Oh, Man-- Not Another One...

I'll be honest, some mornings, I'm just plain out of gas.

I got nothin'.

Those of you who blog (wait-- that's, like, all of you, isn't it?) know what I'm talking about. If you blog every day, chances are, one day or another, you're going to sit at your computer and stare at the monitor and go, "Shit. That's what I've got. Shit."

Bloggerblock. Sounds like a game you can download for your cellphone for $7.00.

When I get bloggerblocked, I tend to turn to newspapers for inspiration. Since I live in the 21st century, I don't actually get the newspaper, so I go to www.nytimes.com because I like to pretend that I'm highbrow, and oftentimes there will be a headline that will pique my interest enough to read a paragraph or two. Today there was a piece in the Automotive section about how, to prevent pedestrian injuries, hybrid vehicles may be fitted with "fake vroom vroom engine noises" so blind people and regular assholes who just aren't paying attention or are listening to their iPods won't get creamed by the next Prius or Insight that comes careening around the block at 60mph-- like hybrid motorists drive like that anyway.

And I thought to myself-- yeah, I could write a blog post about that.

But I didn't feel like it.

That's what writing for no boss and no deadline and no money gets you. Writers who "don't feel like it." What would happen if Andy Rooney just "didn't feel like" doing his 3 minute schtick every Sunday night? Oh, right-- they'd just air one of 7,000 re-run clips. I don't think anybody would notice. I don't think Andy would notice.

If nothing moves me sufficiently in the realm of the New York Times, I will turn my attention to the lesser, local offerings of the Philadelphia Inquirer and, if I'm really wandering the acrid desert, the Philadelphia Daily News. Well, the old DN came to my rescue, and speedily today, for I have struck gold with the following headline:

"Another Hunter Finds a Body in N.J. Woods"

When I read this headline, I read it in kind of a world-weary, exasperated way, as if to say, "Another Hunter Finds a Body in N.J. Woods." I mean, from the tone of the headline, the simple use of that word, "Another" leads one to believe that you can't even go for an hour's hike in New Jersey without stumbling over some human skulls or finding the Brower kid.

I have to say I was very disappointed when I read this article and found that, in the past year, only two hunters have come across bodies in New Jersey's wooded areas. From the tone of the headline, I would have thought this was happening every week. Or more.

I mean, I don't know-- I've never gone hiking in New Jersey, and I've never gone hunting anywhere, but now I'm kind of creeped out about what's lurking in New Jersey's woods. I know Jersey is "Sopranos" land, but they just whack people in the middle of the street and in Italian restaurants and leave them there-- badabing! Two to the head, you're fuckin' dead. They don't take the trouble of dragging the corpses of these poor bastards into the woods for hunters to find.

Who does?

Well, according to this article, in December of last year, some stupid little whore paid her boyfriend to have him kill her father, "because he was mean to her." Honest to God, that's a direct quote from the Daily News article. They tried to economize Daddy's body with a chainsaw, but they abandoned the idea, probably because it was too much work, and they ended up dumping his body "in the woods on opening day of shotgun season for white-tailed deer."

I mean-- who knew, right? God, when you're a murderer, you've got to think of everything!

My mother likes to say that, "everything happens for a reason." I think that, if you're a white female and you've reached the age of sixty, you are required by law to adopt this way of thinking. I think, if she's reading the paper this morning, she would read this article and say just that-- that these idiots dumped that body in the woods on the first day of shoot-em-up season so they could get caught, that this crime happened because this woman and this dude needed to be in jail, removed from society. I think she would also say that these hunters were meant to find these bodies, for whatever reason. She might even go so far as to say that, when you go into the woods to do violence, eventually, you're going to stumble upon violence.

She'd definitely say that about hunters who get iced by other hunters who mistook them for prey.

I probably would, too, if I thought that everything in life happened for a reason.

Without the Kiss

Yesterday morning, my wife and I were in a doctor's waiting room, watching "Good Morning, America." Dr. Sanjay Gupta, America's favorite Model-Minority Physician, was discussing the virtues of "compression-only CPR," and how it was carefully developed and greatly increases the chance of saving lives.

"Bullshit," I murmered in my wife's ear. "It increases the chances that people will actually perform CPR on some dirty hobo who collapses in front of them on the street, if they don't have to actually put their mouths on the stinking bastard."

That afternoon, after my wife went to work, I got a text message from her. It's very long, because we just got an unlimited texting plan, and she just got a brand-new phone with a QWERTY keyboard:

"You're right about comp. only CPR: they
developed it to increase the likelihood
someone will actually do it. Dr. Sanjay
Gupta admitted it on NPR. Love you!"

See? Sometimes there is even truth in my cold, cruel, cynical view on the world. Welcome to The Kiss of Life, without the Kiss.

Of course, I don't mind that they've developed a handy-dandy new way to do CPR, namely, with your handies, that's fine-- but I do have a problem with their couching it as a "better" or "more efficient" or "more lifesaving" way to do CPR. It isn't. One of the first things they taught us back in EMT school was that CPR has a less-than-2% success rate. 20 compressions to 2 breaths, 50 compressions to 2 breaths, 100 compressions to 2 breaths. 10 to 1. 12 to 2. Whatever-- it doesn't matter-- the guy's dead by the time you've started, and chances are he's going to stay dead.

And all you'll get is very fucking tired.

My CPR certification expires in two months. My EMT certification expires on October 1st, 2011. I suppose, soon, I'll have to start making decisions about whether or not I want to renew both, or just the CPR, or neither. I haven't tended to a patient in an ambulance or driven one since February of 2007. Yet, when my EMT certification was due to expire in 2008, I renewed it for three more years, taking a bunch of ridiculous online courses and practice quizzes. I know that, if I decide to renew my CPR certification, that they will have changed the procedures. They change them every two years which, coincidentally, is how often you're required to get re-certified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Funny, that.

I have no doubt that, with the American Heart Association and the American Red Cross's PR blitz about compression-only CPR, they'll be pushing that hard during the 2009-2010 re-certs. And that's fine. I can remember getting certified in CPR for the first time in 2004 or 2005, I forget which. The instructor, a 6'3" red-faced, big-nosed, no-nonsense paramedic, said,

"Look, if you come up on some disgusting scumbag with a stoma spewing yellow shit all over the place, you're not going to put your fucking mouth on that, right? You're gonna do compression-only, because you'd be outta yer goddamn mind to kiss that foaming neck-pussy."

In my seventeen month career on the streets of Philadelphia, I never kissed any foaming neck-pussies, and I never performed CPR on anybody. Neither had my partner, who was a paramedic with many more years on the street than me. I found that out one day, when it was quiet in the ambulance, I turned to him and asked him if he ever had.

"No," he said, before very a-typically launching into a monologue, "but there was one time where I was real close. I had this patient, typical cardiac old lady, in the back of the truck and she was going to the hospital for chest pain, but she was talking to me, nothing weird going on on the moniter, and then she just looked at me, and I knew something was going to go wrong. Then, all of a sudden, she went stiff as a board on the stretcher and the cardiac monitor flat-lined, and I was like, oh, fuck, you know? Here we go. So I checked her pulse, nothing, then I straddled her, you know, I was down on my knees with one leg over top of her, I rolled up my fuckin' sleeves and, I swear to God, I was about to push down on her when her eyes popped open and she was fuckin' staring at me, on top of her with my sleeves up. And she goes, 'Is everything okay?' And I stared at her for a minute and I was like, 'Uh.. I think so. Is it?'"

Sometimes, during a particularly long transport, I would silently pray that my patient wouldn't code on me. I guess, I would have known what to do if it happened, but I was always panicked by the logistics of different things you had to do. Were you supposed to radio dispatch to report the code? Would they notify the ER for you? Were you supposed to call the ER? If you were on a Basic Life Support ambulance, staffed with two EMTs, were you supposed to call for an Advanced Life Support ambulance to meet up with you to provide higher intervention? I was never certain how many liters of oxygen you were supposed to give a patient through the bag-valve mask once compressions were begun. If you're on an Advanced Life Support ambulance, and you, the EMT, are in back with the patient who codes, should the paramedic driving pull over and jump in the back since he has the higher training and the goodie bag full of drugs? I just didn't know. And I had even read the employee handbook, cover-to-cover, confident that I was the only employee of our company ever so to do.

Early on in my career, I had a conversation with an elderly, black EMT nicknamed Strollin' Roland, for the lackadaisical manner in which he lumbered to and from his daily activities-- like a moose through Jell-o. He had a slow, melodic way of talking, and he spoke as if he were constantly on the verge of falling asleep midsentence.

"Have I evah been scared in this bizness? Yes, ah have... Have I evah had patients die on me? Yes, ah have... You get used to all that shit."

I got used to a lot of shit in that job-- incompetent supervisors, manic dispatchers, psychopathic partners, rude nurses, malingering patients-- but I don't know that patients dying under my care is something I could have gotten used to. I guess, of course, we'll never really know. Unless I do decide to renew that cert in 2011 and suit up in blue for one more round.

I'm thankful, though, that I got out of EMS before I ever had to do CPR on a patient, before having a patient die on my watch. I feel lucky, like the cop who retires with 25 years under his belt and never had to fire his gun. Maybe going back would be like tempting fate. Maybe the first call of the new chapter of my EMS career would be an unresponsive male or female or, God forbid, child. That is how God works, isn't it? That would show me I should have just let that cert go the way of an autumn leaf.

Then again, maybe it's just a rite-of-passage that I never got to experience, unlike all the rites I did go through: slamming an ambulance into our station's garage door frame on the first day at our new base, being part of a six-man crew called to lift and transport a 680 lb. patient, getting AIDS blood and pee on my uniform, having a nurse slip me her phone number, almost being killed by my partner with a clipboard, getting stranded in a broken-down truck in the middle of summer, having a 92-year-old nun scream "Heil, Hitler!" at me, complete with gestapo salute. But maybe, just maybe, you have to give CPR to a patient in order to be a lifer.

Me? I just left one cold day in February.

And, when I did, I bade my partner of a year-and-a-half a warm farewell before he unceremoniously patted me on the back, declared, "It's been a lot of fun, man," and walked to his car. I shook my supervisor's hand, and the hand of another paramedic who was in the office, and I walked to my car. And, in the parking lot, I stopped. I turned around, and walked back into the base. My supervisor was still having a conversation with the other paramedic. When they saw me, they stopped talking and they looked at me. I looked at them. Then, I grabbed my uniform shirt and pulled it way, way up, exposing my stomach and my nipples. I jumped up and down and screamed in a high-pitched voice, bugging my eyes out. I showed my supervisor my nipples, and then I turned to the other paramedic and showed him, too and, as they collapsed on the desk in front of them in hysterics, I ran out of the office, slamming the door behind me as I jumped into my car and skeedaddled out of the parking lot.

Well. No one ever said I didn't know how to make an exit.

And who knows? Maybe I'll return, and maybe I won't. One thing's for sure, though: whether I go back on the ambulance or not, I won't be putting my mouth on that foaming neck-pussy.

An Open Letter to NBC

Dear Peacockheads,

Thank you, NBC, for my great Tuesday face-fuck of the day. At least we've gotten it out of the way nice and early.

Thanks so much for canceling "SouthLAnd," easily the best police drama since "Homicide: Life on the Street."

Thanks, also, for ordering new episodes, promising a season premiere on October 23rd, and then canceling the whole fucking thing on October 12th. Ham-handed, bullshit decisions like this really let your integrity and commitment to excellent programming really shine through.

Now, the most exciting thing on NBC is the occasional glimpse of Erin Burnett's neckline when she fills in on "The Today Show."

And to think that the 10:00pm timeslot "SouthLAnd" originally held was given away to Jay Leno, well, that just makes me want to add some vomit to my cry. Wait till it comes out that that pepper-headed chin-wagger anal-whammed all his interns-- then you're going to wish you'd never given him "SouthLAnd's" coveted 10:00pm timeslot.

Apparently, according to you wise sages, "SouthLAnd" was too "dark" or "serious" or "stark" or "gritty" to go on at 9:00pm, as if "Law & Order" (and its seven thousand incarnations) hasn't been scaring the bejesus out of turtle-necked, bowl-cut losers in the midwest for decades. Of course, what you mean is that it's too sophisticated for 9:00pm, but really it's too sophisticated for NBC. This is unfortunate, and it probably means that cable television will pick it up and run it, free from the incessant bleepings that make it sound like an episode of "The Steve Wilkos Show." Maybe HBO will want your cast-offs.

When I used to watch episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" as a boy of 9 or 10, I didn't understand the frequent derogatory references to BBC Programme Planners, comparing them to imbeciles or children or penguins. Now, though, I get it. You have to have one too many chromosomes, or one too few, to be in television program planning. Take a successful show, with taut, intelligent writing, shocking plot twists, characters people care about, high intensity situations, solid ratings, and then you move the time-slot, order more episodes, and then cancel it two weeks before the season premiere is supposed to air.

This just in: people who behave like first graders are supposed to eat glue, not sniff it.

Thanks,
Mr. Apron

P.S. Jay Leno did me in the butt. Happy now?

Well, Nuke the Moon and Fuck that Chicken, it's DEAR APRON!

It's a third fewer calories shy of a Ding-Dong,

it's one watercress sandwich short of a WASP country-club lunch,

and it's sure as hell more laughs per column inch than Dear Abby, it's

DEAR APRON

DEAR APRON:

The other day my kids asked me why I'm always so angry. I didn't know how to respond. I'm angry that they think their dad is "wonderful" because he plays with them all day (he's not working), takes them to get fast food (instead of cooking something healthy), and because he's their coach (he is having an emotional affair with one of the parents).

I assign chores to the kids because things never get done when I ask my husband to do them. If I remind them "It's trash day" or "Don't forget to vacuum the living room," my husband steps in and says, "I'll do it for you, Billy/Jane," which makes me the bad guy. I know if I ask for a divorce, the kids will want to live with him.

How do I explain this to them? And what do I tell my friends when they ask what a pretty, fit, successful woman like me is doing with an overweight, unemployed, lazy man like him? He's more personable than I am, but the stress of being the sole breadwinner has taken its toll on me. -- NEEDING ANSWERS, LEVITTOWN, PA.

DEAR NEEDING ANSWERS:

God, you sound like a real dinobitch.

You say you need answers, but I'm not sure I know what the questions are. Is the question, "Why are you such a dinobitch?" I know you want the answer to be, "Because of your husband, girlfriend," but this isn't Oprah, and I'm willing to bet that you were a dinobitch before you met this personable schlubucket.

The thing about dinobitches is, they should be extinct. Have you given any thought to suicide? Maybe you could crucify yourself on the front lawn, since you're the household martyr.

Make sure to have your kids rake the leaves and trim the hedges first.

You really like to blame your husband for your miseries, but the fact is that you married him, I doubt this was an arranged marriage. So, really, you're to blame, not him. I realize that blaming your husband for your unhappiness is just a logical extension of blaming your parents for your unhappiness, which is what, I'm sure, you used to do prior to shacking up with Dale here. That's his name, isn't it? I just got a feeling is all.

And, by the way, you can tell all your inquisitive, pandering friends that you're a "pretty, fit, successful woman married to an overweight, unemployed, lazy man" because that's what the media dictated you should be paired with. Look at Marge Simpson, Lois Griffin, Francine Smith, the skinny bitch who's married to that asshole on "The King of Queens" and all those other fucking awful TV shows where the tight slut with perky tits is married to the miserable fat lump on the couch. Don't doubt media saturation, honey-- don't doubt it for a second.

Oh, and, by the way, did I mention it's trash day?

DEAR APRON:

I am 14 and have just started high school. I have been told I'm beautiful. Most times I feel that way, except for one thing -- I hate my nose! I don't want to sound ungrateful for my looks. I know I'm not the only girl who has a flaw and wants to change it. I just want your opinion.

From the front you can't tell my nose is messed up. But viewed from the side, there's a bump in the middle. It's also sort of crooked and just too big. I'm starting to be self-conscious about it. I don't like people looking at me from the side, but it's hard to prevent.

I have been researching plastic surgery online. At my age, my parents won't let me get a nose job, but I don't want to wait until I'm 18. Some kids have commented about my nose, but mainly I want to do this for me. It would make me feel better about myself. What am I supposed to do? -- SELF-CONSCIOUS IN MINNESOTA

DEAR BIG NOSE:

Honey, I understand where you're coming from. It's not easy being Jewish in Minnesota. Believe me, my wife lived there for a few years, and it wasn't pretty. You'd think that in a place that houses the Mayo Clinic and is saturated with doctors that there'd be plenty of Jews there, but, really, they're all tall, blonde, beautiful people whose children are, frustatingly, above average. And, while I'm sure you get straight A's and give your math tutor handjobs for PSAT tips like every other 14-year-old in Minnesota, I can tell that your schnozz is above average, and not in the good way.

Oy vey!

Want my advice? Get that fucking ski-slope shimmed down. If your stingy, mean, Jew parents won't foot the bill for plastic surgery before your eighteenth birthday, which is just unconscionable (it should have been your Bat Mitzvah gift, sweetiepie), you're just going to have to do it at home yourself. You will need the following:

1 disposable picnic knife, preferably polystyrene but take what you can get
1 bottle of rubbing alcohol (this will serve as sterilization prep & anesthesia.
1 set of your parent's finest bedsheets. This will show them what the fuck is up.
Several buckets.
Several sponges.
2 lobster forks
1 nutcracker (preferably the festive ones dressed up like soldiers with the beards
1 box of Can-Do's
3 rolls of Owens-Corning fiberglass insulation (to muffle screams)
1 Roomba

Good luck, dear! Send pics when you're all done and beautiful.

DEAR APRON:

I am a 22-year-old woman, fairly mature, intelligent and stable. I'm 5-foot-3 and wear a size 5 or 6.

I have this friend, "Tish," who is stunningly gorgeous. She looks like a model, stands about 5-foot-8 and wears a size 1 or 2. She dresses stylishly and has the figure to pull off many outfits that I never could. Tish is also a nice person who has never said anything to put me down. I feel no ill will toward her, just inferior when I'm around her.

I have had super-short hair most of my life, but have been growing it out for the past year to "reinvent" myself. When I saw Tish last week, she had donated her shoulder-length hair to Locks of Love and now sports an ultra-chic haircut that makes her look better than I ever did. I cried for almost an hour after she left.

I know my feelings are stupid and childish. Not only do I feel ugly externally next to Tish, but also internally ugly for being so hung-up on appearance when she hasn't done me any wrong. How can I get rid of these unwanted feelings? -- PALE IN COMPARISON

DEAR PALE:

Oh, Jesus Christ. What is with you people today?

Here's the deal: you can either give yourself surgery in the basement, or there's a cross on the front lawn with your name on it.

Take your pick, love.

Who IS That Guy?

When you've lived in one place your whole life, you stop noticing the people you've seen your whole life. Your neighbors, your pharmacist, your parents-- you don't see them change or age or grow because, really, they're just pieces of landscape.

When you've lived in one place your whole life, one thing you do notice is people who are, well, shall we say, different.

Take the guy on the moped, for example.

Now, in my neighborhood, people are more apt to tool around in Lexus SUV's than on buzzy little motorbikes. That's just how it is in my part of the world. Me? I drive an eight-year-old PT Cruiser with a big dent on the rear passenger-side fender, but that's my problem.

I started seeing the guy on the moped maybe three or four months ago. He looked like something out of a Wes Anderson movie and, as he put-putted towards the intersection where I first saw him, I half expected to hear twanky, sprightly harpischord music playing in the background, or maybe a song from "The Faces."

From what I can tell, he's about thirty years old with slightly bucked teeth. A brown, leather messenger bag is slung across his chest. He wears a bright yellow construction helmet on his head, a white dress shirt, a safety vest in vibrant, high-intensity orange, black dress pants, black dress shoes, and an Amish-style beard that flutters in the breeze as he turns the corner on his tiny little bike, its engine buzzing merrily along. And he's always smiling. It's not a shiteating grin by any means, it's not a giddy, bizarre smile either. It's just a small little smile of self-contentment, maybe Jesuslike is too strong, but its a smile of inner satisfaction, of one who moves effortlessly through a listless and dubious world.

It's quite a sight, let me tell you.

My first thought was that he is a construction worker-- but the dressy slacks, white button-down shirt, and formal shoes kind of serve to debunk that theory. It's possible that he simply wears the bright yellow construction hat as a riding helmet because he prefers it over a traditional motorcycle helmet for some reason, although the construction helmet has no strap that I can see, and, in a crash, it would go flying off his Amish-looking head. But, hey: whoever said that there was logic in style?

As I go about my weekly routine, I've seen him a few times. Never in a shop or at the post office, but always on the street, on his impossibly small motorbike, wearing his uniform, buzzing along the way.

I think maybe he's some kind of superhero.

I admire the confidence with which he displays himself, puttering along the roads of this affluent suburb, indifferent to the confounded stares of the populous at large. He rides as if he hasn't a care in the world, and he probably doesn't.

I tend generally to be not terribly curious about other people. I'm selfish that way. But here's a guy whose story I really want to know. Badly. Who do you think he is?

The Exioma

My father refers to people who puzzle him and the world as "exiomas."

We know the word is "enigmas," but his version if funnier if nothing else. Israelis. Always good for a ha-ha.

I'm an exioma, I suppose. We probably all are, to some extent, though I think some of us are probably guilty of overcomplicating ourselves for the sole purpose of appearing more interesting. And I can understand the motivation for doing that. It's like-- why wear a plain t-shirt when you can wear one with a snappy "Daily Show" quote on it, or a picture of Gandhi, or a Bob Dylan song lyric nobody understands. In the book, "The Killer Angels," Confederate General James Longstreet jokingly says to General George Pickett,

"George, you certainly have a talent for complicating the obvious and trivializing the momentous."

Well, people like to do that, and people do it well.

I think I realized I was an enigma yesterday when someone was discussing the proposed sales tax on Philadelphia cultural events, like tickets to see live theatre. The arts community in Philadelphia is in an absolute uproar over this proposed tax, and Philadelphia theatre companies are claiming that it will rob them of already-dwindling audiences, and will threaten to exterminate an cultured and essential art form that has long been teetering on the perilous edge of exinction.

Theatre people. They're such fucking drama queens, aren't they?

Well, the person who was discussing the proposed tax hike on arts and culture was, I think, expecting me to share in her indignation over such an obvious affront to the arts in Philadelphia, a scene which I am a part of, however marginally. I'm an actor. I am an avid theatregoer. I teach theatre. I'm a playwright, of sorts. Shouldn't I be leading the parade, the protests, shouting rabid slogans into a megaphone with a hypothetical Molotov cocktail in my hand?

Meh.

I turned to my colleague and I said the following:

"You know what? I think everybody needs to quit crying in their fucking beer, okay?"

She looked at me. And blinked. Twice.

"Going to the theatre in America has always been a rich man's game, and it's always going to be that way. Do any of these fucking 'artists' have any idea how to balance Philadelphia's budget? No. Do any of these goddamned fru-frus and morons know that nearly 300 Philadelphia police officers were almost laid off in order to balance the budget? Is that what they want? Would they volunteer to get fucking deputized and patrol the streets of North and West Philly for free to stave off this stupid theatre tax? No. They wouldn't. This city would be brought to its knees, to its knees if we laid off 300 cops. But do they give a fuck about that?! No! They just want to live in their own protected world where accessibility to the arts is the only important thing in the world."

She blinked again.

"Well," she said, "I guess, when you are involved in one aspect of life, that tends to be what you choose to fight for."

Did I mention that this woman is my boss?

"I would have thought," she continued, "that as an actor and as a theatre educator that this issue might be more important to you but, obviously, it's not."

Obviously not.

And why not? I am a theatre educator. I appear onstage and lustily lap up applause that I probably don't deserve. I see plays far more frequently than I see movies. I was a theatre major in college. Shouldn't I care that the city of Philadelphia is taxing arts events, and not sporting events? Well, yeah. And it's unfair to tax one form of entertainment and not the other, but I'm certainly not going to bust out an editorial to the Philadelphia Inquirer about it, and I'm not going to write a letter to some politician's lover (excuse me-- secretary) about it either.

Why? Because I'd rather pay $8.00 more for a ticket to a play in this city than see 300 prematurely retired cops working at local Targets and Shop-Rites as rent-a-badges for $9.00/hr.

It's really that simple.

And, as I was having this conversation (or was it a monologue?) with my boss, I wondered yet again if I am not in the wrong profession. The performing arts are important to me, but they are certainly not where my overt passions lie. If I could find some way to turn the fervor of my beliefs into a tangible job with a steady income, I'd do that. But I don't know how to do that.

A staunch proponent of law-and-order with a theatrical streak. Or is it the other way around?

Exioma indeed.

My Favorite Day

No, it's not Victoria Day (CAN).

Today, October 9th, is my favorite day. It's my wife's birthday.

All day long, I get to think about the woman that I married on October 22, 2006-- the woman with whom I commenced an almost instant online infatuation on February 16, 2003. All there was back then was a screen-name and words. Lots and lots of words. She told me that she had scared off guys before with her garrulous nature-- but with me, it was just another turn-on.

I get to think about my buddy.

Last night, I spent almost three hours meticulously adorning the dining room of the house we bought together in February of this year with streamers. I spelled her name in streamers on our window blinds. Every doorway in the dining room is framed in streamers, as is the wall air-conditioning unit. While I did my little work, I had an old LP, scratchily playing in the background. It is a 1966 D'Oyly Carte Opera Company recording of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Sorcerer. It is an opera all about love and the mixing up of love and losing love and finding love and love potions, and it is most appropriate that it was the musical selection for the night before my wife's birthday because, in February, she and I will appear in The Sorcerer together. I will be the title character-- the mysterious and Machiavellian magician John Wellington Wells, and my wife will be where she likes to be, in the chorus-- a place where she can deftly hide. A place where I never could.

And, as I painstakingly taped red streamers to frame the doorway to the kitchen, as the character Dr. Daly sang about how unmarried and unloved he is,

"Oh, my voice is sad and low
And with timid step I go –
For with load of love o'erladen
I enquire of every maiden,
"Will you wed me, little lady?
Will you share my cottage shady?"
Little lady answers "No! No! No!

Thank you for your kindly proffer –
Good your heart, and full your coffer;
Yet I must decline your offer –
I'm engaged to So-and-so!"
So-and-so! So-and-so!
So-and-so! So-and-so!
"I'm engaged to So-and-so!"

I thanked my lucky stars that I had married So-and-so.

My wife is my buddy, she is my partner, she is my best friend. She embodies all of my hopes and dreams for the future, and within her lies the vast majority of my happiness and my faith in the universe. For, if it aligned so that she and I could meet and fall in love, it can't be as bad as I'm often inclined to think it probably is.

They say that you can't expect your spouse to change for you, but you inevitably change anyway. I've definitely changed since I fell in love with my wife, and it's been for the better. She challenges me to think in different ways, she trusts me with our financial responsibilities, which to this moment rather floors me since I most commonly use calculators as paper-weights. But she trusts me. She trusts me... with money. She trusts me... in the kitchen. She didn't always, though-- at the beginning, when we would bake together, she watched me like a fucking bespectaled hawk. But she's stopped that since, and I've made my mistakes-- mistaking baking soda for baking powder on more than one occasion, resulting in inedible pumpkin bricks. But she's realized that, really, what's the difference if I fuck up a dessert every now and again? What's that worth, when compared to my dignity and autonomy? And, besides, she once made oatmeal cookies and forgot the oatmeal.

I've planned a weekend brimming with activities, and, honestly, some of them might bust. I don't know-- I've never been to any of these places before. It will involve a lot of driving, and I'll be behind the wheel, but I don't care. It's for my buddy. My right hand. My brain. My better half. My best friend. My partner.

Sometimes I look at her and can't really believe that it's all for real. We'll be sitting on the sofa or sitting across from each other at breakfast or in the car on the way to rehearsal and I'll look over at her and I'll just want to start crying. Instead, though, I just say,

"You know what? You're my favorite person. Did you know that?"

"I had a vague idea," she replies, her stock response.

I have to work today, but, as soon as I can, I'm going to get the hell out of here so I can spend the rest of my favorite day with my favorite person.

Good old So-and-so.