To Have and to Hold

Although Summer has barely begun, I have already had several adventures, and I have been remiss in documenting them. This is the first of several posts about my recent trip home.

Cupcake recently wed Mr. Cupcake on the beach in sunny Oceanside, CA. It was a lovely ceremony with about 25 people, short, sweet, and beautiful. I think that they are going to be so happy together. They compliment each other well, as Cupcake noted in her vows, and I think that they both have the strong level of commitment necessary to make a marriage work. When they were taking me to the airport after the wedding weekend was over, they were telling me that they had agreed to never mention divorce until and unless every other option had been exhausted.

I think that that is an important agreement to make when you choose to marry someone--you make a vow to your spouse and God and yourself, and you don't break it. Things get hard, life gets messy, but you commit to Making It Work, even when you don't want to, or the dopamine has worn off, or you are so busy that you have to schedule sex (which, you know what, shouldn't be such a bad thing. Anticipation and all that), or when they're being a jerk, or when you're being a jerk. You just do it.

In my role as MOH, I took a minute before we started getting ready to ask Cupcake if she was sure--it was close to wedding time, but there was still more than enough time to bail. She didn't have to do it, but once she said "I Do" there would be no turning back. She looked at me and said "I never had a moment of doubt." Their ceremony was beautiful, despite the fact that the groom was "near death" (his words, not mine--he woke up with quite the cold and Cupcake and I debated taking him to Urgent Care instead of their wedding dinner after taking pictures on the freezing cold beach).

Mr. Cupcake's dad was hysterical and inappropriate. Like a lot. One morning he asked me and a few of the other young people staying in the beach house if we ever "cyber." (As in cyber sex, which he thought was when your brain has sex with someone else's brain over the internet). 

Their reception in our hometown was also great--we got to dance and drink and laugh. The Boy let me dress him up in bunny ears, giant sunglasses, and a lei for the guestbook photobooth and danced with me all night, even though he hates dancing, because I love it. He also spent the better part of 2 days helping us to set up for the wedding and didn't even complain. We ate s'mores and drank margaritas until 1 in the morning.

Things that would be more fun than appyling to PhD programs...Again

Readers, this fall will be my third round of PhD. applications. The first time, I was trying to graduate a full year early and had a letter of recommendation from a woman who was going through somewhat of a breakdown that I understand was not very favorable. I did not get any interviews or acceptances. The second time, I had more experience and a new letter and I got 2 interviews (both eventual rejections off the waitlist) and 2 acceptances. One acceptance was to a PhD program, but I ultimately felt that it wasn't the best fit for me. The other was to a Master's program that was perfect for my research interests, which is where I ended up. Unfortunately for me, that means that in order for me to get that ever-elusive "Dr", I need to apply again, so here I sit, with The Boy, researching programs. He is still not quite certain about what he wants to study within clinical psychology and is looking for a heuristic to narrow the field. He asked me, "Is it wrong to judge people based on their pictures? Some of these people look like assholes and bitches." My response, "It's probably bad to do that, yes." His response, "What if they're just hideous and I don't want to look at them every day?" Me: "Yeah, that's probably bad, too. Although, I have occasionally thought to myself, 'These pictures are open for the whole world to see. Couldn't you have used a brush?'" As you can see, we aren't enjoying ourselves.

Also, when looking at US News rankings of the best programs in the country, we discovered that almost all of the schools that we want to apply to are in the top 20. Awesome.

While I'm looking Boston College, he says to me, "Baby, Boston is cold as fuck. You should hear Boss* talk about it. He says it's cold as fuck. It's really, really cold."

Me to him: "Can we just go be beach bums in Hawaii, instead?" His response: "We could be drug dealers. We're probably smarter than most drug dealers."

Him to me: "[Your undergrad, in your hometown] has a really good clinical program." Me: "Yes, I know." Him: "They're nice, but we aren't living with your parents." Me: "Definitely not."

Here is a list of things I would like more than doing this again:

-Being a Vampire and silvering myself a la TrueBlood (season 4--I just watched it. It's the one with the witches)
-Eating habenero peppers straight
-Running
-Zombie Apocalypse (I'm getting to be a pretty good shot)
-Chinese bamboo torture
-Chinese water torture (the Chinese are a cruel folk)
-Watching Golf
-Eating nothing but broccoli for a week
-Drinking black coffee
-Camping

I'm kind of just hoping that my advisor will know someone and they'll just take me. That would be nice. And they they would also just take The Boy, too. And that they give good stipends. And are in one of the three states that we agreed that we want to live in. A girl can dream, right?

*His childhood best friend.