My Newly Unchanged Life

People like to ask you questions about things. Different people often ask the same question about the same subject. They are genuinely interested in your interests. They want details. This is why people always ask about tattoos "Did it hurt?" They know it hurt. That's not what they want to know. But that is a gateway to talking about the experience as a whole.

I didn't expect to feel different after getting engaged but I did. I still do. I feel awesome. Feeling awesome for nearly an entire week is, in my opinion, a pretty good indicator I'm doing something right. But the question people have asked me most consistently is, what's changed? What's different? Anything? The other question everyone asks is "When's the wedding?" and the answer to that is "We don't know and did not realize you'd be asking that question, I guess, because we are completely unprepared with an answer."

But the conceit of this blog post is that my life has or has not changed due to getting engaged and/or turning 35 and, hey, maybe I could say what's different and what's not and maybe it'll be entertaining. Maybe. So, without further ado, a window into my life as a newly engaged man...

Work is pretty much the same. I'm a software application designer which sounds pretty cut and dry but it entails so much more than you might expect. When I come in to the office each day I check two things, bridge and rocketship. This week, both remained more or less static.

There IS a rocketship in this picture.

This week was Oracle Open World. The software I design for is an Oracle proprietary product so not only were some of my department-mates presenting at Open World but we got a bunch of passes. For a few hours, I was a woman named Teresa. I got a great new grocery bag, a water bottle and a USB thumb drive. I also got to see some of the cutting edge technology on display.

Is it a mistake or an ad for the iPhone 54S?

PG&E is actively involved in the community. Which community? All of them! This week saw the kick-off of our charitable giving campaign and the IT department hosted a silent auction. It may surprise some to find out that I am a connoisseur of the arts. I was delighted to come away from the silent auction being the sole bidder and eventual overall winner of this wonderful addition to my collection of prints of animals wearing hats. Seriously. I can only assume that my bid was so powerful it scared off all other potential bids.

"Wha?" He seemed to say.

 But then, you wouldn't really expect my work life to change much based on an engagement or a birthday. How are things around the house? What's my home life like? Have I had to, you know, grow up? Tone things down. Yes, a little. But I'm still young, alive, kicking it old school and what not.

Just the other night I found I had the house to myself so I busted out my axe and raged on some wild jams until the sonic assault was too much and the cat's asked if I might keep it d-meow-n.

My fingers were starting to hurt from busting crazy hot licks anyway so I decided to head to the shooting range for some target practice. Now, this kind of activity might seem frivolous and not befitting of someone of advanced age and responsibility but I assure you it's for a purpose. In fact, before I got engaged I never shot anything at anything. Practically never. But with the prospect of having a wife and a family having become imminent, I set about preparing myself to defend my brood if/when the time comes.

That's a tight cluster!

What if the cats become zombies?

What if Cat Stevens becomes a zombie?!

Later in the week some friends, Rachel, and I got together for a night of pizza, drinking and birthday celebrating. Here's where things actually seem to be a little different.

Instead of making a dent in this...

We finished this.

 Also, I wasn't the designated driver. That meant that instead of having one glass of wine, I could have two glasses and a shot or two of whiskey (and mean hangover and a touch of regret and a feeling of creeping mortality).

So yeah, I may not be able to hold my drink anymore but I'm still rocking hard and shooting straight and living the high tech bay area dream. Maybe things will change when we tie the knot and settle down for real but maybe not. And that is awesome.

The Best Day Of My Life (So Far)

I'm almost always up in the morning before Rachel. I muddle around trying to be quiet and trying to predict when Rachel will get up so I can have coffee hot and ready to go. It's a small ritual but it's important to me. It's part of our history. Before we lived together, Rachel would stay over on the weekends (she lived in San Mateo and I lived in Berkeley) and I'd get up and lumber out for a short walk in the mornings, returning with a couple of low fat lattes and some kind of delicious pastry or fruit or both. When we first moved in to our new place, our neighbors' orange tree was in full bloom and in our yard. The oranges were hard and dry and didn't have a lot of juice so I'd go out and pick as many as I could and then try to juice as many as I could before Rachel would wake. Getting up first and doing small things for her is one of the main ways I feel like I am able to do something special for my sweetheart.

Sunday, I was up first. I thought about making some coffee and scrambling some eggs and seeing if I couldn't 'salad' the odd assortment of fruit on top of the (eye-melting, DNA-unraveling, atomic-polarity-reversing) microwave. Too sleepy. Our extremely modest alcohol intake the night before had left my no-longer-young body feeling extra no longer young. "Sigh." I thought. I decided that the only reasonable solution would be to walk over to Fellini to get a couple of LOLs (that's what they write on the cup for a low fat latte) and some pastries. But then I thought another thought "I bet I could do this on my bike."

This was, ultimately, a misguided thought. I had assumed, perhaps unreasonably, that gravity on the surface of the Earth, as we perceive it, is basically constant. I did not realize there was caveat to this law, 'except in the interior of a bicycle basket'. I rode over to Fellini's and ordered two coffees and three pastries, a cinnamon breakfast bun, a chocolate croissant, and an apple turnover. I placed the two coffees into laterally opposite corners of the bike basket and bolstered their upright integrity with the placement of the pastries surrounding them. I then walked the bike out of the rough parking lot the street, mounted it, and began to pedal. I learned a lot about the physics of objects inside of a zero-G bike basket during those first few pedal strokes.

One coffee, after ushering up a small geyser of latte foam, flopped over onto its back and began burbling it's coffee contents all over the pastries. I continued riding and reached into the basket to grab this coffee so I could ride with it in my hand. "Problem solved", thought I, and it was for almost the entire ride home. Upon reaching the slight downhill to get to my house, the second coffee, I kid you not, leaped into the air, did a complete end-over-end revolution, landed, flopped over and started to pour coffee onto the bike wheel which in turn sprayed it all over the place. "Sigh." I thought again.

I got the coffee safely home, the pastry cut into easily shared slices and laid out on a cutting board, I began the wait for Rachel to get up game. I knew the day was special. I knew why. She didn't know. This made time seem to move very, very slowly. I watched some news. KRON 4 Weekend News is the funniest thing on television, I'm convinced. I ate most of the pastries and drank all of my coffee. Rachel's was getting cold so I risked revealing the specialness of the day by doing something I had never done before, breakfast in bed. I opened the door tentatively to find Rachel fully awake and jabbing away contentedly at her iPhone. She was surprised but my hand had not been tipped. She decided the idea of flaky pastries in bed was not so great and came downstairs.

I expected I'd get more and more anxious as the day went on. After all, I kind of have, you know, anxiety issues. But I didn't. I wasn't. At all. I expected to be freaking out all day and to have trouble sleeping the night before. Nope and nope. Whenever I thought about what I was going to be doing in just a couple of hours, calm and peace and ethereal joy flowed through my self. I was loving letting the day just unfold all on its own.

Cool as a penguin

As the morning warmed and the clouds burned off, it looked like it was going to be an absolutely perfect day... in Berkeley. But what would it be like in SF? Foggy? Raining? No. Also perfect. The only moment of panic came as I drove out towards the city and Rachel checked the traffic. Traffic all around the park was starting to be yellow and red and that's when I remembered that Hardly Strictly Bluegrass would be going for its final day. I panicked a little and started making back up plans in my head in case we could not get anywhere near the Academy of Sciences. Twin Peaks! I'd never been to Twin Peaks but it's a thing. A bay area thing. Battery Spencer! Couldn't ask for a better view than the view from Battery Spencer! As we got closer it became obvious that it was just normal traffic and as soon as we hit the park we were fine and cruised right into the garage.

We arrived right at 11am, when the Academy opens to the general public. We got in line and reminisced about our second date, commenting on how much the prices have gone up in two short years. We laughed at how they try to take a picture of you in front of a green screen and how awkward that was for us on our second date there. This time I knew we'd be stopping and posing and I knew I'd be buying the cheesy picture.

We rushed over to the planetarium to get passes to a show but they were seating a show right then so we just rushed into the theater and grabbed a seat. The new show with Jodie Foster is a lot less motion-sickness-inducing than the old one with Whoopi Goldberg and I love that they update the shows frequently to try to keep up with the epic pace of discovery in this new age of telescope badassness.

The planetarium show exits on the third floor and walks you right by the stairway to go up to the living roof, where I was planning on proposing. It was kind of a joke that I was going to propose up there. I'd been super excited to see it on my first visit and when we got up there, well, there wasn't much to see. Obviously, I guess, it was just a lot of low plants on an oddly shaped roof. The living roof, on my initial visit, had been kind of a let down. This would not be true of our second visit. Now, I'd planned to do it later in our day, after lunch, right before we were going to leave. But we were right there. Too crowded. I didn't want to do it when it was so crowded. No problem, Rachel had to wait in the line for the ladies restroom. In the time that took, pretty much everyone had cleared off of the third floor except women still in the restroom line. "Hey" I said, "Want to check out the living roof real quick? We're right here, after all."

We walked up the stairs and this time didn't focus on the roof but on the incredible view. The day was breezy and cool and the sky was bright blue. Fog still scoured the hilly sections of the Richmond district near the beaches. We leaned against the railing looking out over the DeYoung and smiling at each other. "Hey" I said, "Want to hear a poem I wrote?". "Uhhh, okay." "Well, I guess I don't have to read it." "That's okay, I want to hear it." (Quotes may not be direct but they are pretty close.)

"It's called, A Modest Proposal but it's not about eating babies.

A Modest Proposal

I propose this to you now, my love
That I should have your hand
That you and I should marry
That I should be your man

As a man I kneel before you (here's where I got down on one knee, the left one)
As a man I give my heart
As a man I offer you forever
Or maybe just the start...

For we can not know forever
Can not fathom eternity
I need not ask that much from you
A lifetime's enough for me

So stand by me for a lifetime
And I promise this much is true
I'll show you for a lifetime
That my heart belongs to you

And let me stand by your side
For I could not bear to know
That I had felt a love like yours
And I had let it go

Rachel Louise Gold, will you marry me?"

"Yes!" She was crying a bit by this point but she definitely said yes and I'm pretty sure I said thank you. "I have something to go along with this" I said and pulled the ring box from my bag, took the ring from the box and put it on her finger; a perfect fit. The rooftop wasn't crowded. There were maybe 15 other people up there. I looked around to see reactions and no one was. No one had paid us any attention at all. I'd gotten down on one knee in public, read a poem and proposed to my future wife and no one batted an eye. Ahhhh the Bay Area, where studied ignorance of the unusual is part of the social contract. We hugged and kissed and declared our love for each other but then Rachel had to get down to the business of informing best friends and all of Facebook. It was tough. Thanks to Hardly Strictly, we were experiencing massive cell network lag.

Warming in the sun of the Indian Summer, listening to the squeals and congratulations coming through Rachel's phone, I felt good. I felt amazing. I felt different. The only anxiety or panic I'd felt had been right at the moment before I asked if she wanted to hear my poem. After that, it was all crystal clear and calm. It was so easy because it was so right. I knew exactly what I wanted and all I'd had to do was ask. We locked hands together and started back downstairs to see the aquarium exhibits. Walking down the stairs, I knew what was different. We were a unit now. Sure, we still have to get married to make it official official but we'd promised each other a preliminary vow of one lifetime and we were allied, bonded, complicit. It wasn't us against the world exactly. It was us and the rest of the world.

A lot of other stuff happened that day. We ate lunch. We saw a great play, Phaedra by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Playhouse (side note: A great play everyone should see but maybe not the best play to see on the day of your engagement, wedding, etc...). We made soup and watched Boardwalk Empire. Rachel made more calls and received more congratulations. I decided to make my calls the next day, my Mom was probably already asleep anyway. Writing it now, it seems like an anti-climactic end to a climactic day. It didn't feel that way, though. It just felt right.

Update: I'm told and now recall that the conversation before the proposal was more along the lines of this:
"Hey, want to hear a poem I wrote?"
"Sure!"
"Uhhh... you do?!"
"Yeah, why not? You don't have to read it."
"Oh no, I want to read it... okay, here goes..."
So, for the sake of correcting history and my admittedly poor memory making skills, Rachel was actually enthusiastic to hear my poem. 

The Beginning of the Beginning

Two years ago I decided to give myself a birthday present: a date with a beautiful woman. That date was the day before my birthday and it was incredible. About a week later we'd have our second date, a trip to the California Academy of Sciences. It would turn out to be the beginning of the most incredible relationship of my life. Two years later I decided to give myself an even more audacious birthday present. I'd ask this amazing woman to marry me.

The ring came in the mail on Thursday. No tracking number. No insurance. No signature at the door. Just a small brown box jammed under the doormat. Rachel, when she got home, actually noticed the doormat was a little bent like something had been jammed underneath it. I told her that the UPS guy had tried to cover a large box of knives she'd ordered with it. People say that I am not good at lying or keeping secrets. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't - I don't want to tip my hand - but what people fail to take into consideration, I think, is that Rachel is extremely perceptive. I don't think I've ever been 100% successful at keeping something from her long enough for it to be a genuine surprise.

I rushed the package up to my room and opened it. It was the first time I'd seen the ring in person. I'd found it on a website for a store in Portland, ME that specializes in jewelry made by local artisans and in a few pieces of vintage and antique jewelry. It was the first ring I had bookmarked in my search. It was the first ring I'd shown Rachel as an example of the kinds of things I was looking at. It ended up being The Ring. The pictures had not done it justice. It was gorgeous. It was vintage. It matched the wedding band that Rachel's great grandmother had worn as well as I could have hoped. I checked all of the criteria off in my head. I was excited but calm, not at all nervous or anxious. I put the ring on. I took some pictures to send to my brothers and sisters who had been advising me in my ring hunt and proposal planning.

It wasn't until Friday evening that it really hit me. I had taken the ring to work to show some close friends. I told people my plan. I revised the short poem I'd written. I texted Rachel to get her mother's phone number - not at all suspicious - and when I got home from work I called her and had a really nice, slightly frenetic, conversation. Honestly, I hadn't planned out much to say beyond "I'm planning to ask Rachel to marry me this Sunday." The news was well-received, though, and I felt good. Almost there. All I needed to do now was talk to her father and hope the weather held out for Sunday. It looked like rain.

But Friday was the first time it really hit me: I wasn't going to be single much longer. Sure, I hadn't been single single for almost two years but I'd never been engaged before either and that seemed like a big big deal. It seemed even less single. It seemed like the least single I would ever be in my life before getting married. I decided to document how I spent my last hours un-fianced.

Rachel got home from the gym around 5 and we set about unpacking a big box of very sharp knives. Her old coworkers had purchased her a Crate & Barrel gift card as a going away present and she decided it was time to have more than one good knife. We spent a good amount of time cutting object of various densities and sizes into segments of fractionally smaller size. Sharp knives are a little scary. I kept thinking to myself "9 out of ten fingers agree, sharp knives are great!" No blood was spilled. I was still buzzing from my day of ring sharing and mother calling (attempted father calling) and was looking forward to spending a night with my love that only I knew was marginally special. Alas, she'd been invited to do some crafting for our friends' wedding in two weeks. We whipped up some burritos in the microwave (scary radiation box of cell death) and she left me to an evening of Real Time with Bill Maher and falling asleep on the couch. When she got back she told me that a lot of my male friends were over at the crafting party and I could have gone too. Shoot! Maybe next time.

Saturday started off like usual, Rachel getting up for work woke me up and I went downstairs to make coffee and breakfast. Rachel didn't want a big breakfast so I French pressed out a couple of coffees and made myself some eggs over easy and wheat toast and split a Kiwi with her. It was a really good Kiwi. Rachel left for work and I chuckled at the ineptitude of the local newscast for a bit before putting on some grubby clothes and riding my bike over to the Westbrae Nursery. We'd been super busy and every weekend for months had been filled with activities which subtly equated to yard neglect. I'd had enough of the weeds choking out the plants and enough of the promises of my landlord that he'd have a gardener out. I picked up a pair of clippers, a pair of loppers, a metal spade and a pruning saw (accuracy of tool terminology not guaranteed). I loaded them into my bike basket and headed home. I was ready to do work.

I threw myself into my work and two and a half hours later had trimmed, weeded, hedged and beheaded enough plant life to fill the driveway. I'd done enough destruction to fill my yard waste barrel four times over. By the time I was done I could barely hold my water bottle and my arms were so shaky I splashed it all over myself anyway. I began to worry I'd be so broken that, when I tried to put the ring on her finger, my shaking would fling it down some kind of grating that leads to a bottomless pit. I mean, realistically. We were planning to celebrate my birthday that night with a dinner at La Lime's so I didn't want to eat too much for lunch but was also starving. A pb&j sandwich and half a box of Annie's Bunny Grahams (assorted) hit the spot. I tried calling Rachel's father again but he didn't answer so I jumped in the shower.


I'd gotten myself cleaned up when the phone rang, Rachel's father returning my call. Now, I knew he'd had his reservations about me but I felt like, after two years of slightly awkward interactions, we'd really hit our stride and had come to like each other. A recent day and evening in Napa for Rachel's birthday had been exceedingly pleasant and had left me feeling like everything had worked itself out. This was not quite the case. I had expected, at the very least, a begrudging congratulations tempered with a wait and see attitude. Sadly, this also was not quite the case. However, I remained undaunted (or at least only very mildly daunted).

I was physically exhausted from the work I'd done that morning so I watched How To Train Your Dragon (really pretty good) and Sixteen Candles (When I started watching I saw that it had 2 stars and I thought "2 stars?! This movie is a brat pack classic!" Yeah, 2 stars is about right.) Around 4 I started to get bored and knew Rachel would be home soon. I texted her to see if she'd want to walk to Mr. Mopps with me to see if they have Nerf guns. I'd decided I needed a Nerf gun. Cat training tool, this was the official explanation, although really I just wanted to spend some time shooting foam darts at things. She wasn't up for it and had napping on her schedule instead.

I walked up to Mr. Mopps, listening to the new Panda Bear album and daydreaming in world as I walked. Mr. Mopps had a very poor selection of faux weaponry. Thanks a lot, progressive Berkeley. I couldn't leave empty-handed, though. Mr. Mopps is one of those places that I love for the fact that it exists. I want it to exist. I want it to succeed. It's an institution and it's awesome and cute and if I have kids I want to take them there so I had to buy something. By this time I was being helped by an employee so I asked if they had any books on origami, picked up a Klutz book on the subject and was on my way, walking in the sunshine.

Rachel was napping when I got home so I folded an origami cat (actually a bunny that I thought looked very cat like) and tried to make it look like Charlie. Then I joined Rachel for some light napping. Dear David and Jessica, thanks for stopping by and leaving goodies! Sorry we did not come to the door but we were napping and thought you were either one of the constant string of solicitors for non-profits that we get or our next door neighbors asking if they can clip the dahlias. If we had known it was you, we'd have come downstairs and said hello.

We got ourselves all fancied up and headed out for my fancy birthday dinner. Friends, this dinner was amazing. From the drinks to the food to the service, La Lime's did not miss a beat. I kicked things off with a Sazerac and Rachel with a glass of Pinot Grigio (I think). We started off with the best olives I've ever had, some super fresh mozzarella and a mixed greens salad. We continued with a fresh and light shrimp and peas pasta dish for Rachel and a burger with pork belly on it for me. We also ordered some beets to share and my burger came with little whole fried potatoes that we also shared. I had a glass of a Syrah blend that melted away any remaining thoughts and stress of the day and of the day ahead. It was a meal in the moment and it was amazing. For dessert we shared a Peach Tatin ala mode and a glass of Moscato. We made our way back home and dozed off watching Eureka on demand. Happy birthday to me.

The next day I would propose to Rachel. I had a plan. I had a poem. I had a ring. I was ready.