(The picture above was taken by my cousin Jessica)

It's official. C has become Jewish without benefit of Hebrew lessons, synagogue attendance, or ritual circumcision. Last night I was complaining about how he always turns the refrigerator settings too cold--there is a layer of Perma-frost over all our vegetables. I get frostbite just peeling a cucumber, I kvetched.

He looked me dead in the eye and said, "That should be your worst problem." He was channeling my mother, who always used to say that to us whenever we complained about some petty little thing. I howled. I've heard you always marry your mother, but how did I turn a nice, polite, mild-mannered Midwestern Protestant into a Brooklyn Jew?

We have eaten the leftover wedding cake, all ten pounds of it which are now on my hips, we have opened our gifts, and written our thank yous (but not sent them yet,) and been goofy and sentimental when we see the other person wearing their ring. It feels very right and comfortable to be married. No huge changes, except that the wedding seems to have released C's inner dancing demon. He danced up a storm at our recetion and hasn't stopped since. I'm hoping this means many more years of dancing together--and separately too, sometimes.

Now it's a week and a half after the wedding and we're in our new/old life. Planning, writing, making lists, teaching classes, shopping, cooking, swimming at the gym (to try and deal with all that cake!) and all the rest of it. This week--until Sunday--is supposed to be a particularly intense "portal" according to a Mayan astrology listserve I am on. Something to do with the eclipse the other day.

I have too many writing projects on my list: essays to revise, plays to write. I'm itching to get back to working on a play I started two years ago, about military recruitment, but keep feeling like I have to do more research first. To that end I'm planning on seeing The Hurt Locker, even though I know it's going to be intense and scary, and I also9 ordered a DVD called The Recruiter, a documentary.

And of course I write an essay about the wedding--if people aren't ready to throw up at all this goo-goo ga-ga stuff as my Little Sister puts it. (Being seven, she is particularly opposed to kissing.) It's sort of like all the new-mother blogs that have proliferated all over the web now, sprouting up like toadstools after a soaking rain: on the one hand, children have been born and gotten raised for lo these many millenia, without having to talk about it so much, and by the same token, people have been falling in love and getting married, even fifty-year-old oversensitive underemployed poets, but this happened to me, someone who was pretty sure it would never happen for her again, and so this is what I have to write about. Just fat, happy, boring life, eating cake and watering rosebushes, arguing about the temperature of the frdge, and trying to figure out who gave us the three beautiful mix CDs for wedding presents. We love them, but your name or card got detached from the CDs, so please let us know who you are so we can thank you properly.