the world is your acorn

This is the shirt that Mr. Superhero made for Mrs. Superhero to wear on my birthday. I guess it’s also kind of a picture of her breasts. Well, 1.5 of them anyway.

This morning I woke up to a thump and something cold on my hand. I instantly recognized it as the nose of our dog, but it didn’t make sense. I was in the middle of the bed, and not allowed on it. Turns out The Little Red Haired Girl decided to let Oliver be a bed dog for my birthday! The rest of the morning Oliver and I raced around the house, jumping on and off the bed. Turns out he has little desire to actually be on the bed for long, especially not if we’re in it. Which is fine, because our bed is small and The Little Red Haired Girl generates enough heat for all three of us. But it sure was a nice sacrifice for her to make for my birthday!

It’s my birthday week. Well, my birthday month, actually, but I’m never very good at remembering to invoke birthday month. And now, here it is the end of the month and the week, and I’m just really realizing my birthday is coming up. Tomorrow. I don’t really think of my birthday as a huge deal, but The Little Red Haired Girl is into celebrating birthdays, so now mine gets celebrated. We are starting off tonight by hitting 3rd and Lindsley tonight for the RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) Benefit Concert. We’ll be seeing Chris Pureka, Alice Peacock, Shawn Mullins, Peter Bradley Adams, and Jen Foster. Nice lineup. Tomorrow we are going to go dancing somewhere, maybe Play. We used to go out dancing once or more a week in Boston, and we haven’t been since living here, so I’m excited for it. Saturday is a day off, and Sunday is my annual (since living here) birthday bowling party. I’m excited because just about everyone I invited is coming, and after bowling The Little Red Haired Girl is serving her delicious fried chicken and a chocolate trifle.

After that it’ll be back to real life, what with the summer ending and classes starting on Wednesday.

That was the subject line of the email I sent my brother last week letting him know that The Little Red Haired Girl and I have decided to have a wedding. In a way I guess that is how I’m letting you know too. The Little Red Haired Girl and I have decided to have a wedding. I feel reluctant to say that we’re getting married, because we’re not. Legally, we can’t do that. We can’t have that word. In reality, we made our commitment to each other long ago, in many small and large steps along the way. I guess I don’t really want to discuss what “marriage” means here, but the majority of voting Americans have made clear in recent years that whatever we are doing is not it. That’s ok with me. “Marriage”, like Christmas, has been cheapened in this country by that same majority.

What we are doing is, to me, a declaration and celebration of Us. Mrs. Superhero explained it best by highlighting how important it is to be public, and slightly uncomfortable in sharing the intimacy of proclaiming your love of and commitment to your partner. It’s selfish, but will hopefully be fun for our friends and family anyway.

The weird thing about it is that we are planning a sort of a “traditional” wedding. A ceremony with someone officiating, vows exchanged, a reception, that sort of thing. Not religious, but traditional. Not the wedding reclaimed by queers or constructed around our carefully thought out views of what a wedding is really about. I’m not yet sure how I feel about that.

At any rate, we are excited, and planning our little hearts out. We have decided to try and make it happen in the Boston area sometime in the first half of next September. There are a lot of people that I haven’t told yet, who would call me within a few days of their deciding to get married. But at the same time I don’t feel like the news is that I’m getting married. It’s more that we’re having a party. It would be weird if I called everyone I knew the minute I decided to have a birthday party and expected it to be exciting news, right? That might be an excuse for something, but I not sure what.

• This is what 10 pounds of ground chuck looks like.
• Two rolls of toilet paper are enough for 60 people when only 15 of them are drinking heavily and staying until 11pm
• Little kids LOVE a kiddie pool and pigs in a blanket
• People will bring things to your party even when you tell them they don’t have to, and it’s awesome
• Start grilling the chicken early. otherwise by the time they come off the grill everyone has eaten all the burgers and dogs and no one is hungry anymore.
• Make a list of all the stuff you plan to serve and consult it. Otherwise you end up with things like 50 ice cream sandwiches, a whole batch of carmelized onions and sauteed mushrooms, and a bigg ass jar of pickle slices the next day
• When drunk Mrs. Superhero (let’s call her Rockstar Superhero) comes out, she is mad friendly

Mrs. Superhero and I are hosting a cook out for the doc students in our department today. Really the purpose is to welcome the new students and make them feel like they have some allies before classes start. Apparently I worry about things like that. Anyway, the party is at my house, which is fine, because I love to throw parties. Somehow the rsvp list has reached 62 people. Yeah, 62. 13 was just too many when we had Passover Seder this past spring. So yeah, people will have to stay outside, weather be damned.

Anyway, I’m excited for it. Mrs. Superhero and I have been planning for a few weeks now. She had the presence of mind to ask the department for money, which means that the bulk of our groceries were paid for. She is also in charge of name tags and family photos, the latter of which we are going to use for an academic family tree. Right now I should be cleaning the house, but after getting up early to do yardwork before the heat hit I am feeling lazy. And a little overwhelmed. What does a party of 62 people look like? Especially in my little house and yard? Will we have enough food, and beer? Will people mingle?

Parties are weird because I always really want to throw them, but when they are over I can never really remember what happened. I could never really tell you if I had fun, because it always seems like such a whirlwind of doing hostessy things. Maybe I like to throw them because then I don’t have to do awkward small talk as much, I can always run off to the next thing or task. Who knows. This party isn’t for me though, it’s really for the new students. I remember how miserable it was my first year, moving into a new place, not really knowing anyone, having so many doubts and fears about school and research and what I was supposed to be doing. I am just hoping to alleviate that for some of these folks, at least a little bit.

The Little Red Haired Girl is back to work today! I hope she feels well enough to make it through the whole day. She still can’t eat normally and her jaws are quite swollen, but she’s up and about. Hooray!

That’s how many soliders’ lives the life of one gay man is worth, according to The Onion:

‘Gays Too Precious To Risk In Combat,’ Says General

The Little Red Haired Girl had all four wisdom teeth out yesterday early in the morning. The experience was a little strange. They seem to move people through there like cattle. It’s all very efficient, but not very personal. We arrived at 8:20 for the 8:30 appointment. The Little Red Haired Girl filled out some paperwork, and within minutes was called inside. There was a 10 minute briefing about the process, the she was led to another room, stuck with the IV, and strapped down. The next thing she remembered was waking up with three people standing over her. I was in the special “surgical waiting room” where Regis and Kelly were bantering at high volume. Around 9:10 I was paged over the intercom and told to drive around to the patient pickup door. Five minutes later an orderly of some kind followed The Little Red Haired Girl out while she gingerly tottered to the car.

It was a little freaky seeing her like that. There were humorous moments later when she was just doped out and goofy, and also a slightly scary moment at the pharmacy later in the day. Otherwise things have been going as expected. She is eating some mushy things, chewing a little in the front of her mouth. The pain seems manageable and the swelling is not the worst I’ve seen. We’ve pretty much just given ourselves a time out from life, spending our time tending to the care of the holes in her gums and watching movies and reading. I took some time this morning at school with some work and probably will tomorrow too, but mostly I’m just trying to stay here to keep The Little Red Haired Girl company. It’s actually nice to have an excuse to veg out some, although I’m sure The Little Red Haired Girl would give it up in a second in return for feeling normal again. Soon enough, I’m sure.

I’ve been using the heck out of the Nashville Public Library lately. Their website is kinda clunky and they don’t have everything I’d ever want, but they will send stuff to your branch of choice, and they’re trying to use rss. Nice stuff. Anyway, I just picked up Spook Country by William Gibson. It just came out, so I’m the first person ever to check it out of the library. So excited.