the list

New Years Resolutions have turned out to be a failure. No surprise there; I'm incapable of retaining a thought over the course of an entire year. An entire lifetime? Maybe. A year? Doesn't provide breadth or scope for the grandness of my mental mechanisms.

After two years of failure in fulfilling my New Years Resolutions -- in fact, after two years of failing to come up with any New Years Resolutions -- I have decided to indulge in a Life List instead, like the birdwatchers who check off animals they've seen one by one in some massive competitive venture to quantify their success over their colleagues.

This will be, I suspect, an ongoing list; I'll add and subtract from it as I go along. But at least it's a start, and that's something, anyway.

Life List

1. Write a novel from start to finish.
   
2. Publish ... something.
   
3. Skydive.
   
4. Live under a Bushless government.
   
5. Write a family history.
   
6. Learn to read Japanese (fairly) fluently.
   
7. Whitewater raft down the Russian River. Above water.
   
8. Start piano again.
   
9. Run a marathon.
   
10. Do a triathalon.
    
11. Earn a black belt.
    
12. Revisit 125 lbs.
    
13. Get my cholesterol under control.
    
14. Read the 100 Greatest Books of History (listed below)
    

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC). Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays. Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji
Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Iran, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian

tossing & turning

I have a vague memory of the Guy crawling into bed and scolding me over my last entry. "You can't write about real people. I'll get in trouble!"

At least, that's what I think he said. If so, it's a puzzler, because his chief complaint about my journal has always been that he thinks I make stuff up, or at least narrate the happenings of an imaginary world about which he has only a peripheral understanding. And now he wants me to write about fictional people?

Men. And they call women inconsistent.

I am not, shall we say, the most sedate sleeper in the world. I am not one of the people they hire for Sleep Comfort commercials, a slim, attractive woman with that mysterious ability to retain perfect hair and makeup even in sleep, all limbs gathered together in a graceful sine curve on the bed. This Immaculate Conception sleep style is charming, I'll admit. There's something about it that inspires thoughts of serenity, tranquility, and peace. There, you think, are people who get a good night's rest. People who have dreams about fluffy sheep jumping over fluffy fences. People who have only ever had sex twice -- one for each child -- in the orthodox missionary fashion, without ever doing anything so messy as exchange body fluids or engage in actual physical contact.

Me, my sleep style is more along the many-tentacled lines of Cthulhu, Lord of the Damned. What I do isn't so much "sleep" as I do "destroy." My sleep habits involve body parts. Flailing. Squirming. Strange sounds. They require space to expand, miles of blanket, and half a dozen pillows.

One arm must be free to hang out in the cold. One leg must be in contact with fresh air. There must be blanket trapped between my arms and legs.

All of this is done while I'm completely unconscious, of course. My sleeping body has a mind -- and an exuberantly homicidal energy -- of its own. Whatever my physical flailings, I usually wake up oblivious and refreshed, conscious of nothing more than a satisfying night's sleep.

This was fine in the days when bed was my sole property, unspoiled by the encroachments of third parties. In my college days, when I lived in a dorm and slept on the second story of a two-story bed, the only people who incurred injuries from my thrashing were me and the floor. Now that the bed is supposedly communal property however, my nighttime disco is starting to infringe on the health, sanity, and general well-being of the Guy, who has started to wake up earlier and earlier, and come to bed later and later.

This may have something to do with fact that when someone else is in my bed, I cannot sleep unless I am oppressing him. Physically. Two nights ago, as I was slowly drifting off to sleep, I felt a soft, tentative poke on my hip. Then another.

From underneath my shoulder came a piteous little voice. "Why do you have to sleep on my head?"

Even when unconscious, the moment I feel someone else slide into the bed, I promptly roll over and squash as much of the other body as I can. Or so I am told by one who is in a position to know. It is true that from time to time I have roused myself out of a sound sleep because of the sharp smacking sound of my arm colliding with the Guy's face. Or throat. Or chest. And let's not go into where I wake to find I've lodged my feet.

This sort of expansionist sleeping style is a product of my youth, I suppose. My personality back then was far less mellow than it is now; I was prone to outbursts of emotion, temper, and an irritating itch -- now identified as a genetically transmitted Japanese predisposition -- to conquer and possess neighboring real estate.

My sister complained more about the snoring. I suspect this is why she is now a lumberjack; the buzzing of the saw is a trip down nostalgia lane.

Last night, drifting off to sleep after Return of the King at the movie theater -- good show, by the way -- the Guy started to twitch and wriggle in place. Since the lower half of my body was sprawled out comfortably over the entirety of his, this failed to escape my notice.

"What are you doing?" I demanded crossly.

"Settling. I settle. I always do this."

"You don't."

"I do. I knead my way into the bed. Like a cat."

"You never did it before."

"I did," he said. "I always did. Except I couldn't because you were suppressing me."

I punched him and dozed off. There's no room for other people to express their individuality in my bed.

We're headed for Seattle on Monday, which means today is probably the last day I have to wish you all a happy religious or professional holiday of your choice. I'm not picky.

Enjoy the vacation, and I'll see you all when I get back. With Mom.

God help me.

depression

I don't get depressed very often; not, that is, since I moved away from Seattle and Rochester, both places where depression wasn't so much a state of mind as it was a state of environment, a fillet of lunch meat sandwiched in between the mayonnaise of Seasonal Affective Disorder and the mustard of Precipitation Induced Suicidality.

In the Bay Area -- or at least, those parts of the bay area that aren't named San Francisco -- winter comes to find the sun still clocking his regular hours. The sky is still clear and blue. The trees change color, true, but this of a Prada-esque nod to fall fashion colors rather than the morbid, "just to make sure I fit in my coffin" dessication displayed by New York trees. (In Seattle there was little color change at all. Evergreens, like social conservatives, are aggressively certain that they are outside the evolution of changing times.)

There is, in other words, no excuse for Seasonal Affective Disorder. And yet, there I am, wallowing in the mud pit of negativity. All last week I slogged about in alternating states of depression and rage, trailing doom and gloom behind me like a Democrat hearing of Ralph Nader's candidacy in 2004. On Friday I came within a hair's breadth of going postal on one of the Purple Monkey Princes. I controlled myself, true, but I ended up cleaning out my office to appease my feelings.

I managed not to quit, mostly by thinking about wedding-related bills. However, I am looking for a new job, in case anybody's interested in a Purple Monkey keeper.

The Guy dragged me out to dinner last Tuesday, a reaction to the depressed phone message I left on his machine at work and the increasingly apathetic approach I had been taking lately to cooking. Our destination was Max's Opera Cafe, which in other locations actually presents opera with the meal. In our local opera cafe, the diva-ish promise of the name is fulfilled by operatic quantities of food. We were talking about possible books I could give my ex-roommate at our next book club meeting when we got out of the car. Our book club celebrates key events in our members' lives -- babies, weddings -- with a book-club-ish "shower" during which we present gifts of, you guessed it, Books.

"I was thinking the Kama Sutra," I said as we plodded through puddles. It does rain from time to time, even in Silicon Valley.

"It'd be wasted on her," the Guy opined. "She's too good looking. Maybe her fiance could use it, though." He opened the door for me. There was a small gathering waiting for tables just inside the lobby. We herded ourselves inside with them.

"Too good-looking? What the hell does that mean, 'too good-looking'?"

"I've just noticed that people who are really good-looking don't bother to try hard with sex. -- Two, please," he added when the hostess inquired. We followed her into the dining room while he continued to expound The Guy's Theory of Sexual Relations. "It's like they think they've already gone to the trouble to show up, so you should do all the work since you have more to make up for in looks."

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

"It's true, though."

We reached our seats. The hostess handed us menus and left, struggling hard not to giggle.

"It's still stupid," I said self-righteously, then glanced over the top of my menu to find that the Guy's shoe had unexpectedly joined us at the table. He was waving it at me.

I got my ex-roommate The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook to Parenting instead. It's never too early to heap on the pressure.

My sister is finally back from South America. She is thin, she is trim, she is gloriously tan, and she is terrifically cheerful. She is also sporting newly fixed teeth, which she modeled for me in the bathroom mirror.

"Eee ack 'ere?" she yawned, shoveling a fingertip into her mouth to beat a staccato on her molars. "Aaah 'icksd."

Which proves, if nothing else, that my sister always lands on her feet, even when it's in a dentist's chair in El Salvador.

She came down on Sunday night with her boyfriend for dinner and a place to crash for one night. We welcomed her as we usually do, with a frantically cleaned apartment and better food than we normally bother with ourselves: pepper steaks and garlic fries. The apartment cleaning is so she'll be fooled into thinking we're organized, sanitary people. The posh dinner -- they were good fries, dammit -- is so she'll think we're living well. In a sense, I think we're trying to convince her that we, as normal people, are living a life she would do well to emulate.

So far it hasn't worked very well. She tells me that after joining us for a week in Seattle, she'll be spending the next month ice-climbing in Montana, before flying to Spain to hang out with one of her best friends for a while.

"Want to come?"

Yes. Oh, yes. Please.

So, yes. I'm a little depressed. However, I'm headed up to Seattle for a week come Monday, so hopefully I'll feel better by then. Because if there's anything worse than depression, it's being depressed when my mother is within earshot.

Because my mother is captain of the Gratitude Police.

"You are no gratitude for good things in your life. You are so ungratitude children. Asa na yuu na, kotogoto issai tettei shite sushin ni kansha sen. Be absolutely grateful to almighty God in every way for all things morning to night. It says so, in prayer book. You should being more grateful, you have young, and I am so old, I am almost dead, but I am gratitude. Why do you not gratitude you are young and I am almost dead?"

Good question. I feel better already.

hump that toad

This is the postcard that my sister sent me. Yes, two toads humping. The top toad looks very happy, insofar as toads can ever be said to look happy. I think that might be a smile on the top toad's face, but you shouldn't go by anything I say on the subject since I'm certainly not an expert. On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet that that look on the bottom toad's face is indicative of some mental train that involves the laundry and possibly the level of gas in the car . . . and what's going on up there? Is it suddenly raining men?

Psychoanalysis on an amphibian. Lo, how far we have fallen.

You will be pleased to know that my sister has not been murdered, kidnapped, thrown in prison, or deported. The lack of emails in recent days, matched by alarming reports on serial rape/torture/murder cases in Guatemala -– some 700 women since 2001 -- has given me a qualm or two. However, I managed to get in touch with her this Saturday, so all is well, relatively speaking.

Mom called a few hours later, and after enraging me on the subject of my wedding, started speculating on what was going on in my sister’s mind. I was still frothing over her earlier remarks on the wedding-related front, but prudence kicked in right before I snapped, “Nothing, but then, she takes after your side of the family.” I cut the conversation short and hung up, instead. Talking to my Mom on the telephone is growing increasingly difficult. It’s like being nibbled to death by the tiny Ducks of Reproach. Eventually, even an insane person will snap.

I was informed the other day that the CDC's guess on this year's flu strain was wrong -- or, if not "wrong," at least "incorrect," which I'm told is not quite the same thing as wrong. I dunno. I suppose government health organizations work off a different thesaurus than us normal folks.

Or do I mean "dictionary?" I should look for mine.

At any rate, all this means is that I'll be less susceptible to the flu going around, or at the very least suffer it one day less than I otherwise might have. Good for me and my latex-wearing, chicken-and-the-egg flu shot nurse. Especially since the Guy is sick, and I am flaunting my wellness before him like an empty Honeypot at a state fair.

It's unusual for me to be well, just as it's unusual for him to be sick. Nature appears to have taken a sharp left and hurtled the wrong way down a one-way road. On the upside, this is symptomatic of my relatively recent triumph over diabetes. In my last lab test, my HbA1C -- also known as an A1C -- came out at a solid 7.0. An A1C is a blood test that measures your level of diabetes control over the last 90 to 120 days. A person without diabetes should be between 4.2 and 6.0.

---no you don't. Get back here. Sit down. You should know this. Everybody should know this shit. Stop whining. This is educational.

As I was saying, a normal person -- that is to say, one of you freaks without diabetes -- will range between a 4.2 and a 6.0. A diabetic who is out of control will be above a 7.0. When I was first diagnosed, I was around the 8.7 mark. The A1C test is something that diabetics should probably be having every quarter, if they are newly diagnosed and don't yet have their blood sugars under control. Once the diabetes is under control, you can drop to twice a year. Of course, a lot of this is up to your personal physician and your HMO's health maintenance guidelines.

That wasn't so bad, was it? And anyway, the point of this was to tell you that my diabetes is under control. Having a high blood sugar makes a body susceptible to infections and stray illnesses. My blood sugar is fairly level now, so I don't get sick quite as often. The Guy is squished by the right hand of plague, and I'm not. In our household, this is like turning on the TV one day to hear Dubya making sense. It simply doesn't happen.

The flu has been a delight for news stations, who have been sorely tried lately by a dearth of fear-inducing bylines: "Tonight! Terrorists are coming for you, your children, and your little dog too! What you can do to stop them before they hunt you down." Tonight, Tivo picked up a preview for the evening's news broadcast. "Tonight: the neighborhoods where the epidemic is worst. Find out if you live in a high danger zone." Yes. Find out. Hide your children.

Unfortunately, this year for a change I actually want to have the flu. By all means, make me sick. Let me stay home. While it has avoided me like the . . . like I was my teflon-coated mother, the flu has done a number on the little purple monkeys. One by one they've tumbled off the Island of the Purple Monkeys into the deep blue ocean, where they paddle about on little purple foam kickboards of disease. In fact, of all the people in the office, it's possible that I'm the only one left who isn't in the process of, experiencing, or recovering from this vicious spray of sputum.

Screw that. I'd rather be making friends with Mr. Toilet, because this week the Island of the Purple Monkeys has been truly ingenious with its application of tortures; new Purple Monkey Princes have been adopted into the royal Purple Monkey household, and have come to the Island for a state visit.

I must make clear that I do not care for Purple Monkey Princes. Still less do I care for the reminder that they are out there, physiologically capable of breeding baby purple monkeys. I've noticed that lately I've had some rather significant rage issues. Quite a few rage issues. Unrepressed rage issues, to be exact. In meetings and hurridly snatched lunch minutes at my desk, I engage in fantasies of murdering certain people at work.

Okay, yes, I have fantasies of bludgeoning purple monkeys to death with giant foam bananas. It relaxes me. Might be time for a mental health day.

If you've been here before, you've probably noticed that I've gone and redesigned my web page a little bit. This was, yeah, one of those tasks that was hanging out near the very bottom of my To Do list. I’ve only been thinking about for the last four months or so. Procrastination, thou art my bitch.

It's best viewed in 1024x768, and I only say that because my screens are all 1024x768 and I can't seem to get them to change to any other setting. Not convincingly, anyway. I mean, I know how. I can get into the computer display settings and reset them to 800x600, or 1280x1024 or, if I feel really wild and crazy, 1600x1200. Unfortunately, my computer appears to have a rather conservative attitude towards screen displays, and tends to do all in its power to dissuade me from perilous moral precipice of resizing. The screen pixelates. The windows shrink. The desktop expands and requires scrolling to see in its entirety. The computer appears to fear for my emotional stamina. Screen displays today might be the immoral gateway to penis enlargers tomorrow. Where will it end?

Let's find out. Someone hand me a banana.

201 and a bucket of thongs

It turns out that the last entry I did was the 200th entry in the faulty vision incarnation of my journal.

Imagine that.

I've started keeping track of things I want to write about in a little moleskine book that I keep in my purse. Moleskine is the brand, not the literal description of the notebook, mind, though I'm not positive that it might not have been a bluntly honest name at one point during the company's history. There's something to be said for a company that puts its facts right out there in its consumer's face. Who among us haven't wished that Jell-o would bite the bullet and call itself "Rendered Pig Hoof Artificially Flavored Goop," or that Mattel would rename Barbie, "Plastic Ball-Crusher?"

Whatever the Moleskine's possibly disreputable past, my point is that now that I have my thoughts more-or-less organized, I'll be able to write about the things I mean to write about. This will be a giant leap forward from the past, when I mostly just wrote about the stuff I'd managed not to forget.

Maturity's just around the corner. Any day now.

...except no, it isn't, because the first item on my checklist of things to write about is "Thong Underwear," and there's nothing dignified about that subject.

In order to get to that topic however, I have to go back a little bit further, to the subject of wedding dresses, something that has only briefly reared its ugly head on this site.

Be warned. Wedding-related talk ahead. Duck and cover.

The wedding dress topic came up almost immediately after I announced my engagement, unfortunately while I was still in the initial stages of hysteria and panic that so endeared me to my fiance. It was Tara who first broached the subject, and with her usual tact it should have gone far better than it did.

Tara: "So have you thought about wedding dresses yet?"

Me: silence.

Tara: "Yuhri?"

Me: silence.

Tara: "I can't hear you breathing, Yuhri. Are you there?"

Me: "I have to wear a dress?"

Tara: "In and out. In and out. Come on. Breathe, girl."

Me: "They make dresses just for weddings?"

So no, wedding dresses weren't something I was prepared to handle. In fact, I was unprepared to handle anything wedding-related at all. It took two days on the phone for Tara to coax me into visiting a bridal shop; when I finally took the plunge, I did it with the reckless abandon of someone -- someone like my sister -- finally leaping into that long-postponed root canal by doing it on the spot in a foreign country with a foreign dentist who might or might not be familiar with the concept of anaesthetic.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this whole bridal dress shopping process, it basically consists of you, an appointment, a "specialist," (notice the resemblance to a root canal?) and a boutique. It is a boutique because it is always a boutique, unless it is a warehouse, in which case there is no appointment or specialist; it's just you and the mob, in means the procedure looks less like a root canal and more like the frenzy when Doctors Without Borders shows up in your sixty-person village with only one bottle of Imodium AD in the middle of the worst diarrhea season since 1867.

The appointment is so that the specialist knows you are coming and can help you decide on a style, help you try on dresses, and determine the inevitable and expensive tailoring that will need to be done so you'll look like an actual bride and not an obese, unmarketably ethnic Barbie doll wearing Raggedy Ann's pre-One-Night-Stand-with-Raggedy Andy wedding clothes. Tailoring for a wedding dress is not an easy business; it apparently takes an average of four to six months, and requires a fitting both before and after, although the "after" is more to offer the bride an opportunity to buy a completely different dress if the tailoring turned out wrong.

As I say, a specialist is assigned to you, which is why you need an appointment, because tailoring is not an easy thing to figure out and you need a specialist to help make these measurements and make these decisions. If, that is, the specialist can tear herself away from the slightly hysterical bride whose appointment was before yours, that bride who is now six months more pregnant than she was when she first tried on the perfect dress and had all the tailoring done.

The specialist was running a little late. This wasn't a problem. Tara and me, we played with Tara's baby. It is likely we -- Tara, me, and the baby -- were the most mellow people there. We waited an hour. The baby enjoyed herself tremendously.

When the specialist finally got around to us, she was frazzled, exhausted, and slightly shell-shocked though still, the consummate saleswoman that she was, ever so charming. We went through the expected routine. Sorry for the delay. Oh, we don't mind. What an adorable baby. Isn't she, though? Really very sorry, the last person was having some issues. Yes, we heard. So, when's the wedding date?

No idea.

Do you have any idea what sort of wedding you'd like to have?

Eh.

Do you have any idea what kind of wedding dress you'd like?

Eh.

"She wants to wear jeans," Tara said with some exasperation. The baby cooed. She was on my side.

The specialist blinked a little. "So you don't really have any plans in mind? You don't have any particular preferences?"

"I have a groom," I said helpfully.

In retrospect, it's possible that we were the most mellow, easy-going people to walk into that shop the entire week. It hadn't occurred to me before, but brides and their families can be a little nervous. Uptight. Demanding. Psychotic. My issues had more to do with denial, which doesn't prevent a body from standing about amiably while people hurl dresses over their heads.

Given this possibly retarded new client to deal with, the specialist went puttering about the racks and came back with a variety of styles for me to try out. "There's a corset and an underskirt there, too," she called over the door while I tried to wrestle myself into the first dress. "Tell me if you need anything." I could hear the pregnant bride having some sort of argument with someone outside.

It took me a good ten minutes to maneuver myself into the first outfit. Wedding dresses, it turns out, are almost always sized a little larger than normal clothing. If you're wondering what that means, basically the issue is that the standard model for a bride is a seven-foot tall running back with shoulders that could span the Brooklyn river.

I gallumphed out of the dressing room. There was no walking. I picked up the bottom half of my dress, enough white satin to repave San Francisco, and did a penguin waddle out the door. Sideways.

The process of trying on the dresses wasn't very interesting. On the other hand, watching the other brides was. The pregnant bride finally left -- (All brides wear white, did you know that? Even the pregnant ones. Purity is a state of mind) -- only to be replaced by another, equally emotional woman in her late fifties who was clinging with both fists to her late teens. At one point, I kangaroo-hopped out of my dressing room to find the women of an impressively fruitful Latino family, gathered around a bride whose dress was . . . just imagine a lace factory had imploded on a mannequin dipped in marshmallow creme, and you'll pretty much get the idea.

By the third dress, a headache that had been a vague mumble in the back of my skull had matured to a full-grown Democratic primary, complete with fist-poundings and recriminations. I suffered a few more dresses and then made my escape with Tara and baby, having established a few things to my satisfaction.

1. I will never be the uptight bride.
2. Any dress designed with fairies in mind is not meant to be worn in public.
3. Women are psychotic.

Jump ahead several months to November.

Industrious Tara, who hosted a twelve-person Thanksgiving dinner party last Thursday (fourteen people if you count the babies) called me the day after Thanksgiving to ask if I wanted to go shopping for a wedding dress.

Another tangent here: Tara is, in case I haven't mentioned it yet, one of my bridesmaids. It's possible that there's some entry in an etiquette book about how one is supposed to go about asking a friend to be a bridesmaid. With me, it happened because the people at David's Bridal made me fill out a questionnaire. Question number whatsit was about bridesmaids.

Me: "Bridesmaids?"

Tara: "It is traditional. You know. What you were for my wedding."

Me: "Shit. I don't know. Look, they're even asking me what my groom's name is. How the hell do I know?"

Tara: "Yan, Fa--"

Me: "No, I know what the groom's name is. I haven't thought about the bridesmaids. Shit. Do you, uh, want to be a bridesmaid?"

Tara: "I would be honored to be your bridesmaid. How many are you intending to have?"

Me: "I have to have more?"

It occurs to me that Tara has had to put up with a lot, being my friend.

Anyway, so Tara invited me to go wedding dress shopping again on Saturday, since the Jessica McClintock outlet was having a sale. Outlet is another name for Warehouse. See above on the subject of warehouses.

And yet, and yet . . . I got my wedding dress. So that's one thing down. Thank you, Tara.

Which brings me to the subject of thong underwear. After Jessica McClintock, we went off and visited Hillsdale Mall, where I bought my very first thong underwear. Two pairs, not with the elastic wedgie, but with an actual cloth strip that still -- it's true -- digs its way between your butt cheeks like there's gold waiting for it at the bottom of the crevice, but is, I'm told, far more comfortable than the other kind.

They weren't as uncomfortable as I thought they would be. I was quite vocal on the subject at Nordstrom, though. The saleswoman had to hide behind the counter to muffle her guffaws. I presume laughing at loud at one's customers is not recommended in the Nordstrom sales training.

Wore a pair on Monday. Survived the experience. Why do we call underpants "pairs" when there's really only one underpant? Are we counting the holes?

Yes, I know that was an anticlimax. Bite me.