Cash, hee.

In whoa news, one of the three staff members at the Classics library in town - i.e. the closest thing to a dream job for me here - died completely unexpectedly last night. I feel bad about joking about which member of the department was closest to retirement age. (He was only in his 50s, my friend and I think. I only knew him in a sort of nodding acquaintance way, ten years ago.) Whoa.

But the value of the gifts, as appreciated as they totally are, didn't come close to the cost of the wedding.

I could definitely have approximately the same feeling with five hundred bucks at Target, I'm sure. BUT STILL.

Whoa, flea.

So how much driving in a day/a few days can folks here handle?

My drive up to Canada is about 900 miles, and DH and I have always split it up into 2 days. This summer we're FINALLY going to be doing things my way and driving straight through. (The right and proper way, as my parents did it when I was a kid.)

Wow, flea....um, sunshine out of a tragedy that you happen to have just moved to town?

So how much driving in a day/a few days can folks here handle?

I kinda hate to drive, so more than 3 hours kills me. But I can be a passenger in a car for longer than that.

Here's my dinner set. I have 8 of the dinner and salad plates, bowls, and the dessert bowls and plates (the flower shaped ones).

Whoa.

Yeah.

... so, how long before you can start networking for the job?

Yikes, flea.

M and I already had just about all the household items we needed when we got married, so we didn't register for anything, and indeed tried to ask that people not give us anything but donate either to our honeymoon fund or to Partners in Health instead. That idea got nixed by our parents, but we managed to get away with asking for either homemade/locally made gifts (many of our friends are very crafty) or donations as mentioned above, and then we slipped a very short list (vacuum cleaner, waffle iron, three or four other things) to our parents in case anyone called them up in indignation that they couldn't just buy us towels. So we got a waffle iron, a good suitcase, some money, some donations to a worthy cause, and lots of fantastic and creative gifts from friends, including a homemade cookie jar, several beautiful quilts & blankets, and a set of matching aprons done with Very Hungry Caterpillar fabric.

The gifts issue was probably the single biggest source of tension (principally between my parents and me) during the planning of the wedding, but in the end I felt like we pulled it off, nobody got pissed off, and we got just what we wanted.

"I had a string of committed relationships for 15 solid years, and I flew around the world to research this article, and can I just stress how successful, wealthy, and attractive my friends are? Here's an article about how I heroically made peace with the only part of my life that isn't completely fucking amazing."

I get that. I bristled, too. And then I felt sort of bad because when i talk about being single, I feel like I need to head off any sort of criticism that I'm a loser by bragging about my awesome friends who do awesome things and my awesome apartment in an awesome neighborhood of my awesome major metropolitan city and don't you know that I write books and hang with famous scientists?

I saw it as a way to say, "I'm not a loser, my life is pretty awesome and men find me attractive so don't try and put me down."

I do it too, and I know it's tiresome. An editor should have reeled that in.

I can't imagine Matt Taibbi listing his accomplishments to prove that he's had an awesome life. I think it's assumed that he's a dude who's been on Bill Maher and is a staff writer at Rolling Stone so he must be cool/desirable. She's got a cover story at The Atlantic, I assume she has a cool/desirable life. She doesn't need to do the thing.

And the comments section is full of nice guys warning women that their looks will fade and then they will be lonely old hags neener neener.

Just, you know, FYI.