right hand or left?

Wedding talk ahead. Be warned.

So the weekend before the weekend of disease, the weekend of pestilence, the weekend of plague -- namely, a few weekends ago -- Tara and I trooped down to Macy's to begin this tedious task of registering. I took Tara because she has both taste and style, things that I lack in abundance; the Guy, who by all rights should have been my escort, demonstrated a indifference to the whole process that bordered on the offensive.

"I don't care," he said, burying himself head-first in the couch. "Just get whatever you want."

Well, you know. That's just rampant provocation.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a "girly girl." At the age of 30 I have successfully managed to navigate through life without ever having learned how to apply make-up, how to set a table, how to accessorize, or how to shop. My few attempts to use my feminine wiles have had mixed results; true, I get what I want, but when the victim of said wiles is laughing so hard he has overcharged his gag reflex, I can't help but feel it might have been more dignified to bypass seduction and make my demands like an honest person. Selecting the domestic niceties that make a house a home-- well. Let's just say I've never been Martha Stewart, jailbird or no, and leave it at that.

Don't get me wrong. There are few things I find more fascinating than good china. After all, it's so, hm, round. And shiny. And anyway, you know, china. What's not to thrill?

Tara brought her 7-month old along, fortunately, and I entertained myself with haphazard babysitting while Tara exercised the sound consumer judgment I obviously lacked. She quizzed the salespeople, asked intelligent questions, inspected different brands, and generally came across as one of the bright lights of Consumer Reports, while I puttered after her with my fingers firmly wedged between her child's budding teeth. Unfortunately, she drew the line at the selecting and the deciding. "Well, what do you like?" she demanded.

I eyed the long, gleaming racks of extremely breakable plates, like fragile tombstones for my adolescence. "Eh," I said. It was my motto for the evening. Eh.

Tara may have taste and style, but she was remarkably uncooperative in bestowing any of it on me. Beyond happily pointing out to me the most egregious violations against aesthetic harmony, grace, or class -- plates featuring dogs playing poker, for instance -- she was perfectly content to trail after me, occasionally removing one item or the other from her daughter's mouth.

Eventually, I came up with a system wherein I wandered down the aisle of You Break You Buys, and anything that bored me after a count of four (a completely arbitrary number, so don't bother wondering) would go into the reject list. Insofar as systems go, this worked better than most I've concocted over the years. At the end of my jaunt down the aisle, I had a list of rejects, and a list of survivors. Unfortunately, I found that I'd rejected all the classy plates and retained instead every single plate on display that was so ugly, it required a second look to verify its existence.

Insofar as methods went, this was obviously not a success. I dithered some more.

In the end, it took four hours for me to make enough choices to build a list; dragged kicking and screaming to the wire, I stabilized enough of an opinion to narrow things down to two different china patterns, and deferred actual decision-making until a later date. "I'll ask the Guy," I told Tara, and ambled out of Macy's as triumphantly indecisive as I was when I'd first drifted in.

This is not atypical of me. In all fairness, the important decisions -- whether to buy a car, whether to move, whether to change careers -- I can make without difficulty, arriving at some divinely-inspired course based on random fluctuations in Pacific Coast cloud patterns. Given a choice between cars, for instance, or new cities to live in, I'll point randomly at one or the other, and then spend the rest of my tenure in car or city being happily convinced I made the right decision.

On the other hand, take me to a video store and demand I pick a movie to rent, and the rest of the evening will be spent in tortuous fluttering, as though the movie I choose to watch that night will, in some indecipherable and unfathomable way, unalterably change the entire direction of my life.

(It is perhaps unnecessary to observe that this drives the Guy mad, on those rare occasions he can unravel himself from his adoration of my every delicate, perfectly-formed toe. Despite having learned better, he still submits himself to erratic vexation by presenting me with choices at the local independent rental store. "This one? This one? How about this one? What do you think?" Every so often he'll actually hand me a DVD, usually some atrocity out of Hong Kong involving guns, anorexic Asians with long hair, and a poorly spell-checked description on the back. "Look at this," he'll say, and wander off to spy on me from behind a rack. I presume he thinks that if I hold onto the DVD, it will be something I want to watch.

"What will you do when you have kids?" the Guy demands. "By the time you decide what they'll wear, they'll be ready for college.")

Even after reducing my choice of china to two different patterns, I still spent a good half-an-hour worrying over them until even Tara, the penultimate shopper, thought it was past time to go. It takes time to make a trivial decision.

The Guy, dragged unwillingly to the same store by a promise of food, inspected the two different patterns. First he looked at one pattern. Then he looked at the other pattern. Then he went back to the first pattern. "That one," he said, pointing. "Let's go eat."

It took him less than a minute. I took offense. My feelings on this matter were not entirely unakin to the woman who, having spent four hours creating a splendid dinner for her family, watches them sit down, finish eating in under three minutes, then charge back to the television to catch Wrestlemania.

"Get back here!" I roared. The china rattled. "Ponder, damn you! Ponder!"

The Guy, looking crushed and more than a little martyred, slunk back to the china, and for the next hour grew increasingly restive as I towed him from display case to display case. He brooded at dinnerware, pinged at glassware, fingered linens, and glared at pots and pans under my ruthless tyranny; only sharp objects -- knives, mostly -- prompted the slightest spark of interest, and I followed him around the silverware displays, doggedly replacing every utensil he fondled. At last, utterly squashed in spirit, he was released into the wilds of Macys while I went to consult with the registry assistant. When I returned to claim him, I found him gaping vacantly at expensive crystal.

I think it was an important bonding experience, personally. He trailed me to the Cheesecake Factory, drooping, and I wrapped my arms around him in the restaurant foyer.

"I love you," I said.

He stared at me skeptically.

I patted him kindly on the head. "Good boy."