American Wife

Today I had my first dress fitting.

This whole wedding thing is not unexpected--I've been engaged for five months now, and that's plenty of time to adapt to the whole concept of "til death do you part." I'm fine with that part--commitment to a person has never been a difficult thing to achieve. So the concept of marriage is nothing intimidating. And yet...

Holy shit, Batman, I'm supposed to be a wife?

It's just that I always associated wifedom with grown-up things, like responsibility and paying medical bills on time and cooking and, I don't know, things that I generally suck at. I'm not even particularly adept at making my own bed in the morning, and the whole corner-tucking thing? Not a hope in hell. Forget being a competent wife, most days I'm not even sure I'm a particularly competent human.

And after all, what is the meaning of "wife"? (There's a book by that title that I keep meaning to read). I associate things like cooking, and mending, and making sure the toilet paper is stocked, and silly things like that with wifedom. And yes, I am fully aware that said concept is subscribing to traditional gender roles. So, in theory, once we throw all of those roles out the window, what is the new "meaning of wife"? What are the duties of the modern wife? What are reasonable expectations? Sex every night? A minimum of nagging? Lots of laughter? What do I do to make an adequate, equal, modern helpmeet? Particularly when there are no children in the picture (other than delinquent and mainly absent stepchildren) and indeed, no plans, desires, hopes, or thoughts to having them?

And why the hell aren't the men trying to figure out what the meaning of husband is?

These were the random thoughts going through my head today as I moved about the department store, looking for the necessary knickers to wear underneath my wedding gown. As I debated the merits of thong vs. full coverage underwear, a phrase kept floating around in the back of my head: "A year in the life of an American wife." From time to time, I would substitute "American" with "clueless" or "incompetent." But mainly I began to think that maybe this here blog's a good place to follow my first year of marriage, my ups and downs and what I figure out and how our partnership (and hopefully my domestic talents) flourish.

Perhaps fittingly, perhaps forebodingly, I nearly passed out at David's Bridal during the dress fitting. Apparently standing very still while dressed in a gown with four layers of cloth and a built-in corset can really be a brutal experience. Yes, an incompetent wife, indeed.

It's the end of the world as we know it

Southern California, much like Manhattan, is known for its high cost of living. I know people who pay close to $1000 a month for a room--a single, undersized room, I say--in Los Angeles. It's hardcore down here, let me tell you. All these people falling all over themselves to pay out the nose for the privilege (hurumph) of living in California...it boggles my mind.

Fortunately, I am not one of those poor fools.

We live in a debatably cool city--Palm Springs, home of the 117-degree summer days, haven for the gays and grays. While it's no San Diego or Rancho Santa Margarita (I'd live there for the sake of its name alone), it sure as shit beats Beaumont, or Fontana, or San Bernardino, or Hemet. And not only do we live in a cool area, we rent a pretty damned nice place for a (relatively) cheap rent. Two lovely patios, three bedrooms (one of them, admittedly, small enough to house my bookcases, the litterbox, and not much else), a fireplace, a big kitchen, all for a price that still allows me to waste a sinfully large amount of money on dining out and lipsticks I promptly lose.

The only drawback to our happy little home is that it's right by a service road which leads to one of the local ritzy hotels frequented by the film crowds. All hours of the day and night (why a tree-mincing truck feels the need to lumber past at two in the morning, I've not figured out, especially since we live in THE DESERT and there's not too many trees to mince), delivery trucks and landscaping trucks and, possibly, elephants and blue whales rumble past, and their engines are powerful enough to make the bed tremble and the windows rattle.

And we live in Southern California. Have I mentioned that?

On the San Andreas fault.

Which is dangerously overdue for the next Big One.

And when that big mother hits, we're going to be so royally fucked, because if it happens while we're at home, we'll be buried under the rubble of 1000 books and two tons of cat fur because we just made the merrily misguided assumption that the Parker Hotel was due for its next big delivery of posh-people food and booze.

I never should have watched 2012 last weekend. Nuts.

Back on the air...again.

After close to a month of doing reading for work (bah!) I'm now able to spend my off hours reading for myself again--which means lots of self-absorbed chick-lit or anachronistic historical fiction about people who rubbed shoulders with randy kings.

I think it might be time to branch out a little.

Recently I watched the movie Julie and Julia. I have a very low threshold for what makes a movie something I will enjoy (does shit get blown up? do people fall in love? are there sumptuous costumes? is Christian Bale donning a batsuit?) and so, unsurprisingly, I enjoyed J&J very much. So much so that I went to work the next day and placed myself on hold for the book. And it came in, and now I'm almost at the end of the book, and I've come to a few rather interesting realizations:

1. Talented blog writers can take their most mundane, quotidian lives and make them into something that I WANT to read.

2. If I had a nickel's worth of sense (which I don't, as all my nickels are being squirreled away to finance my increasingly expensive honeymoon) I'd actually try to knuckle down and try to update my damned blog on a daily basis and maybe, just maybe my life will seem a little more fabulous.

3. What the hell should I blog about? Librarianship, with a little bit of my personal life tinging in? My impending marriage? Seems like the best blogs all have some sort of theme.

3. I have a tendency to adapt my inner voice to kind of echo those who I am most recently reading (Julie Powell's sarcasm, Crazy Aunt Purl's self-deprecation, my sister's whimsical artsiness). My writing style (I feel like a poseur even trying to imply that I have one) is, as of yet, extremely undefined.

4. Fucking wah.

5. I really dig the whole "blog to books" genre. I think it might be time to pull a Gemini and obsessively study it and then promptly forget all about it.

Over and out.

Self-Helpless

I love trolling through the Relationship, Psychology, and Self-Help Sections of the book store. Completely aside from the fact that I am a neurotic female and think that I can change everything that is wrong with me (even when it turns out that I am not the problem), it's fun to make fun of the titles.

For example:

There were two books that caught my eye: Why Doesn't He Call? and Why Doesn't He Propose? I made the lightning-fast observation that there needs to be a third in the series: Why Do You Give a Damn?

Another title: Loving the Older Man. I mentally noted that the more accurate title would be Loving the Creepy Commitmentphobic Older Man Who Has STDs and a Criminal Record of Domestic Violence. Ahem. Moving along.

Not surprisingly, the book that appealed to me the most was Bitter is the New Black.

A strange victory

It's strangely cloudy tonight, cloudy and gloomy like it used to be back East, in a different land, in a different life. Under normal circumstances, I'd think there's a freakish change in the weather coming. But tonight, I'll accept it as the gift that I'd like to think it is...a birthday gift, of sorts. Three years ago today I came to California.

I keep typing sentences, inane sentences with these empty, vapid words that clutter up the page, kind of like the cheap trinkets and knick-knacks and cosmetics and accessories I buy that are actually worthless, just cluttering things up. I don't think there's any words I can really summon to effectively describe these last three years, and the hopes and disappointments and realizations and resignations that I encountered...there are no words that can effectively summarize the life--such as it is--that I have made for myself here.

It all simply comes back to that thing that my friend Deshka and I told each other, over and over, during that bleak winter and spring of 2006:

It is what it is.

And so it is just that--it is I, who sacrificed a good man to my stubbourn pride within six weeks of moving here. It is my life here, my life of work and not much else. It is the consequence of me trusting one too many of the wrong kind of man, the bad kind, one too many times. It is the friends I have made here, the younger-than-me girls that seem to have it more together than I do, the older-than-me women who talk (a lot) about plastic surgery, it is the harsh sunshine and relentless dust, it is the bird that sings every night, just after midnight, right outside my bedroom window. It is the stubbourn, dogged and ultimately fruitless commitment I maintained for two of those three years, commitment to a boy that didn't really want me that much. It is the gut-numbing, limb-freezing terror that siezes me every time I feel the floor tremble or hear the windows rattle. It is the Pacific Ocean, still freezing cold and foreign to me, it is the three-hour-time difference between me and those who know me and my life, it is the three years of priceless work experience, it is three years in which I can count on two hands the number of cloudy days we've had.

It is all of these things...until it just isn't anymore.

I don't know when that will be. A month ago, the thought of staying here for countless more years made me want to weep with frustration and fear. Tonight, as I drink a glass of Shiraz and listen to the fan hum behind me and keep one eye on the chick-flick I've got playing, and as I watch my cats fight each other, annoyed with the vigorous brushing I gave them both, I understand that it doesn't just happen right now, overnight, on demand. I don't know when it's going to happen. And right now, at this moment, I'm okay with it.

That feeling will pass. But it's here for now, and for that I am grateful.

Happy birthday to me.

Waiting, waiting, waiting...

'Way back in the day, I was a born-again Christian. Hard-core. Went to church three times a week, sang in the choir, sat on the youth group board, certainly talked the talk, tried to walk the walk. For three years of my life, it defined me, my existence, my future. I loved Jesus, went up to the altar every Sunday morning, didn't drink or swear or do drugs or take god's name in vain or have sex before marriage. After all, that could lead to pregnancy or the clap or a broken heart or an irate Jesus.

One of the most tangible pieces of evidence that remain from that time in my life is my chastity ring. Yes, that's right, you read that right, my chastity ring. Not quite a chastity belt, sure--it was 1996, after all, not 1396. They presented the rings (subsidized by my doting, if somewhat misguided, grandparents) to me, during a church ceremony in which I, along with several other earnest young ladies, pledged to remain virgins until our wedding night.

Shortly after I turned 16, I became a "recovering Christian." Slowly, gradually, I fell away from the church as I experienced a crisis of faith, withdrew from my religious activities, and...well, grew up. Opened my eyes. I began to cuss like a sailor. Socially drink, even. The last thing to go was my pledge of chastity, but even that went out the window, a little later than most, when I was 19.

And life carried on. God (if s/he exists) and I left each other alone. I became more secular, more "of the world", and so I remain, to this day. I retained my honesty, my sense of justice, my code of ethics. I retained my sense of self, even as my self changed so vastly from what I once was. But even as I remained constant in some ways, I strayed very far from who I once was in others.

Best example: within the past year, my friend started dating a new guy. They...waited. Or, rather, he wanted to wait. And so they waited. And waited. We debated why. Was he gay? That was just weird, waiting six damned months.

And it's not a complete anomaly. Another friend is seeing a guy--they've been seeing each other for half a year, and they haven't (to borrow an old phrase) "gone all the way". They are both fine with that, and choose for it to be this way.

Baffling. Or so I thought.

See, I am, at heart, a historian. And I have an eye for how things once were. And I know that once, it was considered weird, freakish, inappropriate, abnormal, or at least taboo, to go all the way. People--especially women, mainly women--were ostracized if it was known that they did. Not a good way to live and love. But yet--we've done an about-face in recent decades. Now it's considered weird and freakish if people don't go all the way before marriage, and fairly soon after they meet, too...and somehow, I've internalized this. I got on board, and apparently, I had forgotten my 16-year-old self, in which I said, "If he loves me, he'll wait."

Now it's sexsexsex nownownow, and those who don't do that are not quite right.

Neither extreme is good or right or cool. But less cool is the fact that I bought into both extremes at different times in my life. Neither particularly helped me. Neither guided me down the right path. And I won't say that I've learned my lesson (how trite would that be?)...but I have learned that there is some wisdom in my friends' caution. And not only that there is wisdom, but that it's acceptable. Maybe not socially celebrated, but that caution, that waiting exists. And there are people in my age group who are wise enough--and comfortable enough with themselves--to wait and not need to validate themselves through quick sex.

If I get around to dating again--right now, not particularly high on my list of priorities; it comes right after getting leprosy of the eyeballs--I'm going to wait. A lot. At least six months. And I am only going to go for it if the person and I love each other.

And I am going to know that it's okay.

The ones who can know you so well are the ones who can swallow you whole...

It's my 29th birthday, and I am spending it in Washington DC with my family (good), where it's raining (better), and where I am not freaking out too much about turning 29 (best). I thought it would be hard, but it's turning out better than I thought. Maybe I'm just coming to terms with getting older, or maybe I'm just comfortably numb, but I'm okay with which ever it is.

Being back East helps--being in the humid, green climate (if not location) of my childhood, being with family. Both are familiar, and comforting, and I've felt more like myself than I have felt in a very long time. And I think that's the best birthday gift I could ever get.