Cathy: Thank you so much for telling me about uglydress.com. My favorite is this one, though the Prom Patriot is a close second...

As predicted, Mark things that my overflowing dirty pillows are no crime. I could leave the house wrapped in cellophane and Mark would think I was decently attired. You know, for all his vanilla posturing, he sure seems to enjoy me dressing like a slut. No, that sounds mean. I think he just loves me a lot, and thinks I look good all the time (provided I'm mildly stylish--he's been watching way too much What Not to Wear). I can appreciate that, but I'm the kind of person who is genuinely interested in the fit (or lack thereof) of my pants, not one of those "Does this make my butt look big?" people. I know my butt is big--I just want to know if something is too small for the butt on a given day...

Anyway...

Today is Mark's birthday. I had the weekend planned out--that we were going to relax, go to the farmer's market, have a quiet dinner Saturday, and basically just spend the weekend together, talking and enjoying each other's company. That, and I was going to make him a cake--well, the aforementioned peach pie. Well, it was shot from the very beginning, when I found out Friday that I was going to have rehearsal all day on Sunday (I get out of church at 12:30, then had rehearsal from 1-3:30 and 6-10), so there was no reason for Mark to stick around Sunday. I was kind of in a grumpy mood most of the day Saturday (I didn't sleep very well), and we had decided to have dinner at my place, then go to see School of Rock. Generally my house is empty on Saturday nights. Well, not this one. Two of three of my housemates are right there, sitting in front of the television and decidedly settled in for the evening. God forbid I want to have an intimate dinner with Mark, even if it's only chili! I was disappointed, so my crappy mood got worse, and I ended up yelling at Mark about him drying his hands with a dirty kitchen towel. Now, I am very concerned with hand-washing (particularly while cooking), but I really flew off the handle. So he got angry, and things were pretty tense. Then we went to the theater, and we were 40 minutes late for the movie. Mark wanted to go in; I didn't, and was willing to wait until the next showing. Everything just kind of blew up. We ended up just sitting in the car for two hours (a place where we could actually be alone), talking about what's been going on. We've both been stressed lately--in Mark's case, largely because of the whole pregnancy scare thing. We took that EXTREMELY seriously, probably too seriously, and my usually level-headed pookybutt pretty much had a panic attack a few weeks back. He's still recuperating, really. And my stress meter usually says "This one goes up to eleven" (you KNOW I love Christopher Guest), but I've been sitting up there for like a month straight, so long that it's wearing more than usual, and I'm taking it out on him. And Saturday night we realized that, with all this summer program mess taking up so much space in my brain right now, I hadn't even let him know what was going on. He thought I was applying for young artist programs, which would separate us for a year at a time. He can't handle that. I've been so concerned about getting things going, without messing up his career, that I disregarded the fact that he might be interested in changing jobs at some point. He doesn't want to stay in Raleigh forever--which I knew, but I always just assumed that we'd be apart for a while. He doesn't want that, and neither do I. He went so far as to say that, if we had to be separated for a year, that things would be over, that we wouldn't be able to maintain our relationship. I always just assumed that we could, that it would be hard but we would manage somehow. But we can't be married and live apart for that long. I want so badly to start my life with him. Not to have kids right away, but within a few years, I guess. And it's so hard already to live eighty miles apart, to only see each other on the weekends, to have to do all our communicating by telephone, to squeeze our relationship into 36-hour blocks. It reminded me a bit of when Helen and What's-His-Face-Doormat-Boy-Who-I-Wanted-to-Slap wouldn't want to fight over the phone, so they would ruin the only time they had to spend together with arguments. Granted, we're not arguing (well, for a little while this weekend there was some heated discussion), but is it selfish for me to want to be with him ALL THE TIME? I mean, I know we can't stay in bed until noon and wallow in cutesy-ness every day, but you know what I'm saying. I want our life to begin. I want the joint bank account and the receding hairline and even the yardwork.

Yuck. I think I'm officially an adult.

Does the "yuck" cancel it out?

So anyway, we had an intense Saturday night (punctuated by crying jags from me--I'm such a nutjob, I tear up--even now--whenever I think about how I want us to spend the rest of our lives together; imagine what the wedding will be like), and then watched School of Rock, which was formulaic but very funny in its endorsement of Jim Steinman-esque rock pomposity ("Raise your goblet of rock!"). And I have this inexplicable soft spot for Jack Black. I think I might have ended up with someone like him, had my life turned out differently. But I'm weird like that. Anyway, there was a preview for Elf, this Will Ferrell movie in which a (tall, brawny) man, raised by elves in the North Pole, comes to visit his real father (James Caan) in the big city. The trailer was hilarious. Seriously, everybody in the theater was ROTFL. I wonder, though, if they just jammed all the funny bits in the trailer. I may wait to see that one at the second-run place.

So yeah, right now my stress is kind of tempered by some very intense feelings about my future. And I guess that's kind of stressful, too. But at least I know I have somebody to share that with. What I need to keep in mind is that this is a partnership, so I shouldn't try to bear all the burdens myself. Dude, maybe we should get that pre-cana counseling now. First we need to join a church, though. So anyway, that's what's going on right now. I really need to eat lunch...