Catching up: Jamaica, day one

Derek and I went to San Antonio yesterday, and it was an all day trip, and we were fucking exhausted. So exhausted that we got into a super ugly argument five minutes from home, and we didn't speak for three hours (in fairness, we both came home, stalked into separate corners, and took naps). After we woke up and got over ourselves, I cooked us Mongolian Beef with gailan, and we blew through season one of Sherlock. We decided today would be a super lazy day, and it has been. I have been hell bent on perfecting my stuffed brioche french toast, so this morning was chocolate cherry chevre with mixed jam. I have been infusing the eggs with cooked down rum and cooked brown sugar, and holy fuck, this every Sunday indulgence is god damn AMAZING. I haven't gotten it right yet, and I know why. I need a pastry filler. But barring that, it's still fucking delicious, and I'm pretty attached to the Sunday ritual. This American Life, big breakfast, and sitting at our computers drinking our coffee, working on photos. 

Getting back on track, I went to Jamaica a month ago. 

Perhaps this will illustrate how small I truly am as an individual, but I had never before been out of the country. When my passport arrived in the mail, it hit me that going on my honeymoon was far more than enjoying nine days and eight nights of bliss with my husband, it was making my corner of the universe just a tiny bit bigger. I've always said that was the ultimate point of traveling, so it's not like this was a true revelation. And I've also traveled, but only inside of America. I've been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things. But leaving the country was wholly new, and getting my passport was one of the final nails in the coffin that I was really about to become a bigger person. I was so excited. 

I'm terrified of flying right until the plane starts to taxi. About there, I'm resigned to my fate. If I die, I die. It's completely out of my hands, so I might as well enjoy myself until I explode in the sky. My best friend, Amber, had never flown before. Ever. Because her terror of planes far surpasses mine. To the point where she gets irritated by my jokes about how I could totally die on a flight. She went with Derek and I to the airport, because she was going home the same day that we were going to Jamaica. I was a very good girl, and spent the entire four hours we were at the airport without a single joke about dying in transit to Jamaica. 

Amber and I having breakfast, sans death jokes.

Derek and I had two flights to take: Denver to Dallas, and Dallas to Negril.

If I look like I've been crying in that picture, it's because I had been. I was SO FREAKED OUT about flying internationally, despite my excitement about making my wold bigger. Our flights combined were only six hours. I cried for four of them, and slept for the other two. In fact, I worried myself into such a frenzy that I felt sick when we landed in Jamaica. Only a mild sick, though. Going through customs was so fucking COOL for me, and an absolute breeze. I expected it to take at least an hour; it took ten minutes, and that's a generous estimate. 

We had a representative from our resort waiting to escort us to a luxurious lounge area, and this is when the heat and the humidity hit me, and every step I took escalated my feelings of disgusting sick. They offered Derek and I drinks, and I asked for water, and sat down feeling crabby and revolting and anxious and tired. We were informed that we had a two hour drive from the airport to the resort, and I got a bit more green around the gills thinking of the bumpy car ride that the man was explaining to us. The only nice thing that happened on the way from the airport to the resort was the air conditioning in the car. I fell into a tumbling sleep the second I sat down in our (quite posh) transport van. 

When we arrived at the hotel, a very excited Derek and a really heat sick and dehydrated Drea were given the option to take boozy refreshments. Derek took them, I asked for water, and then threw a temper tantrum over having to fill out arrival paperwork. But only internally. I felt more sick by the second, and listening to Derek exclaim over how gorgeous our hotel was (it really fucking was), and how delicious his drink was, and how good the ocean smelled (all true things) only seemed to make it worse. Derek and I walked up to our third floor suite, he went and sat down on the balcony, and I shed my clothes and limply got into bed, hoping I would feel better soon. 

I took a nap, Derek went down to eat, and when I woke up, I was so incredibly thirsty, but also terrified to drink local water. I drank it, anyway. It's not like Colorado water, but it's definitely good enough to drink. 

My hotel room (which was a MASSIVE suite. Fuck yeah! But it's easier to say hotel room, or just room, and it also lowers how god damn pretentious and disgustingly obsessed with status symbols I sound) was comfortably warm, and comfortably humid, and it smelled like the saltiness and slightly fishy undertone of the ocean. In retrospect, I'm so disappointed I felt too sick to enjoy it in that moment. Derek was going on about how he'd walked around the hotel and he was excited to see it in the daylight. 

I turned on Last Week Tonight, and hoped I'd feel better after a full night's rest. 

Thinking back on it now, it was SO disappointing to arrive into a foreign country for the first time and to feel so absolutely miserable. I wanted to exclaim and feel excited, and be totally immersed in the fact that I was so far from home, and I was so far from where I was a member of the status quo. 

But I'd certainly have that moment. I had eight days ahead of me that were full of them. 

He is no less than a stuffed man

Holy. Fucking. FUCK.

It's been a crazy month. Probably the most hectic month I've experienced in years. I have a lot of backlogged blogging to do, so that's a thing.

We received our sneak peek of our wedding photos while we were on our honeymoon. Those details are coming.

I want to post these.

I'm going to be honest, I took screen captures of them. We don't receive the actual copies until Sunday (eee!). I've left the watermark on all of them, except the ones that are from collages. I want Elevate Photography to get every ounce of credit they deserve, because Ryan and Allie and Tyler were fucking AMAZING.

From left to right: Kati, Amber, me, Stevie, and Syb. I am so fucking excited to see the one on one pictures of all of us. You bet your ass I'll be posting those up when I get them, too. Sorry. Just kidding, I'm not.

My handsome daddy. If anybody else has a better daddy, they're wrong. I love my daddy, and I know what a struggle my wedding day was for him. But that's a story for another day.

My husband makes me happy. If that isn't obvious as fuck, that's why I'm telling you.

Who is that? Oh, nobody, just my god damn husband. My hot as fuck husband. Look at that fucking jawline. God damn.

This picture is so much cooler when I don't fuck it up when I rip it off the internet instead of waiting for my copies.

I loved my flowers. I loved everything about that day. Especially all of the drinking! Of which I did a lot of.

I wish I could say this was the first drink I'd had that day. This was immediately after the ceremony. And it was probably my sixth drink. Of the hour.

This is one of my very favorite photos. We look like superheroes. There are the palettes I spoke of in my last post, and they are wobbly. Wobbly as untethered balls. But this shot, and the others that followed, were so worth it.

Never anywhere without my resting bitch face! Even my own wedding. Where I said "shit" after delivering my vows, and also said "I guess" instead of "I do". What the fuck.

This picture, from far away, makes it look like I have black eyes and no teeth. But it's Derek's favorite photo.

A small moment to ourselves before the craziness started. A beautiful moment. God damn, it was an amazing day.

My son. What a silly, wonderful ham. It's been so hard to be away from him. I'm counting down the days until I see him again. Only nine!

"Are we married?" "We're fucking married!" Best conversation to walk down the aisle to after getting hitched.

Our rings. Ryan grabbed a fantastic picture of them.

We'll see the other pictures either Sunday, or a few days after. I think Ryan said he's out of town, so we may have to wait.

It took me too long to grab these photos, and I can't do the preface to eight hundred updates that I'd like.

Derek and I are going to San Antonio tomorrow to spend the day, provided the weather isn't bullshit.

I have to wake up in five hours. Fuck. I'm exhausted. But Derek is home after being away for a week, leaving me in Texas all alone. With nothing to do. No internet. No nothing. But more on that later.

Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme!

Jamaica, day one.

I was fucking BLASTED this morning, so my husband let me sleep. Until 10. I haven't done that in a long time. We had breakfast delivered to our room, and it was delicious. Honest to god, I've never had bacon that god damn delightful.

After breakfast, we went swimming in the ocean, and I have missed the ocean. It was so fucking tits to float around on the waves, and tool about with Derek. We got coconut water served to us in coconuts, and it was fresh and fantastic and holy fuck, I don't know why I don't live here.

We had lunch, came upstairs, lounged around, and just enjoyed ourselves.

Derek took a nap, I took a shower and blow dried my hair (which is a fruitless endeavor, if I'm being honest. It's so fucking humid that I frizz out after two minutes of stepping out of my room), and then we went and had dinner. I wasn't even hungry, but I had braised oxtail because I fucking could, that's why.

So, I kinda got married.

I got married yesterday.

Well, technically two days ago now, since it's Sunday, according to time. But it still feels like yesterday.

It.

Was.

AMAZING.

I had an amazing night with my ladies on Wednesday (by amazing night I mean we all got fucking shit house wasted and talked until 2:30 am), Thursday was the rehearsal dinner at HuHot (that's where Derek and I had our first date. Having the rehearsal dinner there made so much sense. And it was delicious, so there's that), and then Amber and Kati and I stayed at my wedding suite (which was fucking AWESOME). We all relaxed in the hot tub in my room (topless, obviously, because we're awesome), had a few drinks, ordered a pizza (we were really drunk at this point, so Amber tried to order us pizza from Dallas, Texas), and then we watched Rush Hour. Kati and Amber fell asleep. I Stayed up all night feeling INCREDIBLY unwell and nervous and all around sick and shitty in my tummy.

And then I woke up Friday morning feeling amazing. Amber and I dashed around picking up last minute wedding stuff, went back to the hotel, and got our hair and make up done. Me, Amber, Kati, Stevie, my mom, and Syb had a blast getting all dolled up. Amber, Kati and I left the hotel and drove up to Bella Sera as fast as we could, because I was late. Oops. We changed, and the normal pictures took place. I did first look with Derek, and I can't even make clear how fucking blow-me-away handsome he looked. Holy shit.

We left Bella Sera and drove to a factory site to take our bridal party pictures. We got kicked off of the property, but two hours after we arrived. So really, we're the winners here. I was totally action bride, man. I was jumping in and out of semi-truck trailers, standing on pallets that were precariously balanced, balancing above pools of stagnant water (it smeled atrocious, and there was at least one dead dove floating just under the slick surface. Gross), but these pictures are incredible. We had a gorgeous sneak peek of them at the reception.

From the picture site, we went off and got married. And I had the most GORGEOUS fucking wedding ever. I nearly lost my shit SEVERAL times. How I held it together is unknown to me, but if I started crying, I would have uncontrollably sobbed, so I had to keep it in. I did. Only a couple of tears slipped out.

Forgive the order of pictures here. Blogger is kind of a dick about it.

This was right before we went off and did family photos, right after we got married. I believe my caption for this on facebook was, "I'm married, mother fuckers!" Because I fucking am.

This was at the end of the night. Amber was fucking lit, I wasn't as sober as I claim I was, and I was soaking up time with my hot as fuck best friend. Eighteen years we've been friends. Eighteen. This girl is one of the big loves of my life.

Anali and her fiance came!! We had a great time together. We danced and danced and danced. Tosh danced a lot, too, but we didn't get a selfie together. Which I am eternally bummed about. My friends are beautiful, though!!!

Carl!!!! This fucking guy RULES. His picture with Derek when they did groomsman photos was my favorite picture of them all, because it was hilarious and unexpected. I can't wait to get those. But Carl really stepped up the groomsman game. He was so on it. I love the fuck out of Carl. I'm sad to move to a state where he isn't around to hang out with.

Lordy, we are erotic and supple!! Kati made everything happen to be a bridesmaid at the last minute, and girl really pulled it out for me. I hadn't seen her in three years, and I had missed her terribly. Our picture together was one of my favorites, because she yelled to Ryan, "Hey, we both have physics equations tattooed on us. Can that be in our picture?" and that's what was in our picture. LOVE IT. Love her. She's so special, and I'm legitimately honored to be her friend.

My peaches. My stunning, amazing bestie. Going through a really rough time, personally, and still made me a priority. How much more can you ask for in a bestie? Not much.

I don't know where Amber was for this, or my sister. But these girls were just fine by me.

Our monogram!!!!! It looked amazing. My shitty cell phone doesn't do it justice. But it legitimately happened!!! The lighting says so!!

Right after hair and make up. I'm really bad at selfies if I'm by myself. Technically, Kati is in the shot, so it should be good by virtue of not being just me. Unfortunately, my theory doesn't hold water here.

This handsome mother fucker is my handsome, hot as fuck husband. He's gorgeous and sarcastic and shitty and wonderful and amazing, and all night, he'd lean in and say I was his property. My dad wanted to make it known that if Derek was expecting a dowry, all he had to offer was a goat. I didn't even know my dad had a goat.

He doesn't.

Selfie on the way to the venue. Holy shit. Gettin' murried.

Friday was amazing. I couldn't have had another wedding. I wouldn't have been happy. And Derek being my husband makes me so fantastically pleased.

Today, Amber and I got matching tattoos.

There's mine! I went first. It hurt, but not that bad. 

Both of them together!!

They're the coordinates for where we met. My amazing husband pulled a favor and got us in on literally zero notice, we got a killer deal, and they look fantastic.

I wake up to go to Jamaica in 4 hours. I'm fucking terrified I'm going to die on the way there, or there, or on my way back. I'm so scared. I feel like I don't deserve this much happiness.

I just don't want to die. I want to travel to Jamaica with my husband, sleep in an ocean view suite, have sex, eat food, take pictures, swim in the ocean, come home, pack up, have Thanksgiving, go to Texas, and live my ordinary life with my extraordinary family.

I'm not one for prayer, but I'm as close to praying I get to do that as it gets.

I'm terrified.

We can cook bread and chat about our internal skeletons

It's 11 at night, and I'm just now eating dinner.

Stevie and I had Little Nepal for lunch today. At 12. And I hadn't eaten since.

I read all of my old blogs today. They look deleted, but they're sitting as drafts now. I didn't want to toss out three years of blogging on a whim, and I'm certainly glad I didn't.

I wanted to paint tonight, but I spent too much time dicking around with homework.

Also, I get married in eleven days. What the fuck.

Blog day two, electric boogaloo.

I just returned from my orthopedic surgeon. I got some really bad news.

Fuck.

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men

Holy shit. The wedding is thirteen days away now.

I've been in a really weird place, emotionally. I can't quite describe it, so weird is going to have to suffice.

I could say I feel like being self-destructive, and I could also say that I feel like holing myself up so nobody can see me until the wedding. Those would both be true things. I'm scared and nervous and elated and nervous and scared.

I'm really afraid of fucking all of this up. I'm afraid of being stagnant, and I'm afraid that I'll be sick on my wedding day, and I'm also terrified that I'm not doing the right thing. That maybe I really shouldn't get married. Not because of any way I do or don't feel about Derek, but because of me. And how I am. I've spent so long not wanting to get married that, even though I want to get married, I can't be sure I'm doing the right thing.

I'm pretty sure I am.

My eyes are wide open about the possibility of getting divorced, and ending up hating Derek, and Derek hating me. There's no pretending this is going to last forever. We're people, and people are so prone to failing at monumentally huge things like marriage.

It's a lot to think about, and I've been thinking about all of it. I've talked to Allen a lot about where we fucked up, and if Derek and I are different, from an outsider's perspective. It's been fantastic getting to do that. It really helps. I see the value in my relationship with Derek, and how it's like no other relationship I've had. I know that. I know that marrying him is going to be wonderful, even if it isn't one day. And I think that's what's getting me. Thinking that I may have a blemished record one day. It's different to be never married with a shitload of failed relationships. Being divorced is an entirely different animal, in my mind. It sounds so ugly. And it also sounds so avoidable. By not getting married. I think these things, and I think, maybe this is a mistake. Maybe Derek and I should just be in cohabitation phase until we either die, or are through with each other. And I settle on that and get ready to tell Derek that maybe we shouldn't get married, but then I think about this:

I don't care.

Ultimately, I don't care if Derek and I get divorced (don't twist that). I don't care if this burns down to the ground, because it's something I want to do.

I get it now in a way I never did. When you actually WANT to be with somebody, and the problems you have are trivial in comparison, marriage is practically the only course of action. This isn't to say that people who choose not to get married are making the wrong choice and they  need to hop along to the nearest altar. I don't believe that at all. I still believe that marriage is a ridiculous institution, and it's just a party and a piece of paper, and people shouldn't be expected to marry somebody just because. That's fucking stupid. I can still think marriage is stupid and realize it's the best choice for me. Kind of like a tattoo. Tattoos aren't for everyone. some tattoos are stupid, and some people who get tattoos should have really, really, REALLY not gotten tattoos. But when something is REALLY important to you, it needs to be boldly and permanently celebrated.

Listen, that metaphor worked in my head, and if it didn't land here, then whatever, but I'm leaving it as is.

I really am excited to get married. Excited and scared and nervous and all of it. It's bizarre to think that in thirteen days, I'll be someone's wife. Someone will be my husband.

I didn't really get it before, but I get it now.

As a not even related aside, Allen told me the other day that the Naval Academy where Top Gun was filmed (or modeled after or whatecer) charges people five dollars for quoting that movie. I really fucking hope that's true. It made me laugh so, so hard. I tried to find something to verify this, and found this TIL reddit thread which, sadly, has a link that is 404ing HARD. However, I'd be lying if I said the comments didn't make me laugh my ass off. Certain people REALLY need to know about this.

On expiration dates, selfish love, marriage proposals, and a thing or two about sailfish

My wedding is in 19 days. Nineteen. Fucking. Days. (Eighteen now. This took two days to write)

I've now spent three months without Derek. We've had a few weekends in between where we've been together, either where he lives, where I live, or in between the two (seriously, Amarillo fucking sucks. It sucks my dick. But their Indian place is FANTASTIC). He just went home from a long weekend here two weeks ago, and I've missed him terribly. But I've spent a lot of my alone time thinking about things. Wedding things, mostly. I think this is all normal. Hear me out.

I've had five proposals in my life. One was a ridiculously overblown gesture from a ridiculously overblown idiot when I was 16. I said yes, because I was also a ridiculously overblown idiot that was obsessed with romance. It wasn't romantic, it was stupid, and I don't think it counts, but it's on the list. Thanks, John, for not marrying me, because I had no business at 16 marrying a 23 year old, and also, you were gross. Did I mention my taste has almost ALWAYS been questionable? No? I think that's because it goes without saying.

The second proposal of marriage is one of three that I remember in perfect, unbroken detail. My daughter's father and I were fucking done. It was 4 in the morning, we had been arguing all night, I was 19 years old. I told Chris that I was leaving him, he responded by asking me if I'd marry him, instead. Bold. I told him that he was far too childish and insecure, and I was still too young to deal with his insecurities. And I left a few weeks after. I hope Chris is happy with Shila. I think they're well suited to each other, in that they're both awful people that are as intelligent as rotten watermelon.

Allen is next on the list, and I almost wanted to marry him. Almost. The proposal was forced, though. By my mother. Of all the orchestrators in all the world. I knew it wasn't really real, he knew it wasn't really real, and thankfully, we got no farther into the process than me putting together a few slapdash websites for a wedding we both knew was never going to happen. It didn't feel right when he asked me, even though I had talked myself into wanting him to ask. We had been together for five years, it felt appropriate. But it wasn't. Allen is one of my best friends now, and we didn't make that monumental mistake of getting married because society thought we should. We're better for it.

Dan is next on the list. I remember this one, too. And it fucking hurts. Dan had just gotten back from Afghanistan, which is, like, the fucking WORST cliche. I had taken a week off just to be with him. A few months in to Dan's deployment, I got some medical news. Bad medical news. I hadn't mentioned it to Dan, because I didn't want to cause alarm or panic or worry, and despite the things I say about Dan, I think he did care about me. So, on an outing to Castle Rock, he made some comment about being old or something, I was in a funk and responded with some passive remark about knowing you're going to die sooner than everybody else, and then Dan got all bent out of shape, I spilled the medical beans, and we were pretty fucking silent the rest of the day until Dan wanted to talk about my options later that night. As Dan saw it, option one was he'd pay for me to have my shit taken care of. I said no. Option two was to marry him. And every single "FUCK YOU" alarm bell went off in my head. To set the record straight, I had daydreamed about that the entire fucking time he was deployed. I thought maybe, all of that time apart would pull his head out of his ass, he'd tell me he loved me, and everything would be perfect and happy and amazing and he'd want to marry me. Except that's not how the story goes. At all. Clearly. I thought about it. I asked Dan to tell me if he was asking for him, or asking because I was sick. He didn't even answer. No yes, no no, just silence. And I resented him mightily for that. I still do, even though I got my answer about why he asked after we broke up. He swears he asked because he legitimately wanted to marry me, and because he loved me, but he didn't know how to say it, and he was scared. I've called Dan a coward a lot over the last four years, but in fairness, I was a coward, too. I had a billion opportunities to get out, when I wanted to get out. And I dealt with a lot of blowback from my friends for saying I was done, and then sticking around for more bullshit. Ultimately, I almost said yes, making jokes about being in a loveless marriage, and Dan got one REALLY good dig in at me about saying no, and I think it was legitimately the most hurtful, manipulative, crap-dick thing he ever, ever said to me. And there were SO many things I wanted to say to him about it. But mostly, I just bitched about it to my friends and stuck around, which was a bad move.

I've been thinking about Dan a LOT in the last few weeks. As the days tick down to my wedding date, I think it's only natural to think about where I've failed as far as relationships go. And I'm concerned about a great many things. I think about what it would have been like to marry Dan, and it's not pretty. I painted our entire life picture, and I had done it before so it's not the benefit of retrospect making it an ugly picture, it's just reality. For Dan, I was a concept, not a person. He didn't treat me like a person, and that would have carried through if we had gotten married. I made a joke once to Dan about us getting married and how we would have been divorced, and he told me that if we had gotten married, I still would have been his wife. Which broke my heart, in a very real way. But it also made everything perfectly fucking clear to me, and incidentally, it's when I knew I wanted to marry Derek. Despite my telling Dan that he should do something about the fact that he loved me, of course he loved me, and of course he still did. I was confused and fucked up and hurt, and I felt cheated. But I shouldn't have, because any life with Dan would have been sterile and awful and only one of us would have been happy, and it wouldn't have been me. I don't think it would have been Dan for very long, to be fair. I think my luster would have worn off after maybe five years. Concepts are only as real as you let them be, and to the best of my knowledge, Dan never made me real. I was always an outside thing. Kind of like the Velveteen Rabbit, but without the happy ending.

I would have been ANYBODY Dan wanted me to be. Anybody in the whole wide world. Anybody but me, anyway, because that person wasn't good enough. Which was made clear every damn day. I say a lot of shitty things about my relationship with Dan, and I realize it's not terribly fair of me. Because I was a fucking wretch. Legitimately. Dan deserved better than me, and I hope he's found it in his girlfriend. I sincerely hope they're happy as fuck together, and she's everything he wants, and vice versa. That whole being anybody Dan wanted thing, though...it taught me a LOT. I've spent the last two years with Derek being unabashedly myself. I am fucking crazy, and selfish, and angry, and loud, and stubborn, and neurotic. Unapologetically so. I told myself after Dan that I would never, ever again compromise who I was or how I am just to keep someone happy, and I haven't, and Derek loves me for me. There's no pretense or disguising my bad attitude, or my depression, or the fact that I get irrationally jealous over the dumbest things. He even understands that I STILL, and probably always will, have hang ups about Dan. We've talked about them at great length. But ultimately, I'm where I want to be. Derek and I have a messy, crazy, lazy, adventurous, boring life together. We include each other, we fight all the time, we have sex all the time, and I love him. So very much.

I wouldn't be marrying Derek if I hadn't gone through all of this. I wouldn't be ok with being with Derek if it weren't for Dan, I don't think, and I have nothing but gratitude and appreciation to Dan for that. Dan really did give me exactly what I wanted, just with somebody else. I needed that relationship to fail so this one...the one that's marrying me in 18 days...could work. It may not work forever. Lying about that is stupid. We may burn out and die, too. But I'm SO much more comfortable in myself than I was two years ago.

This is where thinking about my failures has gotten me. I'm not depressed, I'm happy. And that's a weird place to be when you reflect on things you've fucked up. Weird, but so, so good.