Too Sweet To Be Sour Too Nice To Be Me

I added some crude stick figure cartoons I drew a few years ago so that this wasn't a wall of text. You can thank me by not disappearing forever while I restructure my entire life.

Hello all!

As you may have noticed, my update schedule has slipped across the board. Luckily, I have three very good excuses reasons for this:

1.) I am looking for a new job.
2.) I am moving to a different state.

And most importantly,

3.) I am getting married.

In other words, not quite the vague “I’ve got some stuff going on” I was once worried I’d have to put up here to explain delays and/or lack of content. In fact, I’m “death of an immediate family member” and “birth of a first child” away from winning Change of Life Event Bingo.

I try not to let my personal life intrude on here, insofar as that’s possible when I’m busy telling you about how my family almost killed me by “teaching” me to swim or about all the sicknesses the Neti pot didn’t cure me of. Oh, and sometimes about how fucking depressed I get. That’s pretty personal right there.

This seems different, though. It’s too much like the popular notion of a blog, in which I tell everyone about my life and all the sandwiches I eat. Wait, we have twitter for that last part now. #mundane

Even so, I figured I owed it to anyone who regularly reads what I put on here to explain what was going on.

I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my life. This makes every finals week I’ve been through, graduate or undergraduate, seem like a cake walk by comparison. (Side note: what the hell is a cake walk?) With the exception of the sad/happy day when I do win Change of Life Event Bingo, I don’t expect to ever have more things going on at the same time.

There’s no time when there’s not something with an impending deadline that I could be doing. Those drapes gotta come down. Have I checked government jobs today? I need to call that restaurant and make sure we get our catering order reserved.

In the middle of that, writing has taken a backseat. It’s frustrating but true. I’m comforted by the fact that it’s also temporary. No one plans a wedding all the time, except for wedding planners, those sick freaks. This is your life? Really? Choke on a three tiered cherries jubilee cake with vanilla bean icing.

A tangent to a tangent, wedding planning is hard. It in no way resembles what I had in my head. I expected Lord of the Rings, I got A Game of Thrones; I expected Mad Max, I got The Road.

Everything is much more complicated and stressful. For example, flowers. It’s like, “What kind of flowers do you want?” “I want red.” “There is no flower named red. Which of the available 34 kinds of red flowers do you want, in what size, in what arrangement, in wharrr raggga HRRRR GRAAAAA!”

At that point the flower lady turns into some kind of monster designed by Guillermo del Toro, one with mouths for eyes and genitalia that also function as wings. Tears of blood may be involved.

For someone who occasionally spends way more time than is rational trying to pick out salad dressing at the grocery store, or reading reviews of things like slotted spoons on Amazon, making all of these tiny decisions is challenging. There are a lot of decisions to be made, decisions that branch into other decisions like the tech tree in a turn based strategy game.

If wedding planning was as easy as researching ion engines and colonizing Beta Rygel IV, planetary class 29, I’d have conquered matrimony many months ago.

In addition to being logistically complicated, it's also emotionally involved. While the transistor radio I call a heart is only capable of feeling three and a half human emotions, all of those emotions pile on board the party bus when it’s time for wedding planning.

It’s more or less the same thing with looking for an apartment two states away and a job search in a depressed market. I have to remember not to get sick, and to try to move around or something, because everyone I’ve ever known will be looking at me in formal wear soon.

Lest I sound bitter, I am excited about all the things that are happening. The downsides of wedding planning do not translate for me into the downsides of being married. That part I am happy about beyond the telling of it. I am also looking forward to exploring a new city and finding something different to do with myself during daylight hours.

I told a friend that by October my life will be perfect, and that when she sees it in the light of the newly risen sun, she will weep tears of joy, the perfect ones where there’s neither strange hiccupping nor snot bubbles - just a single runner of saline from the corner of a perfectly moistened eye.

However, as an old farmer I just made up always says, “October ain’t tomorrow!” I’ve got a lot of month between now and then, and in that time I’ve still got to keep this thing going.

I’ve reached out to a few friends who are creative types, asking for some submissions. This place isn’t big enough for me to call it anything as fancy as “guest content”, so I’ll call it “People helping me out so this blog doesn’t go as fallow as a fictional farmer’s corn field.”

As for Batman recaps, I want to get back to regular updates. I’m not kidding when I say that I feel like I’m letting Batman down. I think he’d understand, but it really depends on which incarnation we’re talking about and which writer is filling his speech bubbles.

I know Frank Miller’s Batman doesn’t have time for my wedding shit; there’s a war on crime, on every sick necked junkie and two bit hood who thinks Gotham is a devil’s playground. I’m the devil in this concrete Inferno. I’ll dole out hell night after night, one broken bone at a time. I’m burning the trash, whether it wears a uniform or holds an office. So go ahead and have your little ceremony. Dress everything up in lace so you can forget this city is rotting.

Sorry, got carried away there. It happens.

As for fiction, there’s a lot I was working on. I’m excited about it. I keep getting new ideas, ideas that don’t care whether I have free time right now or not. They’re the chorus of voices I try to silence so I can measure my furniture or buy spackle. I’m having mixed success.

In closing, as this is way longer than I intended it to be, hang in there. I’m not done, but I am delayed.