Kevin pointed out that I hadn’t yet posted that I am getting married on my blog.
So I am posting it: I am getting married on October 4th, 2008, to Jonathan Scott Taylor, the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.
I love you, JT.
My sister is pregnant! I am being the gay uncle and buying lots of things for Cora (my unborn niece’s proposed name). Thus far I have bought a ridiculous number of bibs (including a bib with the Gerber Baby sporting devil horns on it), a rattle, and a spoon with a plastic plane attached to it (to play airplane with baby food). I bought the plane in blue and told my sister that I wasn’t buying pink crap and shoving gender stereotypes down the kid’s throat. She replied “No pink crap!”
Here’s a pic of us before Molly got preggers.
So my friend Andy Hill and I went to Minako Organic Sushi for dinner the other night. Minako is my favorite restaurant in the world. It’s run by my friends Judy/Minako and her mother, Yoko. Judy, who used to work in the music industry (she will kill me for writing that), runs the floor and Yoko runs the kitchen. I call it the Japanese Laundry. It takes a long time to eat there and the food is exquisite. It’s also on Mission between 17th and 18th, which is essentially crackwhore central, and the street is thick with crazy drug addicts.
As we are wont to do, we closed the restaurant. Yoko came out and poured us some sake and started telling us the most absurd and funny story. She said that a (male) Yakuza came in to the restaurant a while back wearing pink pants and talking on a Hello Kitty cell phone. She said he was very quiet and normal and friendly.
But then he started telling her that he was smuggling cocaine and heroin stuffed inside of a condom stuffed inside of a condom stuffed inside of a condom, apparently because then dogs can’t smell them. She also mentioned he was putting them inside sushi fish or something like that (in which case I imagine the dogs really can’t smell them). But then she said he went outside and a bum panhandled him and he karate-chopped the bum! And she actually said “Hi-ya!” in her adorable Japanese accent. I just about lost it. Granted, I had had a lot of sake at this point, but the mental image of a pink-panted Yakuza karate-chopping a panhandling bum was just a little much for me at the moment.
Plus I have had this picture of the Japanese man with the pink bear gun sitting around on my hard drive for a long time and this was a perfect opportunity to use it.
Sadly, this breakup threw me into severe acute depression, and it’s just now I am feeling a little like myself again.
I had lunch on Monday with Carol Lin, a former CNN and ABC anchor who has the distinction of being the first reporter to break the story of 9/11. (She is also friends with my friend Jason Bellini… Very small world. In one of email exchanges she said “Oh I love Jason! He picked me up in Kosovo and drove me to Macedonia.” How often do you get emails like that?). Her husband passed away from cancer at a young age and now her mother has it. When she found out her husband had cancer she decided that she was going to stop working and become his caregiver. Since his unfortunate passing she has decided that she wants to be a force for change in the world of cancer (and chronic disease in general). She’s a very motivated and passionate individual.
We were meeting over the possibility of me helping her out with a new venture she is trying to create. We got along great. After the technical and business discussions finished we began to get a little personal. At one point she started getting visibly and softly upset and said that in the midst of all of her sadness she one day realized that she just had to wake up every morning and choose happiness. She said it was work but that she had to choose it every morning.
Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a joyful person, that I love to laugh and take pleasure in the little and big wonders of the world. I take joy in joy itself. After my breakup I just felt crushed and horrible. And the day I met with Carol I felt horrible. But I decided that what I was going through was nothing compared to what she went through. I have great friends who care about me, I have a great business that I have built up by myself, I have a great apartment and a great dog and a great family. So what if some misfit kid stole my heart and played emotional and mental soccer with it?
I decided that I was going to wake up yesterday and choose happiness.
And yet the day sort of sucked, but I kept reminding myself to choose happiness. I got close to tears at several points during the day, as I am now. But I woke up again this morning and decided to choose happiness.
I am going to continue to wake up and choose happiness until I don’t have to wake up and consciously think that any more. There is too much in my life that is good.
My friend read me this passage from Amy Tan’s book Saving Fish From Drowning the day after I broke up with him. The astute reader will replace gender-appropriate pronouns where they belong.
I had other men as steady companions, and with each of them I experienced a certain degree of fondness but no heartsickness worth mentioning. Well, plenty of disappointment, of course, and one silly episode of cutting up a negligee bought for a night of passion, an impetuous disregard for money, since the gown was worth far more than the man. But I ask myself now: Was there ever a true great love? Anyone who became the object of my obsession and not simply my affections? I honestly don’t think so. In part, this was my fault. It was my nature, I suppose. I could not let myself become that unmindful. Isn’t that what love is–losing your mind? You don’t care what people think. You don’t see your beloved’s faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don’t mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally–that’s the worst, I think, deficient morals.
I always minded. I was always cautious of what could go wrong, what was already “not ideal.” I paid attention to the divorce rates. I ask you this: What’s the chance of finding a lasting marriage? Twenty percent? Ten? Did I know any woman who escaped having her heart crushed like a recyclable can? Not a one. From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don’t have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.
