Happy Couples Don't Get Ratings

Sunday night, dinner was cheese and triscuits in front of Desperate Housewives. I'm just home from a family wedding and my slovenliness is somehow a response to the weekend I spent steeped in my family whom I alternately adore and hate.

I write my last check for the electric bill, cursing the fact that I forgot to order more checks. I put a Gee's Bend quilt stamp on it and remember the exhibit at the museum, except I always get it mixed up with the Phillips collection exhibit and some American landscapes. I resent the fact that I have become the type of person who uses quilt stamps. I cling to the idea that they are artsy and thus okay for a twenty-two year old to put on envelopes.

The weekend in review disappears under two incidents: my aunt, the awful one, asking me at the wedding reception if I was going straight for my doctorate. When I replied in the affirmative and attempted to explain why, she cut me off to ask how old I'd be when I got out. I'll be twenty-eight, bitch.

The second incident was my mother showing her displeasure once more about Virginia. I love my mother. She's one of my best friends. But her attitude towards graduate school pisses me off. First she didn't want me to get my doctorate; apparently there'sa rumor going around my family that getting a doctorate makes you forget to get married. And now, when I've found a program I am truly in love with, she's got nothing but negativity for the eight hour drive. I made her listen to me, this time. I think she finally understands that I'm not going 500 miles away to spite her, or to deprive her of my company. I'd be doing it because the degree program, the research, is really too good to pass up. I love the town, I like the campus, but that's all frosting. Five years and I'm out, and I'd rather have that degree and that experience than settle for anything else.

I will miss Cleveland. I think about that tonight while I write my return address on the electric bill--about how the idea of missing Mark and Phil and the Algebra and graffiti and related things sinks slowly under the fact that someday, my return address won't be Cleveland anymore. I fear losing my Cleveland pride. I wonder if I will forget to love the Indians, no matter how much they lose. And I think about how much of this is just fear of moving, fear of transplanting myself away from my family and loved ones.

I put the Turtles' "So Happy Together" on iTunes and think about wedding music. Kate hasn't chosen hers yet, although I was fitted for my bridesmaid dress yesterday morning. If I were to make a Postsecret card, it might have something to do with a short playlist on my iTunes that I have, just in case. Which is stupid, and exactly the kind of behavior that men attribute to women all the time, but mostly I just don't want to forget a great idea. I care about very few things when it comes to weddings, but I want nice music.

I think about telling my dad that with the absence of influential music forces in my life, I listen to the same six albums over and over, and not a single one was recorded outside of the early nineties. I love this about R, that he's got worse taste in music than I do (and that's really something) and he doesn't care. I remember thinking as the processional music started that if someday it was R standing up there waiting for me, he would never think to be nervous, he would never wonder if I just wasn't coming.