This week (12/20): Here Comes The Bride.
Well, not quite yet.
This page is late. Again. I was working on a half-assed kinda piece about how I like Christmas a lot and wish that people who bitch nonstop about the presents, the shopping, the overcommercialization, the "lack of meaning", and everything else would just go ship their Grinchy selves off to some non-Christmas-celebrating country until after the 25th. I couldn't really get it going at full boil, though, and I was feeling pretty guilty about letting this page go so long without an update.
But yesterday (the 19th), I headed out to Virginia to see Johnny A. one last time before Christmas. We went out to dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant, and then did some quick Christmas shopping at Borders and a couple of other stores. Nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary. But when we got home, he told me he wanted to give me one Christmas present early. He had me close my eyes while he went to get it. When I opened them again, he'd put a ring box in my hand, and he was down on one knee in front of me. He asked me to marry him. And I said yes.
Cute Ring Story: The weekend before, I'd stayed at his apartment on Saturday night. One of the many rings I wear was missing the next day when I went to put them back on. I figured it had just fallen down under something. Johnny gave it back to me when he picked me up at the subway yesterday, saying that he'd found it in his cat's playhouse, which, if you've ever met his cat, is entirely plausible. Actually, he'd taken it to several jeweller's shops so he'd have an idea of my ring size.
It's funny -- I've never heard of people suffering sudden amnesia after a marriage proposal. But I can't for the life of me remember him putting the ring on my finger. And he doesn't remember me saying yes. (You've got it in writing here now, Johnny.) I was pretty sure he'd gotten down on one knee, but double-checked with him in case I'd imagined it. By some kind of odds that truly defy the natural order of things, both his parents and my mother happened to be out that night, and we had to try several times to get them on the phone to tell them the news. (A pleasant coincidence that Johnny didn't know about but which I think is pretty neat -- December 19th is my late father's birthday.)
So, as you can imagine, right now I just can't seem to get myself worked up into a righteous lather about much of anything. Clinton got impeached? Whatever -- he's President Terminator, and he'll bounce back somehow. Livingston resigned before he ever got to be Speaker? Wow. Hope my next job lasts longer than that! Even if I was pissed enough about something to give it the full "Blah" treatment, right now my concentration span is so short that I doubt I could string together two coherent sentences about it. I'm going to be a real peach at work this week.
I'm sure that as the date draws nearer and as we go through everything we'll have to do to get married, I'll be finding all kinds of fresh sources of annoyance to yell about. But right now, for once in my life, I'm just too content to bother whining. I won't go on in sappy detail about Johnny because it would just embarass him, but I will say that I was single (and very unhappy about it) throughout most of my twenties, while other people I knew couldn't seem to stay out of relationships. Johnny was well worth the wait.
I'd really like to thank everyone who's sent us their best wishes. The comments on Crunchland and from friends in E-mail have been wonderful -- it's great to know that people are out there pulling for you. And I have to give a special shout-out to Crunchland for bringing us together in the first place. I first called Crunchland when it was a BBS in 1995, because I wanted to find a place to pester people with my opinions and maybe find a group of folks to do stuff with. I had no idea I'd eventually meet the man I'm going to marry via Crunchland. So, to people who claim that the Internet is bad because it isolates people, I say "bite me".