Fruit on Strike

There is a downside to increased consumption of fresh fruit, in that delayed consumption of said fruit -- in conjunction with leaving said fruit to bake in a 90-degree apartment every day -- can easily result in in an overly ripe pear literally exploding in one's briefcase (yesterday) or a seemingly healthy apple turning into a terrifyingly brown and mealy mess upon first bite (today).

Any inquiries as to the various upsides of unexpectedly curtailed fresh fruit consumption can be directed to my colon, which has evidently purchased a timeshare in Barbados.

The Best Intentions

M. and I spent the better part of this morning -- or what was left of it after our delayed, 11am wake-up -- watching the Food Network, shouting out additions to our wedding registry as we watched Rachel Ray and the Barefoot Contessa and Assorted Others use our future pots and pans and processers and Pyrex bowls to make things that we would surely be making ourselves if only we had the appropriate implements and gadgets.

Of course, not even Williams-Sonoma can furnish all of the items presently missing from our kitchen inventory, including Get Off Your Ass and Go Grocery Shopping; Take La Paloma Burritos Off Your Speed-Dial; and Move Somewhere That Has a Kitchen With More Windows and Counterspace and Fewer Cockroaches. Luckily, we've already got more than enough Go Ahead and Make Up Another Excuse to last us well into our golden anniversary.

The upside is that while my husband and children will be eating Skittles and burritos every night for dinner, they might be eating them from any number of beautiful, mint-condition serving pieces, like this:



or this:


or this:


or this:


or, of course, this:



In other news, I was sitting here fifteen minutes ago, minding my own business, eating Skittles from my enormous box of birthday candy, catching up on Desperate Housewives, when I was startled by the relentless bleating of a farm animal being tortured with a meat tenderizer in our airshaft. So I ran to our bathroom window and spent the next five minutes perched on the side of our bathtub, listening to our downstairs neighbor mangle Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" in his shower. And I mean mangle, but in a completely confident and self-assured kind of way.

Which leads me to wonder whether our neighbors think that Kelly Clarkson actually showers in our apartment, or instead merely wonder what the upkeep costs are for our retarded singing mule.

Thirty and a day

Now that I've recovered from the anticlimactic horror of entering my third decade -- everyone reminding me that it's technically my thirty-first year can please hush the f*ck down -- I can sit back and catch my breath. Dressed, I might add, in a very geriatric-appropriate get-up of yellowed white T-shirt, grey underpants and black socks.

"So how does it feel?"

Honestly, I was too preoccupied with a zit on the right side of my face -- the result of my habit-of-late of letting my beard grow out on the weekends, only this was an especially long weekend, which meant more beard, which meant more clogged hair pores -- which started out as a little nothing but, once I'd had at it with my fingernails, razorblade and tweezers, ended up as a Big Something.........this sentence has lost it's grammatical sensibility. In short, though, I was too preoccupied with this aforementioned blemish to really notice how it felt to turn thirty. Plus my left foot, which seems to have a torn tendon from Saturday's yoga class. Plus some ongoing GI tract troubles. And a lingering cold.

So I guess thirty feels pretty much like twenty-nine felt. Which is to say, pretty much like I'm a ninety year old obsessive compulsive hypochondriac narcissist stuck in the body of a twenty-nine year old who sits on the couch at night dressed like a seventy year old.

Things that have made this transition somewhat easier:

1. M. threw me a surprise party on Saturday night. Better yet, a surprise party which was actually surprising. This is due partly to M.'s and associated others' skillful secrecy and planning, and partly to my friend Miriam's skillful manipulation of my insecurity and fear of humiliation (Me: "I dunno, I think M. might be having a surprise party for me." Miriam: "I think you'd better stop before you embarrass yourself."). A surprise party is something for which I have always longed, and now that M. has gone and thrown me my first and only, he has won my heart for good and I am forever his love slave. It was also a chance for some of our friends to commingle with some of our (my) family, which I think went well, and which has given me hope that I will be able to hug and kiss and perhaps dance with M. in front of my parents without fainting or vomiting.

2. We received our Very First wedding gifts. A toaster, which we desperately needed, and a waffle iron, which we desperately wanted, even if it will spend most of its time sandwiched on a shelf between the fondue set which we also once desperately wanted and, God willing, a chicken pot which one of us once obsessed about to the point of making an unfortunate wedding guest feel obliged to procure for Him if only for the purpose of not having to hear Him ask for it one more time. Receiving our first wedding gifts was nothing short of exciting. As M. remarked, because he's a diehard romantic and I'm his love slave and he can never again say or do wrong, "Wow, getting this toaster makes the wedding feel so much more real."

3. While we're on the subject, the chicken pot has been brought down from $240 to $199 in less than two months. Which means that in four months, if my math is right, it will cost a little under a dollar, which means that Someone and Someone will have the most unique, most cast ironiest wedding favors ever.

4. I can now put together a relatively lame and incomplete List on my weblog and not feel badly about it, because thirty year old ninety year olds tire easily, and have limited reserves of creativity which they need to set aside for devising new healthy bowel regimens.

In other news, check this guy out -- special attention to his Letters to Star Jones -- whom I just discovered and find to be particularly dang funny.

In more alarming news, it dawned on me yesterday -- I forget if it was when I was tearing my right cheek apart, or preparing my Metamucil -- that my mother had me not when she was thirty-six, as I have always had it in my head, but when she was thirty-four. I've always figured that as long as I had my first child by the time I was as old as my mother was when she had her last child (i.e. me), I'd be an adequately young and limber parent. Now that I've got two years less to work with, and given the apparently extensive preparation and waiting time inherent in gay parenting, I am left with the unfortunate necessity of having to multitask at my wedding, which will now be held either in China or a back alley egg bank.

2 hours, 10 minutes and counting

Who the HELLS idea was it for me to go through the hassle of turning 30 while I'm busy trying to plan a wedding?

The heart is a lonely hunter

Act I, scene i. Valentine's Day, evening. Two handsome young men lay entwined on a bed, fully clothed, satisfied, smelling of pizza and cheap wine. An overpriced box of chocolates lies open between them.

Groomzilla: Feeling a stray spot of Jacques Torres chocolate buttercream ganache on his upper lip and immediately calling to mind several romantic films. Ooh, I have chocolate on my lip.

M.: (skeptical) No you don't.

GZ: (indignant) I do so. Kiss it off for me.

M: (scrutinizing) There's nothing there.

GZ: (determined) Yes there is, kiss it off.

M: (resolute) There's nothing there, though.

GZ: (whining) C'mon, it's romantic, kiss it off.

M: (blase) No.

GZ: (firmly) Do it!

M: (clearly) No!

GZ (pouting, pausing): And how come I didn't get any Valentine's Day candy?

M: (tauntingly) I'll get you some tomorrow when it's half-off.

GZ: (poignantly) You're mean.

M: (lovingly) Happy Valentine's Day.

Now I lay me

In what threatens to become an unfortunately recurring Sunday night phenomenon, I went to bed last night at a decent hour only to find myself tossing and turning, wide awake, two hours later as visions of June danced in my head.

When this happened the first time, two weeks ago, it was more of a fear-based thing, i.e. how will we pay for it, how will we fit everyone into the inn, will anyone even show up, why does my father hate me, what if we don't get the chicken pot, how long will it take to teach my mother to DJ?

Last night's panic -- thanks to a weekend spent more-calmly-than-not reviewing and prioritizing our new bullet-pointed Things Still Left To Do list with M. -- wasn't rooted in fear as much as in details, i.e. will friend X and friend Y really sound okay singing together and if so who will sing verse C, what's so wrong about a boy with a bouquet, would an ecru suit look better with blue or purple, tie or no tie, why hasn't our potential partially-shaved-headed goth DJ written back yet and if he does write back and we hire him will his hair be long or short, where will we put the chicken pot? But fear or no fear, there I lay, wide eyed and ready to plan.

The good news is, I didn't wake M. up to share my new idea about incorporating our brothers and our mothers into the ceremony entrance.

The bad news is, even though my cold symptoms mostly disappeared on Saturday, I got out of bed at 2am and took a Nyquil. So I could rest. Which, indeed, I did.

The other bad news is that there are 4 months full of Sunday nights between now and June 24th, and Nyquil must surely be a gateway drug, leaving me with the unfortunate but inevitable fate of marrying M. from the safe confines of rehab, just like Liz Taylor.

The other good news is that Liz Taylor, rehab or no rehab, is undeniably glamorous.

The other other good news is that hospital johnnies only come in one color, and I'm pretty sure it's my signature one.

A pause

At least once every two or three weeks, someone stumbles upon this site by Googling "Scott Speedman sightings".

Even more often than that, someone else finds their way by Googling "ice luge".

Today, someone Bloggered "prostatitis" and, yep, there was my site.

This, to me, signals one of two things. Either nobody else is having a gay wedding and is confused or curious enough to Google "gay groom" for a little moral support; or, I need to spend a little less time ruminating on Felicity stars and male genitourinary hygiene. Or, perhaps, in a world where Brokeback Mountain and LOGO TV and Elton John & David Furnish have become commonplace and run-of-the-mill, the time has come and gone for blogs about gay grooms.

Perhaps what the world truly needs right now -- indeed, what the world is practically begging for -- is a blog that is brave enough to speak the unspeakable, to release the masses from their hidden shame about prostate infections, to let the world know that we are here and we are proud, our penises burning with each and every bout of urination, our bellies full of Zithromax and devoid of any lingering form of natural stomach flora, humiliated as we vomit once more on the sidewalks of New York -- nay, on the sidewalks of the universe -- and attempt to convince our primary care providers and anyone else who will listen that, no, we have not been bottoming beyond the call of duty. Perhaps I am the man to lead this revolution, and perhaps this blog will be my revolutionary electronic pulpit.

Prostatitis sufferers and survivors, UNITE! UNITE!

BE HEARD!

SPEAK UP!

.....!

.....

Guys?

guys.......?

.....anyone?

Ice lugers?

Listen to this

The fountain of HomoNuptial ramblings remains dry -- chalk it up to being overworked, or underinspired, or preoccupied with ridding my apartment of cockroaches, or unhealthily obsessed with trying to establish a normal bowel regime, or perhaps just to Seasonal Affective Disorder -- but my iTunes Music Store remains fertile and abundant.

I therefore present my New Favorite Group/Album -- costarring a friend of a friend of M.'s -- which anyone with any sense of taste or morality will immediately listen to, fall in love with, purchase, and enjoy. Seriously, I suck at describing music, so I won't try, but it is good.

In other news, we're narrowing down the Race for the Ultimate Gay Wedding DJ. It's currently between a middle aged gay black man with a fondness for Hawaiian prints and a thirty-something partially-shaved-headed ambiguously-oriented gentleman with a predilection for Goth and Industrial.

The former is friendly and Family, but sent us a DVD of another gay wedding he dj'd which seems like possibly the boringest gay wedding ever. The latter has flawless taste in and talent with music, but requires room and board and is a little bit out of our miniscule price range.

Unless, of course, we receive multiple chicken pot delights which can then be sold and bartered to pay the piper.