Your Lengthening Lists Quizo Update

Since I am of an age where it is commonplace to get married – as evidenced by the fact that I have attended, by my count, 11 weddings in the last three years – I will occasionally be asked when I plan on joining the cult of wedded bliss.

“Well,” I usually reply. “How much time do we have?”

The usual response here is one of confusion and/or surprise, as even my psychiatrist’s question-answer is something of a jarring non sequitur.

I will continue, “because, you see, I have a list of 842 reasons why the answer is ‘never’ and I just wanted to know how many of them we’re going to be able to get through before you have to go home for the night.” There aren’t actually 842 reasons on the list, there are really only 6 or 7, but the number 842 SOUNDS very imposing and effectively conveys the severity of my feelings on the subject.

After spending a long day with two of my recently-married (to each other) friends, though, this weekend saw an unprecedented three – count them, THREE – additions to the list.

Reason #843: the price of wedding rings. I was as aware as anyone else on earth that engagement rings are freakishly expensive. The “two months’ salary” rule is a ridiculous fallacy, of course, but one expects to pay a hefty sum for an engagement ring. That’s just part and parcel of the deal, unless you’re one of the lucky ones like me who should the unlikely need arise plans to either a) hope your mother gives you the family engagement ring, or b) surreptitiously swipe it out of her casket at your mother’s wake after she wanders into a very dark place and is eaten by a grue. But up until Saturday I had never even thought of how much the wedding band costs. I mean, I figured it wasn’t nothing, but when I actually heard the price I would have spat out my milkshake were it not for the fact that I wouldn’t actually have the milkshake until about ten minutes later. Seriously, folks, we are talking about truly outrageous numbers here. I mean, you drop however many thousands of dollars on an engagement ring as a way of saying, “see, I love you so intensely I am willing to forgo so much money that I will subsist on nothing but tap water and Quaker instant oatmeal for the next few months.” Spending the kinds of money we’re talking about on wedding rings is a way of saying, “okay, now we’re BOTH completely broke. I hope you’re fucking happy. Pass the oatmeal.”

Reason #844: “filling the registry.” Given my well-known idiosyncrasies/psychoses about gift-giving in general I have always found the entire idea of the wedding registry a bit unseemly, but on a practical level I understand the need for it. However, much like the hidden/obscene cost of wedding rings, the registry also has a seedy underbelly, and you find yourself wading through it after the wedding when you go to get all the stuff on your registry that no one bothered to get for you. This was the specific part of the day that had been used to sucker me into the whole process since a long time ago, as part of a lifelong litany of things we think but do not say, I once unfortunately uttered aloud the words “I find furniture shopping to be vaguely masturbatory.” Word to the wise: the fact that you get quasi-sexual excitement out of buying a sofa is not something you want your friends knowing, since they can basically make you do whatever they want by saying that they will walk you through the Macy’s furniture department at some point along the way. And so I went along on the registry-filling trip on the strength of the promise that in the course of the filling we would go look at dining room sets (when the time came, in fact, we would not).

Now my love of shopping is well-known. I am a fan. It is one of my few reliable pleasures. Some people self-medicate with alcohol or needlepoint or golf. I am terrible at golf, lack the manual dexterity for needlepoint and suffice it to say tried the alcohol thing with fairly disastrous results, so now I find myself in a position where the one thing that is guaranteed to always lift my spirits is spending money in a retail setting (which frankly creates its own problems, just less so than Absolut). But registry-filling is to shopping what, ironically enough, weddings are to parties. It takes the basic idea and sucks all the fun and spontaneity out of it by having too many rules and regulations and shit you HAVE to do, as opposed to true shopping (and a good party) which is about unbridled self-gratification. Registry-filling is not shopping. It is the evil twin of shopping. It is the bastard nine-fingered half-brother of shopping. If you don’t think so, try sitting in a Macy’s at 9:30 on a Saturday night trying to track down a specific duvet cover while wondering if the nice bridal registry lady’s pen would go all the way into your brain or if it would just get stuck in the middle of your eyeball somewhere.

Reason #845: getting married turns you into a woman. And I don’t mean in that interesting, get to meet Jodie Foster sort of way. In the midst of all this quasi-shopping we split up to cover more ground and my friend and I, lets call him… say… “Nick of Oprah’s Book Club,” were searching for several (again very specific) towels. We’re looking around searching for “chocolate” and “midnight” towels, the words “brown” and “blue” being I suppose too blasé for Macy’s, when we come upon a display of towels that, to my trained eye are about 98% as good as the ones they’re looking for but cost half as much. Trust me, when you shower three times a day towels become quite a sub-specialty.

“Are you totally 100% set on the other set of colors?” I ask. If there is anything less important in the entirety of God’s creation than what COLOR your towels are I could not, and still cannot, think of what it could possibly be.

“I dunno,” Nick says. He puts his hands up on two stacks of folded towels that are just about at eye level. “I really like these white ones, but the sea green is such a nice shade too. Hmm.”

I stare at him.

“What?” he asks.

“So,” I say, “were you just never going to tell me about that vagina of yours, or what?”

While Nick was gamely laughing at himself I noted aloud, “of course, Reg is nowhere to be found and I’m helping fill YOUR wedding registry, so I don’t think I like what that makes me.”

We’re almost out of time, so let me just add that in addition to undergoing sexual reassignment in the last month, Nick and Oprah’s will be going for their third win in a row tonight, so let’s all show up and try to put the brakes on that.

Also - oh look.

Someone put a clock on my desk.

Perhaps I will manage it.

That would certainly be something we’ve never seen before.

JLK