Did you know that I didn’t want a wedding? And that I have a vagina? TRUE MOTHERFUCKING STORY, INTERNET.
I was in favor of the Vegas-way. Elvis, gambling, boozing? All up my alley. A 440-lb white dress? Not my scene. Nonetheless, *someone* stupid told me that relationships were about Compromise so I gave in. We had a wedding on 9/10/05.
And I give my thanks EVERYDAY that it is over. Seriously, every day I wake up and am grateful that it is NOT my wedding day.
Over the course of the wedding, I had several epiphanies of things I will be sure to do the next time I get married. Because I am not just stupid but annoying too:
1. Don’t do it. Romantic as the whole shebang can seem from afar, it isn’tt. Don’t let any rosy-cheeked newlyweds tell you differently. It’s not a rite of passage, it’s a highway to hell.
2. If you’ve ignored my advice, do yourself a favor and elect someone from the wedding party to be the Annoying Questions Lazy People Ask Fielder. Make someone else be your bitch or people will walk all over you.
3. Do NOT get an upper respiratory infection before the wedding. Because then you will turn into Typhoid Becky and infect the entire Chicagoland Area with a Superbug worse than MRSA. Unless, you know, you’re into that stuff.
4. Make sure the DJ plays Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” as your first song. Because really, it does.
5. September 10th is a fucking hot day. Also, your knees have sweat glands.
6. Everything is better with bacon.
7. Elope to Vegas. Because, obviously.
8. Do not allow yourself to be suckered into doing all of the work for a wedding that you didn’t want to have in the first place because then you will be bitter and annoying to everyone around you.
9. Do not make your friends wear strapless dresses. They will bitch and moan and make YOU wear 608 lbs of yellow taffeta at their weddings. And ride on a llama.
10. RSVP’s are optional. Get over it.
And lastly, just don’t do it. Really, no. Don’t do it.
Around 3 months ago, our good friends were having a garage sale, and we having recently moved loads of The Daver’s crap from one apartment to our freshly-bought condo, had tons of shit to unload. So, I packed and packed the unused crap into boxes for Dave to pack into the car to take to their house. Pretty much any story where stuff gets moved involves me packing while Daver lays down with a headache.
(as an aside: we have a division of labor here; Dave carries shit down the stairs to wherever it happens to be going, and I do EVERYTHING else).
(an aside TO the aside: and by “division of labor” I mean that I pretend that Dave is going to carry the stuff downstairs and so I get it all together and about half of the time he actually carries it down)
(an aside to the aside to the aside: I want an elevator)
Predictably, the garage sale came and went. And the boxes sat. Dave always gave me some vague mumbles about donating the stuff to charity while the boxes remained in the same dining room position, slowly gathering dust and moss. For months.
Rather than getting angry about it I figured that I would take care of it myself.*
According to my calculations, it dawned on me that the longer that I let these items sit there, the more apt Dave was to remove them from the boxes and lovingly welcome them back home because he loves his things unnaturally. Like old threadbare underwear and broken cassette tapes.
I, of course, was having NONE of this. Our condo had no storage as it was and the less stuff we had, the better.
So there I went, huffing and puffing my way down to the dumpster, where I put the stuff to the side, hoping that someone might go through it and take what they’d needed. Because while I wasn’t going to be giving the Gnomes on Ice glasses a home any longer, someone else might find them perfectly lovely.
Before I brought my last load down, I took a break to eat. By the time that I had managed to get back downstairs, I noted that all of the boxes that I’d set out NEXT to the dumpsters were gone. Vanished. Fin.
This assuaged my guilty ego in more ways than one. Maybe I should invite them in to peruse Dave’s collection of old receipts and gum wrappers.
*this would prove to be THE running theme in our marriage. Well this and “Becky is kind of a bitch.”
Daver and Ben are clones. They’ve always been clones.
We’ve joked about it a lot because while Dave is Ben’s step-father and certainly the father in Ben’s life most of the time, he’s not biologically related to Ben. It doesn’t matter a lot to us because that’s the way it’s always been, but it’s so interesting to see someone share so many of the same quirks and eccentricities.
If they shared genetics, it would be one of those “that is OBVIOUSLY YOUR side of the family things,” but since they don’t, we just laugh. Dave’s the cheese to Ben’s macaroni.
The final proof occurred when we ventured out to Pashmina’s condo. Now, upon arrival and close examination, Ben realized Pashmina, not having children of her own, has no *toys* and was directed to play her old Nintendo.
Ben’s first foray into video games was Duck Hunt and was eerily good at it. He actually killed ducks which is something that I’d never mastered, not then and not now. Next Dave gave it a shot. I saw years of painful training behind his perfectly executed shots at the ducks. I sat slack-jawed and drooling as I watched my husband kill them ducks dead.
I was spellbound, enraptured, and utterly unable to remove my eyes from the screen.
Given a couple of more tries, Ben was remarkably better. He even began to shoot at the annoying dog, like generations of kids before him.
Then attention was focused on me. It was my turn. Let me explain that I had not had a Nintendo as a child, I had come from a Sega Genesis household; two vastly different worlds. I had played Duck Hunt maybe 3 times in my life over at my next door neighbors house, and I’d never killed a single duck.
I warned my captive audience of this as I sat brandishing the beautiful orange gun, and I fired. And I fired. And fired again. I sat there, firing impotently while Dave, Pashmina and Ben laughed hysterically. I did not, and probably never will hit one of those damn ducks. Being good at video games is just not in my genes.
Wasn’t then and it isn’t now.
Ben, though, he’s clearly The Daver’s son.
