Today I've been married for twelve years.

Today is also very cold, with frost on the shingles out my window and a forecast that won't take us above 50F for a week, which makes me shake my head, because the day Dan and I got married, it was 80.  We planned an October wedding because we loved the cool weather of fall, so naturally our wedding was hot and humid.  But it was a good day.  Lots of family and friends, great cake, and some killer photos, even if the photographer did take forever to get them to us.

Our wedding was not a typical wedding.  We paid for it ourselves, and we were grad students at the time, so when I looked through the bridal magazines I tended to feel judged and inadequate, because I knew I couldn't arrange what they were suggesting was the norm, and I outright panicked when I went around Iowa City trying to find a reception venue we could afford.  At very few points was the angst about having the "perfect wedding" (a real statement from a Virgo).  Mostly it was about how to be able to invite all our family and friends and have food and entertainment for them but to not go broke in the process.  To be honest, at that point we were already broke, and about to get more so: the thought of renting a hall for thousands of dollars made me sick, and frankly, having Another Fucking Wedding with the same china plates as everybody else and the same boring hotel ballroom and the same dumb DJs turned my stomach even more.  So I got my grit on, and I searched high and low (Dan came along, but at this point this was Heidi With The Bit Between Her Teeth), and we ended up at the Swisher American Legion for $250, and I think we got $100 back if we cleaned it up.  It was two floors, with the bar in the basement, the dance floor upstairs beside the dining, and a big ass American flag on the wall.  We were home.

jtaddy  did all my decoration: he went with me to Micahel's and other craft-like places and even brought some of his own stash and helped deck the church altar and then our reception hall with silk flowers.  (He also brought a plastic jack-o-lantern and set it on the head table.) A friend at work did all the catering for the cost of the food, and the fare was simple: ham sandwiches, potato salad, relish tray, and some baked beans.  We had punch upstairs and my dad bought all the pop and a keg of beer, but everything else people had to pay for.  My sister's boyfriend gave his performance for free and brought along a band for $500.  He also let us use his electronic equipment to boost our home stereo so Dan could DJ his own disco.  He did this, I might add, in the day before you could even burn a CD: these were all songs from his own collection, and he ran over between songs to swap them out and barely left a pause.  

It was a simple show, and full of quirk, but it was us.  I think we wasted a lot of worry on what it looked like and whether or not we spent too much or too little on things, and we should have found a way to reassure my mother we had the clean-up covered so she didn't run around for the last hour picking everything up and making people think the party was over.  But honestly, it was a good time: a really, really good time.  It was much cheaper and much more us than the hotel ballroom.  It was good, and it was right.

I didn't marry Dan because I wanted a home and a family.  I didn't marry him because he was going to make a good income (though I admit it was an awfully nice perk).  I didn't marry him because I was supposed to get married or even because I didn't want to be lonely.  I married him because before I met him I was frazzled and angry and hurt and very, very lonely, and I didn't realize how much so until I stood next to him awhile and watched some of that melt away.  He just worked. He was cute and nice and handsome, but he was really weird, too.  He was far too shy, and he had a clear obsession with Madonna, and he did things that were strange like eat spaghetti with salsa on it for dinner.  He seemed overly polite and perhaps too nice, and then he'd get out Madonna's Sex book (in French!) and show it to me.  He'd have me over for a night of overcooked spaghetti and Xanadu, then hold my hand and look at me as if I, too, might be a muse who would fade away at the end of the movie. 

He put up with my crazy, and he hasn't ever stopped.  I all but stalked him when we first met, because he was so damn shy, and I wanted to be available for him to come over and casually say hi to and dumbass stuff like that, but he never minded: in fact, he says he was flattered.  He lets me have hair-brained ideas, and usually goes along with them.  He tries things with me.  He thinks I'm brilliant and beautiful, and he tries to move mountains to take away my pain.  He's my biggest supporter, my strongest lifeline, and my best friend. Oh, he is FLAWED. Jesus, after twelve years, I could write a book.  But I love the flaws as much as I love the man, and my only upset comes when he lets his fear of the flaws get in the way of living. I like his neuroticism.  I even like his doom and gloom to a point.  I like his hesitation.  I LOVE every quirky weirdness he has, especially the ones he doesn't want anyone to know about. But what I love more than anything is that he lets me in.  It isn't that what he lets me in to see is sparkling with diamonds or perfect or anything: mostly what I love is that this shy, cautious, quirky  man who is naturally paranoid about letting people see too deeply lets me in to see him like he allows no one else.  

My marriage to Dan is like our wedding.  It's hobbled together from what is handy and held up by family, friends, and a combination of my amazonian determination to take over the world and his cautious, slightly worried hesitation.  It's never what the magazine says we're supposed to do, and yet somehow ends up being so much better than high-budget and chic could ever be.  It's held in odd venues with interesting stuff on the walls, but the food, while simple, is always good.  And in the center of it is the pair of us, cycling around one another, living our own lives, casting the threads of our own universes, solving our own problems, feeling our own pain. I have this image in my head of the two of us suspended over the congregation of the church where we got married, larger-than-life in our wedding finery, our hands spinning with light as we try, with alternating wonder and panic and desperation, to spin out the threads that our our lives.  We honestly have not woven them together.  We are not a house in the burbs, a seamless unit, a romantic two halves of the same soul.  We are Dan, and we are Heidi, and we have our own battles which we must face alone. We both will confess to you that we get lonely, sometimes achingly so.  We both seek completion outside of one another, and we both yearn for things the same way we once yearned for a partner.  Being married has not made all our loneliness go away and did not give us a happily ever after.  But what it has given us is a companion, a friend, a lover, someone to turn to both in the light and the dark.  Someone to share with.  Someone to listen.  Someone to love, to reach out from the madness of our own universe and accept an always-ready hand.

That's my favorite thing about my marriage.  Dan didn't save me.  Dan didn't fix all my problems, and he's never going to.  He didn't demand I fit his image of wife or lover--he's never really demanded anything at all.  He's just love. Twelve years ago, he came, and he never left.  And at this point, he'll be with me forever, no matter what happens, because after twelve years, he will always have a huge, huge place in my heart.  He isn't a swashbuckling hero.  He isn't there with the answer to every problem.  He isn't even a lightning strike. He's just Dan. He's the guy who falls in love with me when I quote Annie or 9 to 5.  He's the guy who tears up when we drop our daughter off for a weekend with my mother.  He's the guy who rubs my shoulders when they hurt.  He's the guy who leaves the crock pot on the counter for me to put away because he hates to do it.  He's the guy who does the dishes.  He's the guy who reads all my m/m erotic fiction first and doesn't just like it, he's moved by it. He's the guy who ABSOLUTELY HATES cleaning the eaves but does it anyway.  He's the guy who makes enough money to support the three of us and doesn't mind doing it (most of the time).  He's the guy who went grey way, way too early and who looks very sexy in a beard.  He's the guy who is better in bed every time we go there.  He's the guy who fights a lot of inner demons that sometimes get the best of him.  He's the guy who has a nasty temper that sometimes he can't quite control.  He's the guy who loves music, and who shares it with me.  He's the guy who hated cats when he met me and now has five. He's the guy, who, for much as he is a man, is also a little boy.  He's the man who looks at me with messy hair and a bathrobe and tells me, with sincerity, that he thinks I'm beautiful.  He's the guy who, all these years later, still looks at me like I'm his Kira come down from Olympus.

He's Daniel Scott Cullinan, and he's my love.

(And yes, sweetheart: the title of the post was to make you smile, because you are also the guy who would love an anniversary blog post with a Bananarama song as the header. Love you, baby. Thanks for twelve wonderful years, and here's to fifty more.)

 being married to a man who is not only willing but EAGER to read your very, very graphic m/m erotic romance, but who reads it first and within two days of delivery, and when he finishes tells you it's full of heart and made him feel so good and touched him so deeply, and then quotes YOUR favorite two paragraphs unprompted and says that's what the book is about.  Thank you, Dan.  Love you so, so much.

I have another beloved beta with this story right now, and a request out to another go-to, but I would not mind another.  I'd need it within the week, which probably puts almost everybody out of the running.  But if you want to read a 100k romance about two men (with a third added later) traveling from Iowa to Vegas in a big blue semi, holler. I'll even do spell check first this time.  (Sorry AGAIN, Dan.)  I'm looking for content and story, not line edits, unless you catch me saying "iPod" instead of "iPhone" again or some other gross mistake.

Off to read more about poker.

Thursday night I went to see The National.  They are a group that started in Ohio in their youth, disbanded as they grew up, and reformed when the band members all found themselves in the same area of Brooklyn.  Most people haven't heard of them, but if you watched Obama's acceptance speech on election night, they played part of The National's "Fake Empire" on a loop just before Obama came out.  It was also featured in this ad in much the same way. (That might have even been playing, the video part, at the acceptance speech.  I can't remember exactly.)  The National is probably the best example I know of how free content can actually make an artist money.  I received a promo copy of "Fake Empire" from a friend who gets a lot of sample/advance music, and I played it to pieces until Boxer came out, then bought the whole of Boxer, and then eventually very nearly everything they've ever put out.  I'm now awaiting their next album, which is out in 2010, or so I hear.  I even made them MORE money by, in an ironic twist, going back to the friend who gave me the free copy and telling him how good it was, and I think he went back and bought the whole album, too.  

I love The National like I love few other bands, and they're one of the very few I'll ever be able to see live, because something tells me E.S. Posthumus isn't hitting the road anytime soon, and Kate Bush probably isn't coming to the midwest, either.  They've been an integral part of SMALL TOWN BOY ever since I started rewriting it again, and they're the best blend of what I like about music.  Amazing lyrics, but still simple.  Great sound, but no arrogance.  They are so incredibly Midwestern, but they speak to things that anyone can relate to.  I love all the songs from Alligator and Boxer, but some of the most beautiful are on Boxer.  One of my favorites is "Gospel."

Dan has been telling me for weeks that the new Alanis Morissette album is very good.  I tried to listen over the in-house network the other day, but the net was too glitchy, so I bailed.  I tried again today, and I just heard "In Praise Of The Vulnerable Man."

Well, as the cherries say, WAS, Dan.  (What Alanis Said.)  Because word for word, that's to you.

Happy birthday again, sweet baby.  Have another blog hug.

First of all, speaking of kisses, let it be proclaimed far and wide that on this day, this glorious day that marks the anniversary of the more glorious day thirty-six years ago--this day is the day that the universe said, "You know, they could really use some Dan Cullinan down there.  Ship him out." 

Go wish him happy, buy him a beer, slap him on the tush, or just kiss him as it pleases you.  And god bless the Gemini boys all around, really.


Now, back to me.  But only briefly, because somebody has to get to horse camp.

So, this whole Mercury in retrograde thing.  I am liking Mercury retrograde in air.  I am liking it much.  But I am sometimes thinking the altitude goes a bit high.  Or maybe not.  But whether this is just good weed or the story really is going to go this way--well, I'm enjoying the ride, and if it continues in this vein past June 20, I will do my very best to keep up.

So far everything I am learning in this revision is "don't think too much," but also "be really analytical."  Which seems contradictive, except the key is apparently don't think too hard about the thinking.  Which I am doing now.  But it's just weird.  While I'm doing it, it's like it's somebody else.  I know exactly what has to be done, when to keep going, when to rest, when to go play Super Mario 3 on the Wii (Tanooki suit!!!), when to go to bed, when to wake up at 5 and listen obsessively to Niyaz and then make the most DISjointed playlist ever that is absolutely perfect.  It's like if a rabid squirrel could be zen.

Anyway, my Scorpio rising is LOVING ALL THIS, and the Cancer moon is fine as long as everybody's happy and loved and there are chocolate chip cookies around, but the Virgo sun is saying, let's just back up a second.  Except that is verbotten, so I went and did a reading for myself.

I used the Tarot Deck of Prague, because much as I love the gothic deck, it's just too sunny in my head for that.  So I took out TDP, shuffled, and said to my personal ether, "So, tell me what you think of what I'm doing right now."

Retrograde or not, this is a good reading.

But it's for anybody who digs the Curio pages, really.  It's just that I know Caryle will particularly enjoy a whole tonnage of Charles photos.

This one actually has a different name than the one given in the image, but it's a total spoiler, so I changed it to something else.  Dan knows, though.  He knows everything.  And while I'm on the subject, please give it up for Dan, husband extraordinare who today, in his continual line of duty as He Who Listens To All Heidi's Plot Babbles And Manages To Appear Interested Every Time, Fooling Even Her--well, I wrote a tonnage today, probably close to 13k, and he sat there listening attentively as I told him everything that happened in everything I wrote and rewrote, and how excited I was by it, and what made me sad, and happy, and surprised.  Good man, that Dan.

Anyway.  Here's Charles and Madeline's page.

So, today was a snowy Easter Sunday.  It looked like this.

You may recall I wished for spring flowers to put on my desk?

I really love Dan.    Like, a lot. 

For child care extraordinaire, for patient listening and endless understanding, and for macbooks and dreams.  And for sending me emails which begin, "hello, gorgeous!"

You aren't just a peach, baby.  You're THE peach.  So here's a big old public hug and smoochy kiss, just for you.

*MWAH*

Short of time to whip up something sentimental and meaningful, I'll save that for another day and give the world instead a smattering of images from my hard drive of my main main, which you can find here, but as a teaser:

who I assume will immediately steal this and make it his own.








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ETA:  sorry, meant to say!  This found via supremegoddess1 

If you want to read how I married Dan because he bought Madonna's Sex book, click here.

Which is actually not blogging at all, but redirecting you to here, which is my husband's report of our night last night.  But he's so good I can't top him, so you'll just have to link.

I married a good 'un.

We're having a bit of it here.  Dan is faithfully blogging it, but I think I'll host the flickr photo show in a bit.

Stay tuned.

Today is the day I got married, nine years ago.

It is also, I must point out, National Coming Out Day, something we noticed way back in 1997 and enjoyed even then, though getting married on National Coming Out Day was not planned. Back then we didn't get as involved in LGBT rights as we are now, but we were far enough along that road that we thought it was cool we were getting married on National Coming Out Day. And to that end, please take a moment to visit HRC and give them money, if you're so inclined. Or just be wildly supportive to anyone and everyone choosing today to share this part of their life with you, though I am all for acceptance and rainbows any day of the year.

But anyway. This is the anniversary of Dan and Heidi United, and what a ride it's been. Nine years ago we walked down the aisle to "Cherish" by Madonna and sealed our fates. Really, to Madonna, and in a LUTHERAN CHURCH. We buried it in a bunch of Christian pop (which we did like, but it was a bit of a front to get "Cherish" in there) and made a case for how the song was about commitment. All I can say is that Pastor Roy Nielsen is one hip dude.

Dan already blogged our anniversary present to each other, so I will let you explore that at your leisure. For my part, I will do Nostalgia Illustrated.

Exhibit A:

I am a big, big advocate for gay marriage, and there is a warm and fuzzy part of me that wants it for equality and all that "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" sort of warmth and happiness -- but also because I really feel committed LGBT partners should be allowed the same social dances, good and ill, that heteros enjoy.

Like this one: Spouses are handy.  You always have someone to blame.

Dan and I have an understanding that we are allowed to play the "spouse nag" card whenever necessary and without question.  Like, someone's asking Dan to do something at work and he doesn't want to, but poltics makes it tricky for him to say no?  Working an extra weekend or overnight?  Attending a party he doesn't want to attend?  "Sorry, but my wife [insert nag/gripe/previous engagement here], so I can't."  Handy.  And I use it, too.  Judiciously, of course, but I am not shy.  VERY handy with telemarketers or people wanting donations.

But this time it really, really is Dan's fault.  He INSISTED I join last fm.

Now, let's think about this.  I have a known iTunes addiction.  I am a magpie with new music, and the internet is my crackhouse for finding stuff I had no idea I needed until it landed in my lap.  None of this is a secret to my husband, but nevertheless he sends me a friends invite, and when I can't make it work he keeps trying to fix the bug in the program until it DOES work. 

And what does this program do?  Why, it tracks my music that I listen to and it gives me recommendations for music I might like based on what I am listening to.  So basically I have an addiction problem and my husband just hooked me up with a new pipe and a great dealer with all sorts of new things I haven't tried yet.

Not that I am complaining.  Well, not much.  I already found Enaid, which was nice.  It's just that I haven't found the money tree to support my habit.  I'm happy to be an addict, really.  I just might be the only person selling myself on the street corner to fill up my iTunes allowance.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, HA!  Lookee, lookee at what I got in the mail today from my MOST DARLING AND AWESOME HUSBAND.

The effect will be lost because he reads this blog, too (waves to Dan), but he alternates between wanting more readers and not wanting to advertise, so I'll just shout out to him here and we'll see how many hits he gets. (He's a stat whore.)

You have to go at least to see the photo of Anna reading the Book of Mormon. You can totally see the schoolteachers in her genes.

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