marriage

so, i'm getting married in a week. one of the many caveats of our arrangement is that i'm not allowed to mention her name in print. so from now on i will refer to my fiance as "my predilection for speed." i'm going to write it with three exlamation points (!!!) just to imbue her name with meaning it might otherwise lack.

this all reminds me of a story. by my first sophomore year in college, i hadn't quite gotten over an aversion to dating friends, not since high school did i even try, because i once had a passing fancy for a girl i'd been best friends with. i'll call her mr. hooper, because he was one of my favorite sesame street characters but after awhile i noticed that he wasn't in his shop anymore i asked my mom why mr. hooper wasn't in his shop anymore and she said "Mr. Hooper died, sweetheart. He's not on the show anymore." mr. hooper and i were best friends in the fullest highschool sense of the word, so i didn't have realistic intention of dating her per se, but then she got wind of my passing fancy because i'd mentioned it in passing to a passing friend, so quite naturally she reacted by never speaking to me again.

not wasting time with me also freed her up to pursue other interests, like theatre and talking her friends out of dating me. good for mr. hooper, i thought. it's always nice to see people turn a new leaf. i've always tended to surround myself with a certain kind of person, and it's one thing making new friends but it's another thing entirely to change the crowd you run with, so to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, for several years once a girl considered me a friend, even in the loosest sense of the word, i wouldn't try to date her.

friendships develop willy-nilly if you're not careful, and the idea of dating certainly retained some of its appeal for me, so i compensated by being an asshole to girls i met, lest they start thinking of me as a friend. this astonishingly vicious cycle consumed a few years that might have been put to more productive uses, datingwise.

after a few years i resolved that things would be different. somehow. years and years and years after high school when i was almost a junior i started hanging out with a girl named maude, and we ended up making out in her room on my nineteenth bithday after she bought me a cake. this isn't so bad, is what i remember thinkng to myself as my insides about burst with joy. as soon as we stopped kissing, maude looked lovingly into my eyes and purred "None of our friends can know about this." she told me i was too young and a bunch of other stuff i don't remember.

it all seemed perfectly reasonable, the way she explained it. also, she was almost thirty.

after what happened in high school, i still felt like it was somehow my responsibility to make sense of all the insane shit girls told me. we surreptitiously sneaked around for a few weeks, but then she somewhat abrubtly stopped talking to me, started back up with the hard drugs, and notified me that we wouldn't be dating any longer by making out with some other dude at a party, right in front of me. i couldn't even get mad about it, because all of my friends were so surprised to learn that we'd been dating in the first place that the shock of having her hook up with somebody else in the hallway in front of my room didn't really register with them.

so yeah, getting married's like that. sort of.

i haven't touched base with my predilection for speed (!!!) today, but tomorrow we're supposed to go buy ourselves some costumes for the wedding. i'm looking forward to it, which is a good thing because once i start living in seattle with my predilection for speed (!!!) we're going to be seeing a lot of each other, i imagine.