welcome to the jungle (a brief introduction)

Nobody really knows when we got engaged. I vividly remember the first time marriage came up between Mr. Astrophe and I, though. We were picking something up from the UPS location on Pittsburgh’s North Side. We lived in the East End and had no car, so some amazing feats of bus gymnastics were required to get from Point A to Point B before the UPS closed, but after we were done with work. At one point, clutching the brown box full of goodies ordered from Amazon.com, we were having a not-particularly-deep conversation about what unknown terrors the future might hold (mugged while switching buses? Alien invasion? Rick Santorum winning the Senate election?) Mr. Astrophe said something along the lines of “I’d marry you, if you wanted…”

There is a substantial amount of gender role inversion going on in our relationship. I drive the car, know about its maintenance, and grill the tasty meat-food. I also catch spiders and release them into the outside world, and take responsibility for humanely killing mice (the cats occasionally catch one but invariably lose interest, leaving the tiny mammals mutilated on the living-room floor). Mr. Astrophe does a lot of the laundry and dish-washing. He also likes pictures of cute kittens more than I do. I am more likely to talk to a lady’s cleavage than Mr. Astrophe is (although this is also due to the fact that Mr. Astrophe is classier than I am in general). This is all I can think of now, but I know there’s more. Perhaps this is why I suffered a brief and intense bout of commitment-phobia, and replied with a heartwarming “Um…”

Luckily, Mr. Astrophe was not so disgusted with me as to immediately give up all hope. So at some point in the spring of 2007, when we were moving into our new place, I asked if maybe the whole marriage thing was still maybe on the table as a discussable option. Turns out it was.

So yeah. No doves in the trees or people getting down on bended knee; we just don’t roll that way. I did have an engagement ring for a while, but it didn’t really work out too well (it had a prong setting, and I couldn’t wear it under my gloves in the lab, and it ended up getting stolen from either the lab bench or the mouse room locker – I’m not really sure of which. That whole episode really was unpleasant.)

Unfortunately, you can’t stay engaged forever. Well, maybe some people can, but not us. At first we were thinking about getting married in fall 2009. But then our friends all started to get married, and we got really jealous, and we didn’t want to be all engaged for like two years, so eventually we decided “Fuck this shit. We’re gonna get married in 2008.” And so we set a date for October 26 (this date was based on which weekend days were still open to rent the county park building that we wanted to use), and we are busily plotting away. It is difficult to plan a wedding and attend graduate school full-time while not neglecting your relationship with your fiancé or your dog (more on this later). Doubly so when you are trying to plan a wedding with approximately 100 guests, most of whom are out-of-towners, with an overall budget of $6000. But we’re doing OK so far, I hope.