Act Two ... Three? Four?

When we last left left our heroine - that's me! - she was poised on the brink of a transition, and emphatically ambivalent about it.  Having met a man whom she could not find any problems with, and who - for some reason probably having to do with an ill-advised vow to laugh at all of his jokes for the remainder of their relationship (yes, he reminds of that at least once a week) - had tolerated her company for the past two years, she was about to move in with him, and she was worried.  What if she became boring and settled?  What if she didn't like having another person around all the time?  What if - horror of horrors - she had to learn to cook?

Now it is sixteen months later, and none of my worst fears have come to pass.  We chose to devote our rental budget to size rather than amenities, which means we have enough space to close a door between us when one of us wants solitude or quiet.  We learned to spend time in the same room without talking, and we got used to talking every day.  And - while I have lately taken to mixing spiralized zucchini with angel hair - I have not, so far, learned to cook.

Also, I am getting married.

This will come as no surprise to most of the remaining readers of this blog, who consist of approximately two people with whom I am friends in real life and who have already heard the news.  But it - still, months after the bestowal of a pretty topaz, well into the photographers-and-florists stage of wedding planning - surprises me.  I found him!  My lobster!  My other shoe!  The elusive Prince Pocket Protector!  And - this will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone except me - he was exactly where, and who, everyone expected all along.  It turns out that the guy for me is not a stoner, criminal, or dropout; he does not live in Australia or Siberia; he has never been married and has no scandalous backstory; he is not cruel or inconsiderate or distasteful in a way that can only be excused by vast depths of perfection imperceptible to everyone but me.  No, he is exactly whom everyone who has ever met me would expect: a mild-mannered ex-physicist, taciturn but funny, dependable and highly intelligent, with a large reservoir of patience and, at this moment, a book about machine learning on his nightstand.

So, that's actually pretty awesome.  I mean, it is awesome in a sarcastic way that my mother and everyone else was right and that all that time I spent looking under metaphorical dating-world rocks and dating the metaphorical slugs I found there in the hopes that one of them would magically metamorphose into PPP was more or less wasted, except that maybe I got some good blog posts out of it.  But also, it is actually really awesome to find someone you're excited about seeing every morning and night for the next - hopefully - fifty years.  You people probably mostly already know that.

Anyway, after that long preamble - which as always, takes up the entire blog post - I will explain why I am (possibly) back: like I said before, I am getting married.  Now, getting married is a very serious thing to do, and most of the issues it raises are too personal to be aired here.  But I am not just getting married, I am having a wedding.  More to the point, I am planning a wedding.  A planning a wedding is... well, it's a lot.  It's exciting and a lot of fun, but it's also occasionally emotional or stressful.  And it's definitely hilarious.  

So - assuming anybody's stuck around this long, and assuming I stick around to write more posts - my little Thesis Blog, which I started eight years ago to chronicle the writing of my thesis and has since then recorded - with varying intensity - the earning of my PhD, new cities and three new jobs, one thousand dates and a handful of relationships, two marathons, and any number of sarcastic remarks, is now, for a few months, going to be a wedding-planning blog.  

Amazingly, the ceiling did not fall in when I typed that.