Farewell, in Four Parts

Part I:

Tiffany: "What are you doing?"

Me: "Trying to write a blog about not writing this blog anymore."

Tiffany: “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

Part II:

Tiffany knows how to say thank you in Korean. She's not Korean, has never been to Korea, and, as far as I know, has eaten Korean food only once, at a little barbecue joint near our first apartment in Los Angeles where we cooked the food ourselves over a tiny grill at the table ("Can you put my beef back on for a little bit?" I whispered, "It's still bloody.")

Still, I went to pick up the pants we had hemmed the other day (at 5’3, all our pants require hemming) and was greeted at the cash register by the seamstress, who was beaming.

"Your friend," she said, gesturing at me in a double-handed wave that suggested another female with slightly larger breasts.

I blinked at her, then nodded. Besides thank you, I also don't know the Korean words for fiancée or partner or lesbian.

"Yeah?" I asked, suddenly nervous that Tiffany had forgotten to pay for our last batch or had dropped off more pants than I could afford to pick up.

"Your friend says thank you in Korean!"

I smiled.

"Really?" I asked. "How do you say it?"

"Kamsahamnida."

"Well," I said, handing over some cash and folding our plastic-wrapped pants over my arm, "Kamsahamnida."

We beamed at each other, and then I went out the door, beaming at everyone I passed on the street, all the way home until I could beam at Tiffany.

Part III:

I haven't written a blog in a while, and it's not because there isn't plenty to write about. I still make silly mistakes in the kitchen; ask blonde things like whether the pay-to-play pool table at the bar knows I scratched on the 8-ball or is it okay to keep playing; and walk home twice, sometimes, to be with the woman I love. But, after four years of sharing those stories here with you, it's time for a change.

But not before I say thanks.

I'm lucky to have a life with more happy things than sad, to have people to share both kinds of things when they happen, to be in love with a woman who thinks it's important to say thank you, and to have had at least 49 of you read my blog, on occasion.

Farewell for now. I hope to share my words with you in some other form or fashion in the future. Until then…

Part IV:

Kamsahamnida.

Skinny-Schminny

Outfit parity is essential in a relationship. Maybe it's a lesbian thing, but if Tiffany and I are getting dressed and I turn around to discover she's a 10 and I'm only a 2 or 3 on the hotness scale, I go back to my drawers and hangers.

Sometimes this can lead to less than pleasant exchanges.

"How does this look?" Tiffany asked one night. 

I glared at her.

"Well, you don't have to be so rude," she said. "If you don't like it..."

"Don't like it?" I hissed. "You look gorgeous! Now I have to start all over!"

It's moments like these that led me to believe I needed a pair of skinny jeans. 

Tiffany has some and because she's so fit and because they so fit, she looks fantastic whenever she wears them--fashionable. Next to her in my old-school boot cut jeans, I look, well, exactly like I did in the 8th grade.

Always of generous spirit, Tiffany promised to help me find skinny jeans, so the other day we went shopping. She loaded me down with multiple pairs in various shades of denim and black and then accompanied me to the dressing room.

And that's where I discovered that there is nothing about skinny jeans that makes me feel skinny. First of all, they're generally about 10 inches too long, so to start off I feel short. Second, by the time I pull them over my thighs, I've started to sweat, so now I feel, in addition to short, somewhere in the range of not-skinny-to-fat.

"Imagine having to pull these on and off on a regular basis?"I asked Tiffany, breathless, after the fourth or fifth pair was stuck somewhere between my knees and ankles. "I can't."

She laughed.

"No, babe, I'm serious," I said. "I can't get these off my calves and I'm starting to have a panic attack."

Walk This Way...I Think

I don't always deserve the confidence I walk with in New York. 

Once, while trying to get my mom to the airport, I hurried us onto not one, not two, but three trains going in the wrong direction because we were so deep in conversation. By the time we got to the last train, which would take her on her own from the subway to the terminal, she was so late we hardly had time to hug.

"Go!" I urged, pushing her toward the turnstile.

She looked back at me, bewildered.

"I don't know where the f*#$ I'm going!" she cried.

"The train only goes one way!"

On an outing during her most recent visit, I changed my mind twice at one above-ground intersection, trying to decide which way to cross a street. Oblivious to my uncertainty and trying to finish some thought or another, my mom mimicked my every move like a shadow so that a crowd of people stepped back to watch. I think they thought we were some sort of pop-up vaudeville act. They don't know that's just how we are.

Anyway, being in charge of logistics in Manhattan can be exhausting, but it's more exhausting if the people you are logisticating don't feel like they can trust your decisions.

Last Saturday, Tiffany and I led my mom and five other members of my family and friend-family from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side and back up the middle to join throngs of other people for photos in front of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. Of course, they could have found the way themselves. But they were deferring to us as their hostesses.

"Do you think they can tell we have no idea where we're going?" I whispered to Tiffany as the group trailed behind us through an underground subway passage. 

"No," she said. "Walk confidently, and they never will."

This worked perfectly until we walked with confidence into an exit barricaded with a metal gate.

But I'll tell you what, you have never seen a U-Turn so masterfully executed.

Packing a Pumpkin

I packed a pumpkin in my carry-on for my friend-family's Thanksgiving in Florida this year. First, I packed my cowboy boots, and then I put in my jeans and my one nice outfit, and then I made a little hole in the layer between my running clothes and my pajamas, and I put the pumpkin in the hole.

"You know they have pumpkin in Florida?" my friend Teresa asked. "In cans?"

Yes, of course I know it's possible to buy pumpkin. It's the reason I left my sweet potatoes at home (also, a several-sweet-potato-sized hole proved difficult to find in my small wheelie bag, and Tiffany said if I insisted on making pumpkin and sweet potato pie from scratch, "You're on your own.").

Anyway, it didn't seem ridiculous at all to me to bring the pumpkin until we got to the airport and I began to wonder if the squash in my carry-on was going to look like a bomb in the security x-ray. After all, a pumpkin does look a little bomb-ish, if your bomb reference is from old cartoons: a ball with a sizzling wick on top. My pumpkin's stem didn't sizzle, but still...

Would my pumpkin be confiscated?

No.

Years ago, my friend-family slid down hills in turkey pans for fun. Now we are a little more mature. On Wednesday night, we went to the bar where everyone but me downed lemon drop and Fireball shots (when I kissed Tiffany she tasted like a piece of Big Red gum.). We danced and debated whether any of us could twerk and learned pretty quickly that I, at least, cannot.

When we got home at midnight, most of my friend-family went to bed, but I went to get the pumpkin out of my carry-on because I knew there wouldn't be time or oven space to bake it in a few hours. For a minute, I regretted the whole endeavor, but then Little Rebecca and Sam and Tiffany and I started slicing pumpkin and scraping out seeds and talking and laughing. Soon, Tiffany went to bed, and Little Rebecca and Sam and I moved on to sweet potatoes, checking the oven often enough to slow the baking process down even further.

I'm not sure our homemade sweet potato and pumpkin pies were any better than the canned kind. But, in my mind, you can't beat cooking from scratch. If all I had to do was wield a can-opener, I never would have stayed up until 2 a.m. with my friend-family, scooping soft sweet potato and pumpkin into bowls.

And if you don't stay up until 2 a.m., you don't learn certain things, like the fact that Little Rebecca, the former bald-headed baby, can twerk. Upside down against the wall, standing on her sticky pumpkin hands.

With a Little Luck

The first time I played horseshoes with Tiffany she got a shoe stuck in a tree. I've never seen someone aim so carefully and miss so completely. Her u-shaped piece of iron didn't make it even halfway to the pole across the way. Instead, it went straight up in the air, shooting through a leafy oak until it came back down to ring a sturdy branch.

"How did you do that?" I asked her, after I had removed my hands from my head and stopped laughing.

"I don't know," she said. "I held it just like you did and then I let go."

We weren't even dating at the time. Lucky for her, I wasn't looking for a permanent horseshoe partner.

Still, it turns out I found one.

Over Thanksgiving, the grown-up boy I used to play time machine with brought a set of shoes to keep us busy on the beach. When he and his mom ended up on one side with Tiffany and I on the other, I had a moment of preemptive competitive panic, visions of horseshoes being accidentally hurled into the ocean off to our left.

"You sure about your partner choice?" I called.

Tiffany glared at me.

"Remember to let go a little earlier than you did that one time," I whispered.

But it turns out the four of us were pretty evenly matched. We all hit the pole and we all missed it, and if Tiffany sometimes missed it more than the rest of us, well, a zero score is still a zero score. After we were tied for a while, we called sudden death. The first team to ring the pole would win. None of us had done so yet.

"Oh, so close!" we yelled back and forth until it was Tiffany's turn.

"Guys," she said, "I've got this."

And, would you believe it, she was right.

We all walked over to look down at the winning shoe in the sand as the sun began to dip into the water.

It was so lucky-looking and pretty that I had to take a picture. It felt like a sign of anything good to come, even if all that means is better hand-eye coordination. 

Sicky Sick Sickerson

I used to like being sick when I was little. It meant staying home from school, spending all day in my pajamas sipping Coke or slurping Campbell's chicken noodle soup, and watching old Bette Davis movies with my mom.

I don't much like being sick as a grownup. It means going to work anyway.

Tiffany, on the other hand, loves being sick. Well, she likes being middling sick--somewhere between scratchy throat and bedridden. She likes coughing in my direction until I look up from whatever I'm doing--

"Are you hearing this? I think I'm getting sick..."

--losing her voice--

"It's literally gone!" she croaks--

and generally playing up whatever ailment she has developed--

"Can you take my temperature?"

Luckily for Tiffany, she's adorable when she's sick.

"I'm sicky sick sickerson," she said to me a couple of weeks ago when I got home as she sucked on a cherry-flavored cough drop. "Sick sick sick!"

The next morning I left her tucked in bed while I went to the gym. But when I got home again she was up and moving.

"Get back in bed!" I said, "go!"

"But I want to spend time with you!" she whispered, her voice like sandpaper.

"You just want me to notice you have no voice," I said, fighting a smile as I pushed and prodded her.

"It's literally gone!" she croaked.

I wish I could tell you I rented a bunch of suspenseful black-and-whites and served Tiffany a piping hot bowl of chicken noodle. But Tiffany doesn't like scary movies and she had to make do with cabbage.

Rabbit Food

Tiffany and I recently left a head of cabbage sitting in our fridge for three weeks (don't worry--we picked it from the farm ourselves, so it was nothing if not fresh). Every time I opened the door and saw it, I felt it judging me:

"You are not creative enough to cook me."

It's true; I'm not inspired much by cabbage. I love sauerkraut, but sauerkraut takes several days to prepare and, even by my standards, our cabbage would have been old by then. Another choice, coleslaw, felt too summery for the fall weather.

One night we finally decided on cabbage soup because it's easy and we had most of the ingredients. When I say cabbage soup is easy, I mean there's nothing to it.

Like, actually nothing. I googled cabbage soup on my way home to make sure I had everything and all the top results were: DIET DIET DIET. A little uncertainly, I bought some carrots and leeks. My stomach growled.

When I walked in the door, Tiffany had already started making the soup.

"Smells good!" I cried, willing the soup to satiate me.

"I think I put in too much cabbage," Tiffany said, warning me away from the pot with her spoon.

"Impossible," I said. "Apparently cabbage soup is for people who want to starve...HOLY COW, that's a lot of cabbage, babe!"

"I told you."

"How about adding more water?"

"I did."

After we each finished a bowl, we looked at each other. Tiffany estimated it would take us each another three bowls to feel full.

"Or we could just have leftover pizza," I said.

And that is why there is now at least three weeks worth of cabbage soup in our freezer.

Playing Catch

I gave myself a blister throwing a frisbee with my brother Brandon and our best friend Zac in Miami a couple of weeks ago. 

I'm actually a pretty good frisbee thrower. But when you have an older brother, pretty good isn't good enough. You have to be:

"Wow!" Brandon said, "I didn't even have to move my hands for that one!"

Once you make a throw that good, you have to keep making throws that good, until you get a blister.

Of course, nobody can throw that well every time.

Soon my throws were sailing over Brandon's head and way to the right of Zac, near the couple making out under an umbrella.

Unlike me and Brandon, Zac has never been obsessed with being the best in ridiculous physical activities like frisbee. He understands, innately, that sometimes being the best means blisters, and so he sat down in the beach chair when Brandon and I headed into the water to practice our "diving catches."

"You're overthinking it!" Brandon yelled as he waded into the deep for the umpteenth time to retrieve one of my bad throws.

"That's because I'm having flashbacks to when we were little and you would say exactly that!" I screamed back. "I feel like I'm 7 years old again!"

Still, no matter how many bad throws I made, Brandon stayed across from me trying to catch them. There is no passage of time with siblings. You are always one throw away from the best throw ever.

And a blister.

Look Before You Lock

Stop in the name of love.

That's what I wrote on a sliver of a sticky note to put above our top door lock recently. I had no choice. That morning, like several other mornings in the past few months, I found myself locked in our apartment by my gorgeous, kind, terribly forgetful fiancee.

A few months ago, Tiffany and I locked ourselves out of our apartment and paid several hundred dollars to have new locks made. But apparently it takes several hundred more dollars to make the inside lock match the outside lock. I'm not sure, really, since we weren't given that choice. What this means is that we cannot lock (or unlock) our top lock from inside our apartment. We can only lock it from outside our apartment, which Tiffany does quite often when she leaves for work, and I'm still sleeping inside.

The other day I dialed Tiffany's place of business.

"Hi, this is Rebecca, and my partner Tiffany is training someone in your gym. Can you tell her she locked me in the apartment... again?"

"You're locked out?" the receptionist said.

"In."

"Wait, hold on, let me take this down. What happened?"

Sigh.

By the time Tiffany got home--sprinting up the stairs and apologizing from the hallway while I waited inside with my backpack and sunglasses on--I had forgotten that I once thought the situation was funny.

But later that night we both remembered that it was. Still. I'm not taking any chances.

Hence the sticky for Tiffany:

Stop [locking me in our apartment] in the name of love.

Bad Hair Day

I recently got my latest bad haircut.

"Oh!" Tiffany said when she saw me. "You cut your hair! It looks..."

"I hate it," I said, preempting her lie.

"I still love you."

You might not think someone could be bad at hair, but I am. I'm not talking about other people's hair although I must admit I'm bad at that too. I'm notoriously bad at my hair. After nearly 32 years, I haven't the faintest idea of what to do with the stuff on top of my own head. This is especially egregious since, because I prefer my hair chin length, I cut my hair quite often. I should be a hair genius.

There are multiple factors at play. First off, I don't do anything to my hair. Second, I don't know what should be done to my hair. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, I don't have a hairdresser I love to do my hair. I almost walked into a salon the other day because I like the fact that the owner's dog lies outside the entrance.

"Forget the dog--what does the owner's hair look like?" Tiffany asked me when I told her my idea.

I tried somewhere else.

The truth is, most of the time it's a moot point. I usually wear my hair up in a bun-for-people-who-are-bad-at-hair (make a ponytail and don't pull your hair all the way through). So when it's time for a haircut, I convince myself that it doesn't matter where I go since I don't care that much about my hair. That works out fine until I see the final result and get home to Tiffany who says:

"Oh! You cut your hair! It looks..."

"I hate it."

"I still love you."

Check, Please. I Mean, Check-Mate

For Christmas last year, Tiffany's mom Patty gave us a hand-painted Peruvian chess set. It's beautiful. The pieces are stored inside the board, which opens and shuts like a box.

Tiffany and I don't know anything about chess. That's not true. I did love the movie Little Man Tate, and my mom's stepdad showed me how to play once or twice as a young girl...you know what, I really feel I must stick with:

Tiffany and I don't know anything about chess. But we decided to play a few nights ago.
While I was finishing the dishes, Tiffany found an app that explains the rules of the game and also lets you play against an unknown, unnamed, virtual competitor. When I came out of the kitchen, she was sitting with her phone in front of her face, giggling:

"Oh, shoot," she said. "He got me!"

"Tiffany, let's play."

"Yeah, hold on.. it's so nice because he suggests moves for me...Whoops! Bad move!"

"Do you want to, like, play a real person?"

As beautiful as our board is, it's not quite regulation. Tiffany didn't have all her pawns (little kneeling men), but she had three bishops (slightly taller, non-kneeling men). So we made one of her bishops a pawn by coloring a "P" on his underside.

The app said the player using the white pieces always goes first. But our Peruvian pieces are reddish and blue-ish. Except for my two rooks, which were grey and looked kind of like the ghosts in Pac-Man.

"You go first," I said. "You're wearing a white t-shirt."

Early in the game, things went poorly for Tiffany.

"Is that your queen?" I asked politely.

"Yes, I think this is her hair."

I took her queen with my knight (a bucking horse).

Tiffany's knights were actually llamas. And she lost them not too long after her queen when she put them in spots diagonal from my pawns.

The app said kings are weak because they can only move one spot at a time. But Tiffany's king was even weaker because even though the app specified that kings can capture, he failed to take my bucking horse both times he was next it.

"I need suggested moves," Tiffany said.

Ultimately, our kings were a couple of spaces apart in the middle of the board by themselves. I began to wonder if they might negotiate a peace accord underwritten by their humans' incompetence. 

But then suggestion-less Tiffany moved her king right next to my ghost.

(Full disclosure: Tiffany beat me in about 5 moves the next night.)

Halloween: No Rush Orders

I was never huge on Halloween. Asking people for things still makes me uncomfortable, so I always felt a bit awkward about ringing the doorbells of even neighbors we knew and holding out my pumpkin-shaped bucket. Also, I watched a lot of "Unsolved Mysteries" with my brother and was terrified of ringing the doorbells of people I didn't know. 

I gave up the holiday much earlier than my friends, preferring to stay at home and pass out candy with my mom.

The 5-year-old daughter of our friends is another story altogether.

Julia loves Halloween. 

On one of our recent visits, Julia told Tiffany and me she was going to be a celebrity this year. She pointed to a picture of a girl in a silver-sequined dress on a well-worn page in her Halloween catalog (did you know there are Halloween costume catalogs?). 

"Cool!" I said, "I wore a dress just like that for prom one year."

Julia looked at my soccer shorts and tanktop and raised her eyebrows. I think she may have been slightly impressed.

I pointed at a cowgirl on another, much less well-worn page.

"I was a cowgirl once," I said. "Maybe I'll be a cowgirl again this year."

"I wish you had told me sooner," Julia said solemnly. "Then we both could have been cowgirls."

Now it was my turn to be impressed.

"We have plenty of time," I said, thinking I could make her a cowgirl in a couple of hours. A hat. Some boots. A bandana. Yee-haw. 

She shook her head and smiled at my ignorance of the time it takes to assemble a proper Halloween costume. There were shoes to consider, she explained. And make-up. And the perfect bag.

"Maybe next year," she said kindly, turning back to her sequins.

Fly-By

For Christmas, Tiffany's dad gave us an electric fly swatter shaped like a tennis racket. All through the winter and spring, it sat in the corner of our apartment, untouched. But Tiffany finally unsheathed it one night when the summer flies came around to spoil our deck time.

"Is it dangerous?" I asked her.

"Hold out your finger," she suggested.

"No way! Test it on yourself!"

There were lots of flies circling our dinner that evening. But Tiffany, whose hand-eye coordination leaves something to be desired (she once got a horseshoe caught in a tree), couldn't hit a single one. And, I, unwilling to swat anything to its death, wouldn't take the racket from her hand.

I guess the flies told all their friends what a great hangout they'd found because, later that night, just as we lay down, an enormous fly rose above the foot of our lofted bed. It looked--and sounded--like an Apache helicopter. 

"Disgusting!" I yelled.

"Get me the zapper!"

I scrambled down our ladder and came back up with the Racket of Death. It turns out it is dangerous. Before I had time to take cover, Tiffany wound up and swung, narrowly missing my head. 

"Watch it!" I cried, diving across her body to get out of the arc of her swing.

She swung again and again, letting out little screams each time. 

"Is it possible you are missing it every time?" I asked, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. "Maybe it doesn't work."

ZAP!

The fly suddenly dropped, lifeless. Onto my pillow.

"Disgusting!" I yelled again.

"Ha!" Tiffany laughed. "I knew I could get it!"

Childless Adults

"So, how many kids are going to be there again?" I asked Tiffany as we packed on Thursday for a weekend in Cape Cod with some of our best friends and their children.

"Seven, I think," she said.

I considered the number in my head.

"Weren't there seven dogs at Thanksgiving last year?" I asked.

"I don't think it's the same thing," she said.

It's not.

First of all, at last year's Thanksgiving, humans outnumbered dogs 18-7. In Cape Cod, children outnumbered parents 7-6. When you count Tiffany and me, grown-ups outnumbered small people by one sleep-deprived body. But I'm not sure you should count us. Tiffany and I are not parents. We are childless adults. I have a new appreciation for what that means after this weekend. It means:

1) We can go to bed when we want.
2) We can wake up when we want.
3) We can leave when we want.

But we didn't want to do anything without the kids. So we went to bed late and got up early and didn't walk out the door without holding the hand of or carrying someone's child.

As non-parents, Tiffany and I are extra cautious. Whenever we left one child to attend to another, we made an official hand-off to a mom or dad:

"Molly, your son is sitting in your car in the driveway with headphones on. The keys may or may not be in there with him."

"John, does your daughter eat sand?"

"Darren, your son took his pants off. Again."

"Bobby, your daughter tried to pee in her bathing suit behind that tree. You might want to get a hose. And some soap."

"Teresa, your youngest is starting his 1,000th ascent of the hard wooden stairs."

"Megan, your youngest bit that one."

Releases of liability aside, the truth is, we had a blast. When Tiffany and I got back to the relative calm of Manhattan (we aren't in charge of anyone here), it felt weird to just hold each other's hand as we walked to dinner. When we came out of the restaurant, I saw a baby in a stroller and had to think for a second:

"Am I partially responsible for making that baby smile?"

And I was kind of sad that I wasn't, so I made a funny face at her anyway.

"C" is for Cookie...

"I bet Brandon hated you when you were little," Tiffany said the other night while we were eating our dessert on the couch.

She was looking at my plate, which I had balanced on my knees.

"Why?" I asked. Then I looked at her plate. "Ohhhhhh."

Tiffany only had one bite of her Peruvian cookie left. And by left, I mean, the bite on her plate was the only bite she had left in this country. Her aunt had brought the cookie over on her most recent trip and wouldn't be returning any time soon. I had my entire Peruvian cookie, plus most of the frozen banana we had split in two. I was eating the banana first because, although it was delicious, the Peruvian cookie was much better. I'm a big believer in self-deprivation, as you might have guessed by now. (And, yes, "hate" is a strong word, but my brother was bothered that I could make my Halloween candy last until Valentine's Day)

"I am slow," I agreed, proceeding to eat my banana slice by slice before moving onto my cookie. This I pulled apart and ate bite by bite, in between sips of milk.

"Come on," Tiffany groaned.

"I'm savoring!" I cried.

Soon I forgot my slow eating was driving her crazy, fascinated as I was by "So You Think You Can Dance" (for the record, I do not think I can).

When I ate my last bite, I felt a little sad, as I always do.

But I felt much worse when Tiffany yelled: "YES! I knew I could do it!" and then popped her remaining cookie morsel into her mouth.

Sunny Days

Tiffany and I went to visit my brother and some friends in Florida last weekend. As usual, I got too much sun (see here and here). I didn't realize just how much I'd gotten until Tiffany and I went into the bathroom to brush our teeth together before our early morning flight home.

When I looked up from applying toothpaste to my toothbrush, Tiffany was staring at my reflection in the mirror.

"What?" I asked.

"Your..." she tried to finish her sentence, but burst out laughing. "Your... look at your..."

"Oh my god, my lips!" I yelled, when I saw what she was talking about. They were huge. I looked like Goldie Hawn after her collagen injection in the movie First Wives Club.

"'Mustafa!'" I said to Tiffany in the mirror, puckering my mouth at her.

Soon we were both giggling, and that's how Brandon found us when he came out of his bedroom.

"What is going on... oh my god, your lips!" he cried.

"Don't tell mom," I warned him, pointing my toothbrush at him.

Then we all laughed until I had to stop because the skin on my lips was cracking. It was easy to stop because leaving my brother makes me so sad.

But later we had to laugh again when Tiffany--my Greek/Peruvian sun goddess--realized how burnt her back was.

"You did a horrible job putting block on my back," she complained.

I looked at her, confused.

"Did I put sunscreen on your back?"

"Oh my god, no wonder!" she cried. "Nobody was looking out for me!"

"Mustafa," I answered. 

If It Isn't Heaven, It's...

Tiffany and I are pretty good in a car (see the posts on our epic cross-country move here).

But we disagree on the rules of a roadtrip. Specifically, she feels that the passenger should never be allowed to sleep, under any circumstances, while the car is in motion. I disagree. The advantages of having two drivers include having the chance to take a nap when you are not driving, which I did on a recent Sunday when we drove back from New Hampshire.

"Are you sleeping?" Tiffany cried.

"Huh?" I asked, jumping in my seat.

"I was waving my hand in front of your face, and you didn't even flinch!"

"Yes, I was sleeping! That's what you get to do when you're not driving. As the driver, you get to control the radio."

She was not persuaded.

"Let's play a game," she chirped.

But, soon after we began 20 Questions, playing a game became troublesome too.

"I'm thinking of a person..." I started.

"Is the person famous?"

"No."

"Then what's the point of picking this person?" she complained.

During her turn, she thought of a place.

"Is it in the United States?" I asked.

"No," she answered.

"Is it in another country?"

"No."

"Impossible," I said, then: "Is it in Outer Space?"

"No."

"What?? What kind of a place... wait, a minute... have I been there?"

"You may get there eventually," she said.

I narrowed my eyes.

"Is it heaven?"

She shook her head, smiling.

Hell.

Dignity

The cab driver gestured to the back of his SUV.

"Yeah, I think you're right," I said. "It fits."

He shook his head. We weren't really speaking the same language.

He began gesturing again, pointing at me, then the back of his SUV.

"Ahhh," I said. "Oh, you want me to sit back here...with that?"

I waved my hand at the desk we'd just purchased and crammed into the back-back of his car, eliminating his actual back seats.

He nodded vigorously.

As a kid, I loved riding in the back-back of our Jeep. It felt like an adventure, even if we were just going to the grocery store. 

But, at 31, I have standards. And dignity to maintain. You know, the kind of dignity you maintain while standing on Broadway trying to hail a cab with an Ikea desk you bought from a girl who just graduated from college.

I looked at Tiffany. She shrugged and headed toward the front seat.

I crawled into the back-back underneath our desk.

"Yes, ma'm," the cabbie said, pleased.

Crossing Manhattan takes a long time on a Friday night. Twisted up between the legs of our desk, I caught up on lots of emails and posted a status update on Facebook. I even texted Tiffany, concerned at the hardship she was facing up there in an actual seat, with air conditioning.

"Look in your rear view mirror," I typed.

"What am I supposed to be seeing?" she answered.

"My hand!" I responded. I was waving my hand like a maniac through the crack between our desk drawer and the right rear door, trying to catch her eye.

"Can't see anything," she wrote. "Tinted windows."

I sighed and turned around to find the man in the car behind me staring through our rear windshield, which was not, like all the other windows in our cab, tinted.

I gave him a little wave. 

Dignity be damned.

Home Sweet... Wait a Minute...

Of all the things I don't do well, being wrong is what I'm best at being bad at.

Unfortunately, I'm wrong a lot.

Even, it turns out, about which apartment building I belong in.

We live in a dark brown brownstone on a street with approximately three other dark brown brownstones (and other light brown ones, pinkish ones, greyish ones, etc.). For the first few months, it was easy to tell which building was ours (Apart from looking at the address. That's too easy.) because there was a bike chained up out front. But, once the weather improved, whoever owns that bike must have gotten on it and decided not to come back because all that's left is the lock.

Sometimes, I go up the wrong stairs and even into the wrong vestibule before I realize I'm not actually home.

Take, for instance, the other day when Tiffany and I got into a fight on our run.

It went something like this:

(heading out of Central Park onto a certain street)

Me (exhausted): "Why are we going this way?"

Tiffany: "Why does it matter?"

Me: "Because my way is faster."

Tiffany: "But why does it matter?"

Me: (silent treatment)

By the time we made it to our street, I was a few angry paces ahead, so I was first to slow to a stop and walk (read: stomp) up our stairs.

"Where are you going?" Tiffany called, as she walked past me to our real stairs.

Why does it matter?

Candy-Coated Is Forever

It's official.

Tiffany and I are getting married.

Yes, yes, I know. It's been months since I proposed and put a ring on it. But that all seems a little flimsy now that Tiffany's cousin put a picture of us on hundreds of pink and white M&Ms and served them at an engagement party in our honor.

Forget all that stuff about melting (in your mouth, not your hands), nothing says forever like having your joint-likeness on pieces of candy-coated chocolates.

I didn't even know engagement parties existed until I became engaged. I'm not sure if that's because the few married friends I treasure didn't have engagement parties or if it's because the few married friends I have treasure me so little they didn't invite me to their engagement parties, but, in any case, I did not know what they were.

I knew about showers, bachelor/ette parties, and weddings.

At first, I was nervous about the engagement parties our families threw for us (we wanted to get married to throw a party for all of them!). It turns out they're wonderful. Mostly, when Tiffany and I tell people we're engaged, all anyone wants to know is when we're getting married. Never mind that it took eight years to get where we are.

But an engagement party is all about gathering to celebrate the incremental marital accomplishment of asking (and answering). We're lucky to have so many people we love and who love us back cheering us on.

Also, I feel especially grateful to have leftover bags of candy with our faces on it.