Me and Xie are no longer dating.
Since I guess a lot of my LJ buddies would've missed the whole Facebook status-update thing, I thought I'd mention here too that me and Xie are engaged now. The editors for Escape Pod are awesome, and they were kind enough to help me out with the proposal, and had the podcast's founder/retired editor pop the question for me at the end of a podcast episode. Poor Xie thought it was just a normal Escape Pod, he never saw it coming. Once he figured out what was going on though, he said yes. (Hooray!)
Getting engaged turned out to be a very bittersweet time. I called my grandmother that night to give her the news; she laughed and said "Well I'm not surprised," before telling me how happy she was for me, and that I'd picked a good 'un, and that she couldn't wait to talk to my mom to discuss wedding plans.
I ended up being one of the last people in the family to talk to her. The next afternoon, she had a stroke, and never woke up. It was awful and sad and horrible and, and, and just sad. We went to the funeral a few days later, down in Rome, Georgia; it seemed like half the damn town was there to pay their respects. (My grandmother was, more or less, a social force of nature.)
I'm not sure if anyone has ever before been told "Congratulations!" at a funeral funeral as many times as I was. Somehow, Q (my grandma) (her name was Susan, but she was always Q to my sister and I), in the brief time since I'd talked to her, had managed to break the news of the engagement to her bridge buddies and other friends. So while standing in the receiving line after the funeral service, I had probably thirty or forty people I didn't even know come up to me to tell me and Xie congrats. It was hilarious and sad all at once, but hearing from so many people how excited she had been about it made me so, so grateful I'd gotten a chance to tell her.
Xie left the country a few days after that, and now we are in the midst of dealing with immigration bullshit and getting his visa application processed. It is taking forever, and it is very unclear when we'll be done with it all.
So now theoretically there is going to be a wedding or something. Luckily for me, my little sister, my mom, and my best-friend-since-birth are all super excited by the prospect of wedding planning, and they have an email chain which I am not even included on where they can discuss all things weddingish.
It turns out that, in order to have a wedding that is not traditional and boring, you have to actually plan it yourself, or at least be heavily involved in the process. I mostly prefer not to, so I will let them see what they can come up with and just hope they do not include too many flowers or lacey things or ridiculous table pieces.
This is assuming I don't get so impatient and fed up with the wait that I don't just make Xie go to a courthouse with me somewhere as soon as his paperwork comes through.
There will probably be a wedding though. Mostly because I seem to have little choice in the matter. Also because I like parties, and "weddings are a pain in the ass" does not seem quite sufficient of a reason to forgo a party that I get to make all of my friends attend. (I have received unbreakable assurances that I will be permitted to choose what kind of beer kegs will be at the wedding.)
As far as the wedding stuff goes, a lot of my ATL friends are mostly just excited about the impending T-Rex Flower Girl. This is because, when I was 16 or 17, I was pretty damned confident I'd never get married -- it is just not my sort of thing. I was so confident, in fact, that when my friend Boman suggested, if I was so damned sure it'd never happen, that I should agree to let him be my flower girl in a t-rex costume if I ever did get married, I had no problem agreeing. So we went to the trouble of writing out a contract: "If Susan ever gets married, Boman will be her flower girl in a T-Rex costume." Both of us signed it.
Somewhat predictably, despite all the dumb shit we did back then that we don't remember now, the t-rex contract was something my friends never forgot. And now that I've mysteriously found myself actually getting hitched, there is no way they are going to let me (or Boman) back out of it. (Actually I think Boman would be heartbroken if I didn't let him, he seems pretty excited about being a t-rex.)
Anyway, people have mostly been cool and shit about the whole engagement thing. I was actually completely convinced everyone was going to make fun of me for it and give me a hard time, because I arguably deserved it. But it turns out everyone is way classier than I'd probably be, because people have been kind about letting me keep my pride, and not teasing me too much. (Some amount of teasing was unquestionably deserved, to be fair.)
But more than anything, I am just really, really excited that Xie and I are not going to be 10,000 miles apart forever. Just gotta put up with it for a little bit damned longer.
Getting engaged turned out to be a very bittersweet time. I called my grandmother that night to give her the news; she laughed and said "Well I'm not surprised," before telling me how happy she was for me, and that I'd picked a good 'un, and that she couldn't wait to talk to my mom to discuss wedding plans.
I ended up being one of the last people in the family to talk to her. The next afternoon, she had a stroke, and never woke up. It was awful and sad and horrible and, and, and just sad. We went to the funeral a few days later, down in Rome, Georgia; it seemed like half the damn town was there to pay their respects. (My grandmother was, more or less, a social force of nature.)
I'm not sure if anyone has ever before been told "Congratulations!" at a funeral funeral as many times as I was. Somehow, Q (my grandma) (her name was Susan, but she was always Q to my sister and I), in the brief time since I'd talked to her, had managed to break the news of the engagement to her bridge buddies and other friends. So while standing in the receiving line after the funeral service, I had probably thirty or forty people I didn't even know come up to me to tell me and Xie congrats. It was hilarious and sad all at once, but hearing from so many people how excited she had been about it made me so, so grateful I'd gotten a chance to tell her.
Xie left the country a few days after that, and now we are in the midst of dealing with immigration bullshit and getting his visa application processed. It is taking forever, and it is very unclear when we'll be done with it all.
So now theoretically there is going to be a wedding or something. Luckily for me, my little sister, my mom, and my best-friend-since-birth are all super excited by the prospect of wedding planning, and they have an email chain which I am not even included on where they can discuss all things weddingish.
It turns out that, in order to have a wedding that is not traditional and boring, you have to actually plan it yourself, or at least be heavily involved in the process. I mostly prefer not to, so I will let them see what they can come up with and just hope they do not include too many flowers or lacey things or ridiculous table pieces.
This is assuming I don't get so impatient and fed up with the wait that I don't just make Xie go to a courthouse with me somewhere as soon as his paperwork comes through.
There will probably be a wedding though. Mostly because I seem to have little choice in the matter. Also because I like parties, and "weddings are a pain in the ass" does not seem quite sufficient of a reason to forgo a party that I get to make all of my friends attend. (I have received unbreakable assurances that I will be permitted to choose what kind of beer kegs will be at the wedding.)
As far as the wedding stuff goes, a lot of my ATL friends are mostly just excited about the impending T-Rex Flower Girl. This is because, when I was 16 or 17, I was pretty damned confident I'd never get married -- it is just not my sort of thing. I was so confident, in fact, that when my friend Boman suggested, if I was so damned sure it'd never happen, that I should agree to let him be my flower girl in a t-rex costume if I ever did get married, I had no problem agreeing. So we went to the trouble of writing out a contract: "If Susan ever gets married, Boman will be her flower girl in a T-Rex costume." Both of us signed it.
Somewhat predictably, despite all the dumb shit we did back then that we don't remember now, the t-rex contract was something my friends never forgot. And now that I've mysteriously found myself actually getting hitched, there is no way they are going to let me (or Boman) back out of it. (Actually I think Boman would be heartbroken if I didn't let him, he seems pretty excited about being a t-rex.)
Anyway, people have mostly been cool and shit about the whole engagement thing. I was actually completely convinced everyone was going to make fun of me for it and give me a hard time, because I arguably deserved it. But it turns out everyone is way classier than I'd probably be, because people have been kind about letting me keep my pride, and not teasing me too much. (Some amount of teasing was unquestionably deserved, to be fair.)
But more than anything, I am just really, really excited that Xie and I are not going to be 10,000 miles apart forever. Just gotta put up with it for a little bit damned longer.