Just married.

(Still gone 'til Sunday, but with teasers from our photographer up and in-room wireless internet at my fingertips... well, you know.)

Hawaii, and things that should not happen prior to the departure for said location.

(Confidential to the anonymous commenter who has his or her panties all in a twist: Yes, I fucking AM married, thanks. It's just that I've been too busy sleeping, eating leftover lobster, and, oh yeah, having sex, to come back solely for the purpose of putting your mind at ease. Alright? Alright.)

So yes, Brad and I did, indeed, get married on Saturday night. It was a lovely evening, at least what I can remember of it, and in spite of the torrential rain that fell throughout the entire thing, I am pretty sure that we had the best wedding anyone has ever had in the history of matrimonial celebration. At the very least, it was certainly the best wedding I have ever had.

Even the weather, which forced our ceremony under cover and subsequently turned the ground under the tent to oozing, gelatinous mud such that every female guest removed her shoes within five minutes, could not put a damper on the fabulousness of the entire thing. There may even be a photograph of me and my friend Kate doing the Charleston with dresses hiked up to display our abundantly filthy feet.

Which leads to the reason for my delay in posting: namely, that we are currently not in possession of wedding photographs which would allow me to do the whole thing justice via blog post.

And I think we can all agree that photographs are an absolute necessity.

So I'm sorry, guys -- I'm married, I swear -- but I'm also photo-less. And therefore, the big recap is just gonna have to wait until I get back from our 2-week honeymoon on the dear little island of Hawaii.

I do, however, have a little something to tide you over in the meantime:

Today, as I attempted to bang out no less than twelve must-do projects in advance of my 2-week absence from the office, my Angry Contrarian co-worker sent me an email that said, "I'd like to meet with you at 5:15pm. Please let me know if that's doable."

"Okay," I wrote back, "But that doesn't leave me much time for edits if you have some changes to the materials I'm writing today."

"No, don't worry about that," he said.

Knowing what I do now, this actually makes a whole lot of sense.

At 5:15pm, with my boss having blithely departed for the weekend ("Have a good honeymoon!" he said) and the other coworkers having left the building, the Angry Contrarian turned to me.

"So," he said. "I just wanted to tell you that today is your last day."

Today is your last day.
I'll give you a couple seconds to let that sink in. God knows I needed them.

It took me a few beats to get my bearings again, during which I stared at him dumbly. My pen, which I had uncapped in order to take notes on any impending assignments, hovered impotently in the air.

"Excuse me," I said, finally, "are you kidding?"

"Well," said the Angry Contrarian, "we just feel that we need someone more... engaged."

There's that word again.

"What the fuck does that even mean?" I said. "I'm doing the work I was hired to do, and I'm doing it well. What's the problem, here?"

The problem, as it turns out, is that my boss has recently decided that he wants to evolve the responsibilities of my position from copywriting -- also known as "the position for which I was hired" -- to more research-heavy and relationship-oriented work -- also know as "something that is not my particular cup of tea". But rather than have a conversation about it, he sent his uptight, prissy, vile little man-servant to fire me.

Without a word of notice.

Today.

That's right, kids -- I have been unceremoniously sacked a mere two days before my honeymoon.

"I'm assuming you realize how extraordinarily unprofessional this is," I said.

"Well, we thought it would be best to do it before you left," said the Angry Contrarian, who was beginning to edge his chair away from mine as though worried that I might beat him to death.

Best for whom, exactly, is somewhat unclear. Certainly not for me -- I can definitely think of ways I'd like to spend my only vacation in more than a year that don't involve the looming spectre of unemployment casting its shadow over the entire thing -- but I suppose that if you are, say, a spineless little man who has no concept of what constitutes appropriate behavior in business, it works very well for you. You know, if you happened to be that sort of gutless wonder. Just saying.

Anyway, this is where I issue a fervent plea for help: I am leaving in 3 days for Hawaii. I will be gone until late September. I am determined not to let my Spineless Boss and his Angry Contrarian Manservant ruin my honeymoon, but on the other hand, I will be rather desperately in need of work when I come back. If you're looking for a good writer -- articles, column, marketing copy, website text, whatever -- get in touch. (Samples of my work, including editorial, ad, marketing and press stuff, can be found here.)

Many thanks to all of you who sent well-wishes for the wedding, apologies for the lousy news, and do keep an eye out for more blogging in another two weeks.

Okay, okay -- you can have ONE picture. (We both look a little shiny, but damn, that was one fine lobster.)

The view from 18 hours away

In spite of being a compulsive extrovert, there have been times in my life when I've kept relatively enormous secrets.

For instance: I somehow managed to avoid telling anybody when, after four months of dating, Brad and I moved in together. The only people who knew it was happening were my parents, who helped me move, and my roommates, who couldn't help but notice that I was leaving. It was weeks later, with the last box finally unpacked in our new apartment, before I summoned the nerve to confess to friends what I'd done.

Weirdly enough, and despite my extrovert status, I didn't want to talk about it. I'd made the decision and I didn't want to dissect it, explain it, or justify it to anyone else. Most of all, I didn't want to have to answer the inevitable question that comes from starry-eyed girls whose jaws drop at the idea of somebody finding love in New York:

"So," they'd say, "Is he... The One?"

Because frankly, the answer is not the one they expect.
The answer is: No, he isn't.

He is, of course, the one for me -- the one who understands my irrational love of Die Hard With a Vengeance, and the one I prefer above all others to share a bottle of wine with, and the one I'm going to promise to love, comfort, honor and keep for as long as we both shall live when we stand up in front of our families tomorrow.

But The One, with a capital T.O.?
Nope. And not because there's something the matter with me, or him, or our relationship.

It's because I find it disheartening to believe that The One, that singular perfect person whose hand need only be placed in yours to set the whole world right forevermore, actually exists.

As far as I can see, we live in a world where each person is responsible for his own happiness. We all have the power to weigh options, make choices, strike the precarious balance between what the mind suggests and what the heart demands. And in that world, had I never joined the (abominably bad) corporate softball team where I met the man I'm about to marry, I have no doubt that we would have each found happiness with someone else. Not necessarily on the same schedule, and certainly not an identical happiness -- I can't imagine that any other man would possess Brad's amazing balance of pure integrity and aggressive cockiness, his ability to simultaneously inspire and infuriate me, or his unexpected sentimentality -- but happiness nonetheless.

Make no mistake: I know I've been lucky. And I know, too, that the ease of living with Brad somehow makes it more possible to be flippant about the possibility of living without him. (The security of it is fleeting and false, because there are times when he's late coming home, when morbid imagination takes over; it scratches the surface of a loss so deep and terrifying that my only choice is to stop thinking or be driven insane.)

But even so, there are other paths out there, and other people. This relationship is just the path that we decided to stumble down together, and the one we've decided to keep taking.

And in spite of the temptation to slap a True Love label on it, I think I like it better this way.

Because while it may be romantic to imagine that a single perfect person waits out there for each of us, one who has been pre-selected especially for you by an unknown third party, the alternative is even more compelling:

You meet someone. Not the one, just... someone. Neither of you is perfect. Maybe he's an asshole about washing the dishes, and maybe you sometimes argue too hard about politics, and maybe you don't fit together perfectly when you spoon each other because one of you has a fat ass and the other has bony ribs. But you love each other, and you make each other laugh, and you make each other think. And in full knowledge of all your imperfections, and in full awareness that life may sometimes be hard, and with eyes wide open and unclouded by the vision of an ideal someone-out-there waiting for you, you imagine your life with this person... and it looks pretty good. And then, because you would rather make your own destiny than leave it in the hands of fate, you choose it.

You choose.

Now that's fucking romantic.

And Guns'n'Roses will not be playing the reception.

The local forecast for Saturday has been evolving over the past several days, from "cloudy with a chance of showers" (bearable) to, simply, "RAIN". Flat, gray rain. Emotionless, rainy rain. The kind of rain that makes everything wet on days when things are not supposed to be getting wet and which, when forecast for one's wedding day, is highly unbearable.

Fuck.

I have never been so obsessed with the weather. I jolted awake at 3:30am last night and checked the ten-day forecast again (bad idea) then tried desperately to calm myself back to sleep with a reminder that I actually adore rainy days. The smell of wet earth, the lush green of the lawns, the musical pitter-pat of raindrops... I love all these things. Most of the time.

Unfortunately, rather than returning blissfully to dreamland, I spent the remaining hours until dawn tormented by visions of myself as the unwilling participant in a sort of bridal-edition wet t-shirt contest overseen by the oh-so-whimsical Mother Nature. And when I did finally fall asleep, plagued by worries about how hard it is to hold a candle in the cold September rain, I had a nightmare that someone had stolen my wedding dress and replaced it with this.



And then I realized: it's not really the wedding-day rain that worries me. It's wedding-day rain in combination with hideous half-gowns and inevitable death from some kind of mysterious head trauma.