To My Best Friend

Dear Jennifer,

Today is the day that we are married.

Do you remember over a year ago when we sat down in Borders in Davis with our calendars and your Palm Pilot and tried to pin down this date? We had to worry about the fact that half of my family has birthdays during this time of year, close friends of ours have wedding anniversaries, and so on. But we wanted to do it at this time of year — I don’t remember why.

And I remember how I proposed to you: by making it a hypothetical at first, asking, "If I were to propose to you, what would you say to me?" It was late at night, we’d been dating for just three weeks, and we’d spent the entire day together — as usual. I’d made my mind up that morning that I wanted to marry you, and I’d spent the entire day trying to figure out how to ask you. In the end, of course, I took the wimpy way out. But you still yes.

We joke with each other and with our families and friends about the reasons why we’re getting married. "Our friend dared me to marry her." "I lost a bet." "I drew the short straw." "I felt sorry for him." And so on. Of course, we both know that the reason I asked you was because I love you more than I ever thought I could love anyone, and I knew that I wanted to spend my life with you.

I thought I knew you a year ago. Since then, we’ve been through a lot together: job crises, job changes, house building, various family issues, friend issues, sick cats, late night emergency room visits, far too much traveling. I’ve seen you in good moods and bad, laughing and crying, happy and angry. Out of everyone I know, you’re the only one who can send me a single word on Instant Messenger and make me spew coffee all over my keyboard at work (people at work know by now that random laughter from my cubicle usually means that I’ve just gotten another e-mail or another Instant Message from you and they no longer question it). You’re the only one I know who can smile at me and make me know that whatever stupid thing I’ve done is forgiven. You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted to marry, that I’ve ever wanted to spend the rest of my days with.

So many times over the past year I’ve held you close at night or sat next to you in the car, or laughed at a joke you said. So many times I’ve looked over at you while you slept and sat the light of the streetlamp outside our window shine down on your face and thought how beautiful you are.

Every relationship has problems. Every marriage has its good years and its bad. All I can do for you at this moment is repeat the promise I made during the ceremony: that I will be faithful to you all of our lives, that I will love you with all my heart and all my soul, and that I will hold you close to my heart forever.

Richard

Farewell to Debauchery

I’m surrounded on all sides by deceit and duplicity!

A couple of weeks ago, Jennifer told me that we were going to have dinner with our friend D– and her partner, and that we were going to go out to an Indian restaurant and have salmon tandoori. I’m never one to pass up salmon tandoori, and I enjoy D–‘s company quite a bit. And then the other afternoon, Jennifer told me that we needed to stop at S–‘s house on the way to dinner to drop off some garb so that S– would have an outfit to wear to the wedding.

"No problem," I said. "I like S– and I haven’t seen her in ages."

I should have known something was up right then. S– is taller even than me, standing at 5’10" or so, while Jennifer stands at just about 5’3". If I’d been thinking at all, I would have realized that Jennifer’s skirts would never fit on S– without significant alteration.         So on Saturday night, we piled into Jennifer’s car to head out to Davis. As we pulled up in front of S–‘s house, I saw my old friend J– walking up to her front door. "What a coincidence," I thought. "I haven’t seen J– in at least five years, and I had just gotten in touch with him by e-mail a couple of weeks ago." I still didn’t make any sort of connection.

Since Jennifer was driving, I suggested that I would hop out of the car and drop off the bag of materials she’d given me and hand them to S–. It would give me a moment to say hi to both J– and S– before rushing off to dinner with D–.

So I got out of the car and walked up to the front step. I went inside to give S– a quick hug, and saw my best man, two of the groomsmen, and another old friend all in her living room. Even then, I had no clue. I just assumed that they were all over at S–‘s house to play Dungeons and Dragons or something — all of my friends are gamers, and S– has always been kind of a gaming central in Davis.

Then I saw Jennifer drive away through the front window. So that’s when I turned to my best man and said, "What’s going on?"

"I finally got you back," he told me.

And that’s when I knew that I was at the center of a web of lies and conspiracy, and that tonight was going to be the traditional last night of debauchery and rowdiness that every groom-to-be goes through a week or so before the wedding.

I deserved it, of course. When my best man got married and I was his best man, I arranged for a large party at my house. I got a couple of our friends to go with me to his house (he lived in Sacramento at the time), and we took him to lunch and a movie, claiming that that was his bachelor party. Then we brought him back to my house to work on a creative project that we were all working on at the time. Another of our friends was already waiting for us there. Even then, he had no idea what was going on until his own brothers showed up, followed some time later by the stripper.

And that is pretty much what happened to me that night. Jennifer had cleverly snuck my medicines for that night and the next morning in to the bag that she’d given me, the bag full of "garb" for S–; she’d been in on it the whole time.

I can’t really talk in detail about what happened the rest of that night. Jennifer knows all, of course, and so do one or two other people outside of who was actually there. Suffice to say that the entertainment I’d provided for my friend’s bachelor party was repeated for mine. The stripper was talented and put on a good show, and the alcohol was plentiful. There was good music, good conversation, and I had a great time.

Jennifer came the next afternoon when I was mostly recovered and took me home. As we drove away I thought about my friends and about the wedding and about my life with Jennifer. I had a great time, of course. And I love my friends for putting it all together and for making me the object of their conspiracy and web of deceit. And now, more than ever, I am ready for the wedding and to spend the rest of my life with Jennifer.

After all, how could I not love someone who is willing to trust me with a month by myself in Europe (even knowing that part of my time there would be spent with my friend A–, a single woman), and who would conspire with my friends to throw me a party which included a stripper and all sorts of debauchery?

Sorry guys. She’s spoken for.

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On another note entirely, I’ve completed another minor enhancement to this website: my current reading list, which is database-driven so that all I need to do is update my reading list in my database and the most current books will show up on my main page, on my Library page, and to the right of my journal entries. There may be no use to you for this information, but I think it’s pretty spiffy.

Two More Weeks

Sometimes, I go through periods where I’ll write an entry for this journal just about every day. At other times, a week or two will go by without me writing a thing. I think at this point I’ve gone for more than two weeks. I hope that I haven’t lost my one or two regular readers as a result.

I’ve kept myself busy at work by cracking down hard on those new languages that I’ve decided to teach myself. I have gone through about half of the C book that I purchased, and I’m finding the basic concepts fairly easy. I wrote a small program to do a quick calculation that Jennifer and I are constantly making for Weight Watchers, and it worked perfectly. Spurred on by my success, I launched Code Warrior and began to try writing a version for my Palm Pilot. I quickly found myself mired in forms, in code, events, menus, and so on. I had hoped to finish this program by this weekend so that Jennifer and I would have it on our Palm Pilots, but I wasn’t able to get it done. My next goal is to get it done by the end of the week.

I’m learning Java rapidly as well, and finding it an enjoyable and easy language to learn. Learning to program, I’ve decided, is easy. Learning to program well is hard.

So learning C, Palm OS, and Java have kept me busy for the past couple of weeks at work while the other Sacramento developer and I have sat and waited for something to do. Finally, though, the day before yesterday, we got a new project. One of the developers up in Portland had developed a new template to use for the company’s corporate site, and it fell to B– and me to take care of copying and pasting content from the old templates into the new ones. I’m certainly not expecting that every task at work will be an exciting one, but this is kind of ridiculous. This is the kind of work that companies hire temporary employees for. My title in my company is Senior Web Developer, and it’s gotten to the point where I’m embarrassed to use that title in internal business; copy-and-paste is certainly not senior level work. I’ll happily use that title on my resume, though. My boss told me, "Do a good job on this project and keep volunteering for new projects; that’s how you’ll get out of doing nothing but HTML." I was a bit too frustrated at the time to remind him that I’d been working on just that for nearly a year, and that I’d been involved in a number of projects before the corporate restructuring that went beyond this level of work. B– and I have decided to implement the code to the strictest levels of HTML 4.1 specifications as outlined at the W3C, if for no other reason than to make this project at least a minor challenge for us. According to the initial sizing of the project, it will take about two weeks to finish this one up; I expect it will take a lot less time than that. In the meantime, I have updated my resume and I’ve posted it and put myself back on the market. I’ve already received a couple of calls, and I expect that I will be able to find myself a more challenging position soon. And this is the primary reason I have for wanting to leave my current job: it holds no challenge at all for me anymore, and the level of work that I’m being asked to do at this point is almost insulting.

On a much more positive note, though, it’s now exactly two weeks until the wedding. In fact, I’m writing these words at about eight o’ clock in the evening, and in exactly two weeks from this moment, Jennifer and I will have been husband and wife for about twenty minutes. There is still a lot to do, a lot to worry about, a lot for Jennifer to panic about. Will the groomsmen all have their boots in time? Will my scabbard show up in time? Will the Christmas lights provide enough lighting for the older folks to be comfortable in the social hall for the reception? And so on and so on.

And there’s a part of me which still feels overwhelmed at the whole thing. I remember breaking up with my last girlfriend before Jennifer and thinking that I would be perfectly happy to be single for the rest of my life. I also remember, though, those times when I knew that there was something missing from my life, and when I knew I would never find a soulmate or someone that I could share my life with.

And here I am, two weeks away from being married to my best friend, the most wonderful person I have ever know, the best thing that has ever happened for me. These next two weeks, as we deal with marriage licenses, rehearsals, and so on, are going to be busy and hectic. I just hope that it won’t be another two weeks until I get to post again!

If Collab: Independence Day

If Collab:If you were asked to identify your most life-altering moment, what would it be? Why did that pivotal event or experience cause you to change your direction?

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if we’d gotten away with it, or if we’d succeeded, if we hadn’t been caught and turned in to the school’s administration, or if the victim had been a less forgiving person.

It was more than one moment. It was a period of a month that led up to a single moment in the high school principle’s office where I suddenly realized how cruel I was capable of being, how capable I am of hurting other people, and how hard it is for someone to forgive a person like that, and how hard it can be to rebuild a friendship when someone has been like that.

I want to be able to blame other people: the woman who came up with the plan to ruin Fred’s (not his real name, of course) psyche, the other people who went along with it, or even Fred himself for being horrifically naive and a social outcast. Honestly, though, the only person I can blame is myself. I was the one who said, "It sounds like fun, let’s do it."

There were four of us who decided that Fred had become pompous and arrogant enough to deserve this kind of treatment. We decided that it would be right for us to play a big joke on him and create for him an alternate sort of social reality that he would believe for a month or two and that we would demolish and destroy at the end of that time. Apparently it had been done to someone else at the same high school. There was even a name for this process in the student body: "Spurgeoning", after the first victim. For that first unfortunate, it all ended with him crying, panicked, in the men’s room of the high school, trying desperately to escape from the white slave traders that he was convinced were after him.

So the plan was this: C–, the woman who came up with the plan, would pretend to be in love with him; so would B–, a guy we all knew who was bisexual. Woman intimidated Fred, and homosexuality intimidated him even more. Then L– and M– would pretend to be in love with each other. My role was to pretend to be a convert to the cult of the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, who was all over the news at the time. Fred, as I recall, was in love with L–, and M– was as close to a mortal enemy as Fred could get. And Fred was a staunch Catholic and we all knew that for him to believe that I was involved in this cult would really upset him.

And it all worked. For a month, we had Fred convinced that all of these things were true. It worked so well, in fact, that we decided that we would bring more people into our cabal. So C– approached N–, another woman in the senior class. N– was appalled, and approached the school administration and told them what we were doing to Fred.

C–, of course, was outraged. How dare N– betray her like this? L– and M– weren’t so outraged; but, then, their hearts were never really into it in the first place. B– immediately claimed that he’d never been into it at all, that he really was sincerely attracted to Fred; but, then, the attraction quickly faded when the whole thing came to light.

Shortly after N– went to the administration, we were all called in to the dean’s office, Fred included, to talk about it. C– sat in her chair, arms folded across her chest, fuming. The dean was open and concerned. L–, M–, and B– were downcast. I felt downright ashamed of myself. It was Fred, though, whom I respected. He was the one who forgave, who said, "It’s okay. I mean, a joke’s a joke, right?" The dean pressed him for a bit, but Fred was adamant. He wanted to forgive, forget and move on. The dean confessed that he’d planned on punishing us, but decided that he wouldn’t because Fred had forgiven.

That moment taught me a lot. I looked at Fred, and I saw the hurt and the feeling of betrayal there, but I heard the forgiveness and I knew it was sincere. I looked at C– and saw the indignation. In that moment, I suddenly knew two things: first, that people can rise above their hurts and their sadness and forgive those who hurt them; and second, that some people, even when confronted with what they had done wrong, will still admit that they were in the right, and will be indignant and outraged when it is implied that they were in the wrong. I learned a lot about fragility, and about courage, and about humility. I learned that I am capable of hurting people in terrible ways.

And mostly, I learned from Fred at that moment something about independence: about how we can be independent from the hurts we’ve suffered and go on to try to rebuild when the natural tendency is to resent and accuse. I feel fortunate that it was Fred we chose to do this to; I doubt anyone else would have been so ready to overcome the hurt and anger.

Fred and I still had a year together in school after that; we were both juniors when this whole thing came down. Somehow, we managed to rebuild our friendship, although it was never as strong as it had been before. When our senior class went to Los Angeles for our senior trip, Fred and I shared a hotel room but we didn’t talk that night.

C– graduated from high school, and I never heard from her again. L– and M– continued on with Fred and me, and I heard from both of them from time to time; B– I ran into at the Renaissance Faire, and he was pretty much the same as he’d ever been.

No lesson is ever perfectly learned, of course. In the sixteen years that have passed since then, I’ve still doled out my share of hurt and pain, some of it even deliberately. I like to think, though, that I learned enough about the human heart and about friendships in the one moment to be sensitive enough when I have hurt someone to try to make amends quickly and appropriately.