken off to parts unknown on a journey of self-discovery, does not count.) It feels good, like I'm stepping into something approaching a permanent place in society (carving out bits to improve the fit whenever I feel I can get away with it).

In that case, the wedding contained another signal. I love to dance. I took dance classes every year except one from the age of five until I graduated from high school. When there's socially-sanctioned dancing, I dance.** The last time K and I went to a wedding, he amiably held my bag and watched me dance with a group of friends.

This time, he beat me onto the dance floor.  Apparently, he secretly spent some quality alone time with the Kinect and our copy of Dance Central and developed some dance moves. (He convinced me to leave it with him while I interned in Florida, claiming he couldn't resist the challenge of a new video game.) Now, it appears that he took time to learn how to do something that I love to do so he could do it with me, sore leg muscles and all. He may not be a polished professional, but he's mine, and I couldn't have picked a better partner.
__________________
*I love following baseball with K in part because it lets me have acceptably neutral conversations with people.  Apparently, it's OK to publicly disagree with Yankees fans, but publicly disagreeing with people who oppose marriage equality isn't-- even though both groups of people are clearly wrong.
** I also dance in situations when it's not socially sanctioned, such as in supermarket aisles, when I think no one's watching.

David Bowie, Hair, Summer, and Bicycle Mishaps

The person who proliferated the idea that hair doesn't effectively insulate your head was full of poo sadly mistaken. I can tell because, thanks to my long hair, the nape of my neck retains as much heat during the summer as other heat-retaining areas of the body (like the armpits). 


I've been growing my hair out since K found out I had never watched Labyrinth and immediately pulled me over to the couch to change that.  "It has David Bowie in it," K explained in an attempt to entice me.


"Who's David Bowie?" I asked.  (I spent the bulk of my childhood with my nose buried in one variety of book or another, so I don't recognize a lot of commonly-known figures in movies and music.)


"Never mind.  It also has Muppets, and it's not as dark as The Dark Crystal. You'll like it."


I remained skeptical right up until a song-and-dance number broke out, complete with Muppets and disturbingly tight pants.

"That's David Bowie," K explained as the song concluded.  Amused, I set my skepticism aside and proceeded to enjoy the movie.


After it was over, I turned to K.  "I want that hair for our wedding."  


"What hair? David Bowie's?" K asked, clearly confused.  We hadn't even begun discussing the wedding, other than the basics (as in: yes, we're getting married, no, we don't know when, maybe sometime after we graduate).


"No, Sarah's hair, from the masquerade scene," I explained.


K made a face. "Don't you think it's a bit... eighties?"


"I like the sparkly bits and the way it's down but not in her face," I said.  "Maybe a less fluffy version?"


"OK," said K.


So I started growing my hair, and a few months later, we began talking in vague terms about what we wanted.  Positive progress, with a single side effect: the nape of my neck gets uncomfortably warm during unpleasantly hot weather.


Today, however, looked promising in terms of avoiding the stickiness and excessive neck-nape heat.  My alarm rang at 7:30 this morning with the sun streaming, but the breeze from the window remained cool.  I'm still adjusting to a biphasic sleep schedule, so the wake-up call failed to thrill me in spite of the gorgeous weather.  In an effort to wake up properly, I dragged myself out of bed, ate a banana, and hopped on my bicycle for the first time in a few years.

Almost immediately, my legs began to sting and the nape of my neck began to heat.  The halter tie of the dress I'd chosen tried very hard to unknot itself, and the leggings rode down.  (If you need another reason to avoid weight gain in college, please note that if you do, none of your clothes will fit, and you probably won't have the money to replace them with clothes that do.)  I made it 25 minutes before stopping, including a brief pause to prevent a wardrobe malfunction.  When I dismounted, I raked my right knee over the cargo rack on the back of the bike, leaving a slightly-red tender spot that hasn't visibly bruised (but still hurts when you poke it).

Ouch.

Still, I claim victory for the day so far: I didn't oversleep, as I did yesterday (when I blinked during the process of getting up and found that 45 minutes had mysteriously disappeared).  I got some physical activity in, and I know I can do better the next time I go out.  I have energy to do things, and in another few moments, I will have finished a blog post.  Not a bad day at all.

Wedding Priorities First Pass

I've been trying to write a blog post about my brother's Eagle Ceremony since it happened. Five days have passed since I started writing, and I remain unsatisfied, so I'm going to back-burner it and try an easier post. In the meantime-- big public congrats to my brother!


K and I have spent some time over the past eighteen months working out what our priorities are for this "wedding" thing.  The first two, which are big ones, were easy to find.

1. No more debt.
   We both took on some debt while going to school.  I got a pretty decent co-op and some help from my family, so, with a combination of luck and hard work, I have almost paid mine off.  K will come out of school with a heftier chunk of debt than I will, but we both believe that with careful budgeting, we can triumph over the College Debt Monster.  Assuming we can both find work, we have an aggressive timeline to accomplish this: we want to buy a house.  As a result, we have zero interest in a big, expensive, traditional wedding (average cost: $27,000, from what I read).  We'll have a wedding that we can afford with money we save over the next year or so.
   
   If this means that we end up eloping, because nothing else will work on the budget, then we'll elope (no later than December 31, 2013, because we're both heartily sick of the word "fiancé"*).  In that event, we'll have a big party on our five-year anniversary or something like that.
2. Family = A+ important.
   I like to talk about how we both have huge, awesome families: people related to us who have supported us our whole lives. I do this because we both consider our families a central part our lives.  Our families have taught us important lessons throughout our lives.  Some of them are standard lessons about love, graciousness, and supporting one another through times of pain, but I've learned more from my family. For example, I learned a lesson about critical thinking, careful speaking and assumption-making from my family when my carelessness in a role-playing session led my character to wander beneath the foot of a giant.  I learned about how things don't always go as planned when, at a play I had put together, my brother "borrowed" the microphone. ("My dad smokes big, long cigars, drinks lots of beer, and is the King of Hollering!" he announced.)  I learned about working together with people you don't like to achieve goals (because if I didn't work with my brother, we were never going to catch all the Pokémon and, more importantly to me at the time, I wasn't going to be allowed to play at all).
   
   I can't imagine not trying to include all of these people who have made such an impression on our lives as K and I begin to build our own family.  So, when we first started seriously trying to think about planning a wedding, we made a list of our parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles.  I organized it nicely in a spreadsheet for our future reference and ran a quick tally.  Between us, we have about 80 family members who visit on holidays (or call if they're too far)-- just the people who have played important roles in our lives.
   
   I looked at him.  "I like the idea of a small wedding," I said.
   
   He looked back at me.  "It's just not going to happen, is it?"
   
   No, it won't, but that's OK, because we are blessed to have so many people to (potentially) surround and support us.

So, having sorted out the big things, we've been talking about the smaller things.  We want a short ceremony and a kid-friendly venue; we don't want a sit-down dinner** or a church involved. We'd prefer somewhere with contiguous indoor/outdoor space, so that we can go outside if the weather's nice and stay dry if it's not.  We have at least a loose idea of the people we want on Team Wedding.  K doesn't want a tux, I don't want a veil, high heels, or a train.  If people are going to make the trip out to see/help/witness/support us as we're getting married, we want to make sure we have time to actually see them-- definitely more than an average of four minutes per person, which is what you get when you divide a five-hour reception over eighty people (yikes!).

We're still trying to figure out some of the less philosophical big things. For example, we haven't found a venue yet, and it's hard to plan a lot of the other stuff if you don't have a venue sorted out.  Still, I have high hopes: we have over a year left and options, and we agree about the big things.  Now, it's just a matter of legwork.

Quick note of disclaimer for wedding-related posts: I would love to invite positively the entire world to my wedding. Sadly, we do not have infinity money, and K would probably be overwhelmed if the entire world showed up. So, if you don't make the guest list (if we even have a guest list) it is not because we don't love you.

________

*To avoid the F-word, I call K "boyfriend", "husband", and "partner" pretty interchangeably, but I hate that I'm quasi-misusing the terms only slightly less than I hate the word "fiancé".

**Having been to events where we found ourselves glued to a table for a meal, we hate missing people we want to talk to while spending lots of time with very few people. We also don't want to design seating charts or cope with table numbers, so it seems win/win to us.

Obligatory Proposal Story

This started as a post about wedding planning, and then I realized I couldn't tell the story of my present without telling the story of how we embarked on this whole "wedding" jaunt. So, I started writing the proposal story, planning to fit thoughts about wedding planning around the edges.  They didn't fit.  Apparently, you have to start at the beginning sometimes.


K proposed to me in December 2010.  I had spent the previous six months in Missouri, and he'd flown out to visit, help me pack, and drive back to the Northeast with me.  He kept texting someone while I was driving* and, when I asked what was up, he told me he was asking his dad about the weather.  Reasonable enough-- it was December, and I hate trying to page through radio stations looking for the local forecast.


We had planned to spend a few days with my family, a few days with his, and then I'd go home in time for us to spend the holidays with our respective families.  In particular, we hoped to participate in his family's tree-trimming tradition: they make margaritas and everyone takes turns hanging ornaments.  (A brilliant tradition, in my opinion.)


Trouble struck, though: his father, who works in a different state, got held up at work and couldn't make it back as soon as he had hoped.  Meanwhile, a nasty snowstorm was brewing, and, while I love my little '97 Honda Civic, no one wanted me to test its ability to drive in a blizzard.  So, I checked the weather and made the decision to head out early, missing the tree-trimming party.  I said my good-byes and opened the door to leave.


"WAIT!" said K's mother.  One does not trifle with K's mother.  I stepped back inside, closed the door, and waited as she began to rummage in her sewing room.  She emerged, beckoning to K, with a cylinder wrapped in paper featuring brightly-colored cartoon cats.  "Here," she said, plunking it into his hands.

This isn't the same wrapping paper, but it's similar enough.

Uh-oh, I thought. The thing in K's hands was a bit larger than a baseball-- not the size of a ring box at all-- I had a bad feeling about it.  He handed it to me, and I opened it slowly, trying to delay the inevitable.


I was right. "Koala Marsupial Mammal,"** he said, using my full name, "Will you marry me?"

Speechless, I noticed that there was a piece of onion peel on the floor.  Oh no, I thought. I am going to remember this forever, and K proposed to me with a piece of onion peel on the floor. 


I think I needed some prompting. I don't quite remember, though: I was focused on the onion peel.  "Yes?" I said, trying to be happy.  The ring, according to his mother, it had belonged to her great-aunt.

Delicate; not flashy. Doesn't look out of place on my hand.

Hugs ensued all around, and the K and I went out for pizza to celebrate at a charming local shop where entertainment consisted of two gentlemen discussing the hours they could give a third gentleman while continuing to pay him under-the-table. K explained that he'd meant to give me the ring, disguised as an ornament, as part of the tree-trimming party that never happened. I tried not to wish he had waited or that he had found an excuse to keep me there, so I could have the prettier story.  After we ate, I called and told my mom, dropped him off, and ended up catching part of the blizzard on the drive home after all.

I then proceeded to tell as few people as possible. First off, I didn't want to call attention to myself-- it seemed rude to call people and talk about myself. Secondly, though, I wasn't quite ready to be engaged, thought I didn't tell K that.  I said "yes" because the answer wasn't "no" and I thought it would be "yes" if I just gave it some time (and I was right about that, too).  Then people started asking if we'd set a date for the wedding, and I really didn't want to tell anyone, because I got sick of saying "no, we don't know, sometime after we both graduate and have a little money set aside".  I had never thought about weddings before. Why was the wedding important? We had simply agreed to be a family together-- wasn't that the important part?


It turns out that that while agreeing to join together into a family unit is indeed the important part, it is not the only important part. These "wedding" things are pretty important, too: they mark a transition, and they bring the community of awesome people who are going to support you through the transition together for a celebration.

So, we've been engaged for nearly eighteen months, and I think we have a pretty decent idea of how we'd like the wedding to go.  We've mostly figured out what's important to us: avoiding debt, including our families, having a child-friendly event, taking enough time to actually see our guests, and avoiding a sit-down reception because we hate being rooted to a table.

We still haven't quite set a date.

Quick note of disclaimer for wedding-related posts: I would love to invite positively the entire world to my wedding. Sadly, we do not have infinity money, and K would probably be overwhelmed if the entire world showed up. So, if you don't make the guest list (if we even have a guest list) it is not because we don't love you. We just have a giant family, and that's going to impact how many other awesome people we can invite.
_____________
*We are still working on getting him his license, so his job was to keep me awake and make sure I didn't do anything stupid while merging.
**Note: not actually my full name