T-minus 8 and counting.

While I wouldn't say that I woke up on the morning of my wedding hungover, I would say that I was incredibly nervous and skittsh for the entirety of the day, making me look like something of a -- how shall we say? -- crack addict.

I woke up at 7 and couldn't get back to sleep, which worked out okay, I guess, because Bridesmaid Jenn was already awake and had already wandered into a local Starbucks. She then called me at 7:30 and instructed that we "stop having sex" and tell her what kind of coffee we wanted.

She came back to our room around 8 with coffee and fruit. I ate this coffee and fruit . . . and then I threw up in the toilet. Note to self: coffee is not a good chaser to a night of drinking wine and gin.

We met the family and the rest of the bridal party for hotel brunch at about 9/9:30ish and proceeded to pick at fruit. Note to all: I cannot eat when nervous. At speech tournaments in high school, I could never eat until after my first competition.

I go to my room and rest for awhile until I get a call from the florist at 11 a.m., asking if she can drop off flowers around noon. Bridesmaid luncheon is put on hold until the florist delivers incredibly gorgeous bouquets and boutonnieres to my room.

I had picked this florist off the internet, had never met with her and only exchanged phone calls and emails . . . and this was the result. Magfreakinificent!

My bouquet.

His boutonniere.

Bridesmaids and Bride's Mom joined me for lunch at Cheesecake Factory. We all went shopping in the Handbag Basement while waiting for our table. Despite touching beautiful purses for a half an hour, I still can't eat once we get to Cheesecake Factory. Pasta sits on my plate. Magen gives me Xanax.

I love Xanax.

By the time of our 3 p.m. hair appointment, my world is looking up. I do not appear like as much of a crackhead, and as my hair transforms itself in Angela's capable hands, I am becoming a very pretty crackhead as each minute passes.

We are out of the salon a little before 5 and are suddenly superbly glamorous. Here's what our hair looked like:





Kate took the pictures of Magen and I, but I didn't have any of her hair prior to the wedding. So here's her entire look, courtesy of Gabe, our photographer. (You can see her flowers, too!)



(Cassie and Jenn, being short haired, napped at the hotel during this time. Or hit the bar. I'm not sure which.)

We shielded ourselves from the wind before returning to the hotel to complete the movie-starlet transformation.

Randi helped me decide which underwear I should wear.



Yep, those cotton boy shorts were totally the winners.

The getting ready bit is all really a blur to me after that crucial decision was made. Jenn did our makeup, Randi, the unofficial bridesmaid, helped zip things and adjust things and lend moral support to Kate, the Best Kate. Cassie and Magen shooed my mom away when I was about to kill her. I think I ate two slices of rye bread . . .

Then at just past six we were spirited away to the ballroom by our less-than-stellar wedding planner . . .

Posting falls second to spending time with my new husband.

Really.

When finally you move in with someone that you've been with for years, the notion of alone time seems to fall by the wayside and you spend every evening making up for the number of evenings you didn't get to spend together throughout your relationship.

Marcus and I have been together for over 6 years, moved in together in July and got married last October.

So we're still doing that "spending every moment possible together" thing.

But because of that, certain things have been neglected for far too long. I've finally gotten into the groove of balancing work with absurd amounts of internet surfing, so the posting can resume. I've even begun to resurrect my book blog, an experiment I tried back in 2005 that quickly disintegrated.

In any case, I'll take this time to post a few photos of the events leading up to and concluding in my nuptuals.

Tally ho!

The Bachelorette Party

Jenn buys me a silly hat for my tiny head.



It lights up! And has penises on it! I am referred to by a strange man on BART as "The Weiner Devil."



At one point, I decided my pretty hat should be around my neck instead. To my dismay, my pretty hat later leaked battery acid on my chest, leaving me with a slight rash across my chest that, thankfully, was totally gone by the wedding on Saturday.



We met up in the Mission for dinner and drinks at Luna Park, which was awesome, but not quite as carnie-licious as I had hoped. Amazing mushroom ravioli things. Delicious goat cheese fondue. The best Singapore Sling I've ever had in my life! Some amazing grape cocktail called an Ice Breaker which is basically grape vodka and contineau. It tastes like exotic Kool aid and I am pretty sure I could drink it forever. All in all, a tame night. Lots of alcohol. No raunchiness. Threw up some god-awful pink drink when we moved on to the Elbo Room. Then I threw up in a tree on the way to Bart.

I am so good at vomiting.


The Rehearsal Dinner

We have the most awkward rehearsal ever with a wedding coordinator we didn't hire. We knew that we'd have someone coordinating our event as it came with the package we had from the hotel. However, we had been working with a different coordinator prior to the rehearsal, only to discover that the hotel had switched their schedules that day and thus we were stuck with a horrible beast of a woman who yelled at my bridesmaid, yelled at my guests and could not seem to fathom that my honor attendant was a man and the Best Man would be a woman.



I think the look on my bridesmaids' faces generally sums up how everyone felt about our coordinator.

But after that, we had a lovely lovely dinner with all of our attendants and out parents at a little Italian place around the corner from the hotel. Much wine was poured -- some of it into a glass that still had a different kind of wine in it -- and then afterwards we hit the hotel bar with my attendants . . . and then, true to our Santa Barbara roots, we all decided that we should grab things from the liquor store and drink in our rooms . . .

The face you make when you're getting married in less than 24 hours.

In which I appease Drew and Meg.

I spend a lot of my time these days on the train to and from San Francisco. This is actually pretty great because it gives me two guaranteed half hour blocks of time each day to read. As such, I finish 200 pagers in about 2 days. It's awesome. Other than the fact that I have to get up early in order to get parking at the BART station, I will never ever complain about this commute. I'm on the train at an early enough stop on the line to guarantee a seat every day, and I guarantee a pleasant ride by intentionally sitting next to people who also have books.

This, however, does not guarantee a lack of crazies.

I mean it. If you want to meet some choice characters, start taking Bay Area Rapid Transit.

I'm trying to get into the habit of cataloging all the strange and interesting folk I see on the train, but that may be something I have to discipline myself to do after this whole wedding business is over and done with.

I'm really ready for the wedding thing to be over with. Thank God its less than two weeks away. At this point, I seem to only be concerned with my bridesmaids' abilities to purchase evening appropriate shoes.

Other than riding the train, most of my time not spent working has been devoted to making tiny canisters of personalized M&Ms look pretty with film strip-style bows and little name cards and such . . . or handwriting 160 place cards and stamping them with pictures of the food that person intends to ingest (little golden chickens and little silver blue fish and shiny green carrots) . . . or flipping through guidebooks to decide where I want to squander my money when I'm in Spain.

I'm rather exhausted. The wedding business is a lot of extra work, and I look forward to using up my last bits of energy in Spain, and then veging out with my new husband and watching a lot of TV.

I promise details of our adventures in Spain and many many stories about the crazies I see on the train . . . but for now, I'm sure I should be writing movie names on clapboards (our version of table numbers).

I love a good Dutch Oven.

I am getting married in about 8 weeks.

My evenings consist of creating spreadsheets for the caterer, using multicolored post-its notes to arrange seating, scouring the internet for gifts for the groomsmen, purchasing things (favors, accessories, place cards, thank you notes . . . and so on), and obsessively checking my registries to see if anyone has bought me presents.

Certain presents have already arrived, and one seems to have been burgled by Target, a company that will not resend things after they have been returned to the sender because they were erroneously delivered to an incorrect address.

If you happened to buy me the Hamilton Beach Toastmaster, I am sorry. I will not be mastering toast anytime soon unless you purchase it again (with your refund) and send it to my new address.

Presents are why would should all get married. Seriously.

You don't even have to get married, actually. I'm fairly certain that the internet will let you register for gifts for any occasion. I suggest doing this for all of your birthdays, housewarmings and the third Thursday of every month, which could become a day to celebrate your awesomeness.

Here are some things I've received on my porch recently:

*A set of ceramic mixing bowls. Red on the outside, white on the inside. Neat little pouring spouts.
*A 10-piece Kitchen Aid nonstick cook set, featuring a stock pot, a high-sided sauce pan, 2 saute pans, 2 small saucepans and 4 assorted lids that fit these things. They are red. With rubberized grips.
*A set of 6 gorgeous martini glasses.
*A Mario Batali Dutch Oven. (Jennie Orphan makes jokes about this all the time, but it is the most useful piece of cookware I've ever owned.) It is red.
*A 20-piece set of gorgeous mahogany-colored Asian style plates.
*A set of low bowls to go with said 20-piecer.

All of the mahogany-colored things looked redder online, to my slight dismay. They were too beautiful not to love.

It wouldn't be fair to say that I'm getting married just for the presents, but the presents are what make it a bearable thought in these final stages of planning.

In the bedroom.

Easily the most important room in the house, the bedroom was the first room we set up on our very long, very tiring moving day. This is the fantastic Cal King bed we got off Craigslist for $350. There is a large possibility that it could be one-of-a-kind, as we purchased it from a furniture craftsman with an obvious pituitary gland disorder. (He was a giant, close to 7 feet tall, and his larynx seemed too large for his throat, causing his speech to be strained in an unusual way.) He told us he had set it up to show some hotel clients and needed to sell the model. So I assume that we may be the only people in the world with this bed. It has a padded headboard, as well as padded sides, which seems slightly unnecessary. It is full of awesomeness.



The bedspread we got at Bed, Bath & Beyond. Those who know me know I prefer everything to be red, but in the interest of design and compromise, I have decided to limit redness only to the one room in the house that is truly mine: my kitchen. We had wanted to do something very Indian/Peacocky with this room, but The Perfect Peacock Sheets by Natori are $600 just for the comforter, we decided to Moulin Rouge the place, by which I mean made it match our set of Moulin Rouge promotional posters. So this was the bedspread we agreed on, and it should be noted that the copywriters at the Bed, Bath & Beyond website seem to think that the stripe with the burnt velvet is in a leopard print pattern. It even looks leopardy in the picture. But do not be fooled! The burnouts in the velvet are actually flowers, which makes a lot more sense, considering that the embroidered panels on the bedspread also feature flowers.

And here are the aforementioned promotional posters around which this room is based:



Another thing I love about this place is that my closet is mirrored--never again will I not have the joy of full-length mirrors! Of course, for some strange reason, our hallway closet is also mirrored, which just seems unnecessary to me. There's no point in giving a hallway the illusion of width. Also, the hallway mirrors are a bitch to clean. But I have no complaints about the ones in the bedroom, even if they make our TV seem minuscule.



Finally, my dresser, which is a new product in the Ikea universe. It's actually so nice that it doesn't look like it came from Ikea. (The black-stained wood helps.) It was $270, and sturdier than any Ikea dresser I've had before. Thus far, the drawers have not sagged under the weight of my many clothings.

Mary, what kind of homosexual are you?

That color right there is mauve.

I actually wouldn't call that mauve exactly. The best name I have for it is perhaps "dusty rose" or pinky-grey, the latter of which seems to be the most truly accurate. It was not our color choice, but rather the choice of previous tenants, whichever one decided that the carpet du jour should be uncleanable, unnice feeling burbur.

So that's the true wall color. Let it be known it took me 3 or 4 shots before I realized that I needed to photograph it without flash because the wall is actually not a matte surface. Here are the rest of the bathroom features, with flash, so they're extra-shiny.

Ze sink:



Above ze toilet:


The art piece here is a limited edition purchased for me by my friend Anders several years ago as a birthday gift. It's called "Violet" by John John Jesse. Yes, she is a vampire dressed like a slutty Vietnamese soldier. Bare breasts are totally appropriate for bathroom art.

Ze toilet cove:



That remarkably small and slightly pointy toilet bowl is what we face every day. It's not the smallest toilet I've ever seen, but it does seem to be slightly irregular in size.

Anyway, the bathroom is not spectacular. I wish I had a good picture of the shoddy tile work, wherein the linoleum tiles don't quite match up and you can see the totally awkward harvest gold color that is under them. Regardless, the bathroom does its job. And is 8 million times nicer than any other bathroom I've ever had in an apartment.

Welcome to our evil lair.

I decided I would start sharing photographs of the house by starting with the least put together room so that your expectations have nowhere to go but up.

Welcome to our study/office/kitten restroom/evil lair/library/editing room/Marcus' closet.

We've got about five bookcases in here and all of them are full-ish. The anal retentive part in me spent about two days attempting to organize the books in some comprehensible fashion. Marcus has a shelf and a half of film books, nearly two full shelves dedicated to theatre books, and then the rest is about 4 shelves of text/reference books, an entire shelf dedicated to my thesis work (with Francesca Lia Block books stuffed in because they fit perfectly there) and the rest is all general fiction, divided either visually by size or somewhat categorically. (Black writers and poetry share a shelf, Dave Eggers and Chuck Palahniuk share a shelf with gay authors . . . It makes sense to me, and that's really all that matters.)

(That's merely a fraction of the bookage in this room.)

This is Marcus' command center of doom aka "editing suite." I tried not to photograph it too closely because, well, its the only area of the house that I've allowed him to control . . . which means its messy. (This is also the reason I did not photograph the part of the room that consists of his closet and the kitten's litter box.)



My current prized possession: antique roll-top desk circa 1930.



I actually just acquired this yesterday off Craigslist for about $60. That's an astoundingly good price for a roll-top desk, and if you actually looked at this thing, you'd know why. It is scratched to hell. It's previous owners obviously didn't love it quite as much as I will, but I do give them props for ruining the value of this desk by cutting out a hole under the roll-top hutch to run computer cables through. I mean, that's super clever and all, and I really appreciate it, but I'd never be able to resell this thing after I refurbish it for any decent value.



Luckily, I'm not planning on selling it. Ever. The desk actually has a wall-mounted shelf that goes above the roll-top, which I intend to refurbish before I screw it into the wall. (NB: None of the knobs on the desk are the original white ceramic ones. I've already replaced them with more attractive knobs.) I'm armed with wood filler, dark walnut stain and a satin-finish varnish. This desk and I will have a lifetime of fun together.

More to come, including the very odd shade of pinky-gray on our bathroom walls, my dining room chair project, the complete lack of wall-art in our living room and our impressive media collection.