I met a girl who’s way cooler than you.
I mean no offense. Don’t take it personally. I’m sure you’re a pretty groovy person, intelligent, happenin’. You’ve got a lot going on, but you’re still fashionably bored enough with the world to come look at this nonsense in the middle of your day. That devil-may-care, fire-me-for-noncompliance-to-posted-web-usage-policies attitude is pretty hip of you, as hip as any attitude with the word “compliance” in it is going to be. You would never have a ten minute argument with a comic book store clerk over whether or not Star Trek was “camp” while dressed in a Starfleet uniform in public in broad daylight where people can see you for no discernable reason.
(Sorry for the tangent, but I just encountered such a person and am still coming to grips with it. Trekkies notwithstanding, I had convinced myself that guys like this didn’t really exist. I thought they were the stuff of folk tales, like the yeti. Several of which, incidentally, this gentleman appeared to have eaten. This girl I met is way cooler than that guy. His effect on my psyche was such that I would not be surprised to learn that the comic book store had hired him to stand there, just to make the rest of us feel better about being in a comic book store. “I may be buying a pamphlet full of illustrated leotards, but at least I’m not wearing one. I can march proudly to the counter with three copies of ‘Spider-Girl’ knowing that, no matter what they take from me, I’m still not the becostumed, mastodon-sized trekker.” None of which, of course, has anything to do with my point.)
Cool though you may be, the girl I met is peerless. She has no rival. She is a girl who invites you over to her place so she can bash your teeth out in a game of Soul Calibur. She is a girl who speaks in programming languages and does the Disney-movie, stuffed-animal girly girl crap. She is the only other person I have ever met who has been seen consuming, in fact regularly restocking her refrigerator with, Diet Rite Cola. (Has anyone ever uncovered evidence of a Regular Rite Cola? Not that I would imagine you’ve devoted a lot of your resources to the subject. Though I have.) She is a girl who goes to dinner with you and grabs the check so often you start to mistake her for the waitress. She, like the Trek guy, is the kind of creature that I did not believe actually existed anymore. (And that is the only thing they have in common. I really cannot shake that species embarrassment from my head.) So when I met this cool girl, I quickly decided to stake my claim. Plant my flag, in a non-double-entendre kind of way. We needed to date. Especially after she asked me out, which was sufficient to bump her up a whole bracket all by itself.
I’ve never had anything fall into place quicker, and I knew we were destined for greatness the first week I knew her.
In my circle of friends, I have been at the center of a continuing scandal regarding Ted Drewes frozen custard that stems from my not giving a damn about Ted Drewes frozen custard. “There’s a custard stand down the street from me,” I famously said, “and I grew up near this other place called Fritz’s. And you know, it all tastes pretty much the same. So why am I driving all the way over there?” Apparently, this remark was reported in the press as, “Ted Drewes sells frigid mucus in a paper cup, and I spit on Ted Drewes and by extension your personal childhood, and I can’t wait to give all my money to the custard stands in the suburbs in an effort to see the once-proud city of St. Louis burn to embers, which I will also spit on.” My originally innocuous comment, born of nothing worse than laziness of mind and palate, has met with such resistance and defiance from my friends (some of whom are saving money to construct a large wall around the city of St. Louis and poison the suburban water supply) that it has gone from being a simple lack of preference to being a way of getting force-fed ice cream. There have been times I’ve brought up abortion just to get the conversation civil again. We only reached detente this year when, after my friends threatened to exile me to Elba, I conceded that it may all just taste the same because I always order Reeses Peanut Butter Cups as my custard’s topping. And really, how different are those gonna taste? Staleness aside?
(But I mean, seriously. It’s custard, and they freeze it. Ooh, get the patent office on the phone. We must safeguard the recipe.)
So this summer, I met this girl at the movies with some friends (and yes, the first movie we ever officially saw together was based on a theme park ride, and there’s no going back and doing anything about that, so let’s all just agree that at least it wasn’t “The Country Bear Jamboree” and move on) and soon thereafter she struck up an e-mail conversation, taking the initiative attractively while also dodging all that phone awkwardness. And during this back-and-forth, we began talking about the relative merits of living in my more central neighborhood instead of the godforsaken suburban wilderness she moved into when she settled in our fair city. Attempting to sell my neck of the woods with a proven crowd pleaser, I wrote, “…and of course, everyone enjoys being less than ten minutes from Ted Drewes.”
She replied, and I swear that this is exactly what happened, “Personally, I’ve never really seen what the big deal is about Ted Drewes. I have this place right down the street from me called Fritz’s, and it’s all pretty much the same. But I mean, I almost always get peanut butter cups in mine anyway, and how different is that ever going to taste? If you think about it.”
And that was probably the first time I said, “I’ll see you at the altar.”
Well, I mean, not to her. We hadn’t even gone out yet. What am I, some kind of creepy weirdo?
No, I mean from like a romantic standpoint.
Okay. Fair enough.
Anyway, that turned out to be only the first of many times in the months to come that I would claw at my temples screaming, “Get out! Get out of there!” Not needing to speak to communicate my thoughts has freed up a lot of my time, which has now mostly gone into smooching and driving to the godforsaken suburban wilderness. As the months have flown by, the girl has become a girlfriend, and the girlfriend has become an integral part of daily life in a way that would have made me feel like a caged pet just a few years ago. (I have always valued my freedom and unstructured time above everything else. I’m a bit like a cell phone in that every so often I need to be left alone plugged into my base; otherwise all you end up with is static followed by death. The thought of someone expecting to spend time with me or in my space, even every other day, would have driven me out a window before I met her.) In a process resembling the reintroduction of a captive animal into the wild, I have slowly put her in front of small groups of friends and relatives, trying to see if the baking soda and the vinegar make a volcano. So far, the verdict has been universal: everyone loves her instantly. In fact, most of my friends like her more than they do me, and have had no problem telling me so.
So, six months will have passed next week without either one of us having thrown a single piece of flatware at the other person. Sheer bliss. My girlfriend is celebrating this weekend by moving into an apartment much, much closer to mine. It is a two bedroom apartment. The second bedroom and the space it allows are explicitly being rented with me in mind. It is assumed by all parties that the day will come in the not-too-distant future when we do the proper paperwork, everyone chants the proper chants in the proper big magical building, and suddenly we’re both entitled to one another’s furniture. To live happily ever after, as they say.
Unfortunately, even this promise of domestic tranquility and chair sharing has its pitfalls. The wedding guests are restless, and as of this very week it is officially pissing me off.
I had a conversation with my dad this week that typifies the lip I’ve been getting for the last couple of months. The conversation itself didn’t bug me- it was, in fact, all I could do not to burst out laughing at the poor man- but it was a more innocuous syptom of a much more serious cancer of the mood.
“Tell me something,” he began. “I have to know: do you like her as much as we do?”
“Well,” I replied, “for the sake of all involved, I hope I like her more.”
“Because I mean, wow,” he said. “We… she’s just… wow.”
(See? No matter what comes next, it’s hard to hate this conversation. This is the first choice in my life that my dad’s approved of since I decided to go ahead with the potty training.)
“Wow, indeed!”
“You’ve of course talked to her about the future by now.”
“To some extent, we’ve certainly discussed-”
“So what are you dragging your feet for?”
“Well, I- wait, what?”
“Quit futzing around with this girl! She’s going to leave!”
“‘Futzing’?”
“When I dated your mother, we were engaged for a year, and even before that we were together practically all the time. Every day. And all the time we futzed around dating before the wedding, that whole long drawn out foot dragging, was wasted time.”
“Well, we’ve only known-”
“Wasted time!”
“But-”
“Hurry up!”
And this appears to be the consensus among people whose goddamn business is, technically speaking, none of this.
Whenever someone asked me the limp, tired question, “When are you going to propose? To your girlfriend? Hahn? Haaaaaahn?” I used to joke, “Six months after the last time someone asks me that.” I hoped that this would communicate all sorts of things that it did not. “If I do it, I want it to seem spontaneous and surprising, not the result of some kind of word-of-mouth marketing campaign or grass-roots mandate of the angry mob.” “I would prefer my engagement to seem like my decision, rather than yours.” “We still need a couple more months to see if the other shoe drops. Like, more than six of them.” “I do not respond well to pressure, and the best way to see this happen is to stop telling me to do it. F***er.” And so on. But recently, remarkably, the question has shifted from teasing to a kind of exasperation. People are starting to act like they expect something I owe them. I feel as though something is being taken away from me.
It’s become exactly what I prayed it would not, and much too soon. It has risen to this neverending cacophony of voices, this din that begins to resolve itself into a chant. We’ve been together six months. That would be like going half our lives without getting married… if we were field mice. As it is, I give us another fifty, sixty years. So I’ll think we’ll make it. Just under the wire. Somehow.
Did this happen to any other marrieds reading this?
I am not exaggerating when I tell you, gentle reader, that I cannot go a day without someone bringing up how many bridesmaids we’re going to have, or where we plan to do it, or whose church it will be in, or how many guests we will have or how much we plan to spend. I recently got a new one about whether our kids were going to public school. There are only two people I can think of who have never brought up this topic:
1) My girlfriend.
2) Me.
That’s another reason why I love her.
So, with all this in mind, I wanted to take a moment today to issue an edict.
I HAVE NEVER, TO MY KNOWLEDGE, PROPOSED TO ANYONE. THE WEDDING IN QUESTION IS THEORETICAL; THE CEREMONY IS FICTIONAL, AND THE RECEPTION IS BEING HELD IN YOUR GODDAMNED IMAGINATION. No more will I penalize my girlfriend because of the asinine questions and opinions of other people. When the day comes, it will have everything to do with our feelings for one another, and nothing to do with public demand. Kindly f*** off. I have spoken.
You know, I feel better.
(You should meet her. She really is… wow.)