Monkey Monday: Readers… 22 August 2011 9:08 am
Posted by Tracy in : eating,events,family,friends,good news,life,monkeys,nyc,photos,pictures,politics,silly,tea , trackback…I married him.
Photo by the kindness of a stranger and Peter’s iPhone. In case you don’t click through for the caption on Flickr, here it is:
Gay people can, and Tracy and I did!
On pi approximation day 2011 around 4pm, Tracy and I got married at the city clerk’s office in downtown Manhattan. At T+16 hours, we told our families. At T+40 hours, we went to cheer for all the people getting married who previously could not.
And now for some teachable moments! This is a TracyFood post mostly to teach said moments, starting with the question, “What’s Pi Approximation Day?” Answer: a holiday for celebrating the awesomeness of “good enough” (which I believe is extremely underrated). How is that relevant? Well, Peter and I would rather have started the process of making me eligible for his employer’s health insurance after marriage equality went into effect in New York State on July 24, but even if there hadn’t been a lottery for appointments to get married that day, it was still an occasion that rightly belonged to people who’d been waiting much longer than we had. But July 25 was the last minutes before our trip to Portugal and the Netherlands (note to self: finish posting those pictures), and the August 20 expiration date on my NYU-sponsored health insurance was starting to loom large…
So, we picked a date which, appropriately, acknowledges the importance of not making the perfect the enemy of the good. Added bonuses: neither of us math nerds could ever forget it, and a built-in excuse for tasty treats (Tracy and Peter food! yay!) We further approximated success by being the last couple married at the Manhattan City Clerk’s Office before marriage equality went into effect (when they opened again on Sunday, it was for everybody! Yay!), and we even had help shutting down the old system from Greg Rae, who went above and beyond all his work on bringing marriage laws into the 21st century by agreeing to be our witness at pretty much the last possible minute, and then recommending refreshments afterwards:
Afternoon champagne tea at the Crosby Street Hotel, Instamatic-style
So that was awesome, and another reason this post is TracyFood-worthy, because Tracy starts with tea and all that. Also awesome: Surprising our families the next day (my parents were particularly tickled to learn that they’d already paid for the wedding reception by leaving a bottle of champagne after my NYU graduation). More awesomeness: Going back to the City Clerk’s Office (tandem-style, as the first picture shows) on Sunday morning to see marriage equality go into effect in New York City. As I wrote on Facebook later that day, as we started coming out about our shift in legal status:
being retroactively gay-married is pretty fricken’ awesome, and I highly recommend that married people everywhere lobby against DoMA because I’m pretty sure equal marriage for everyone would be the most awesomest of all.
Which brings us back to the teachable moments of this adventure. It really does feel like a coming-out process, complete with questions like “Does this person know? Or care? Is it weird to tell this person? Or weirder not to? What assumptions might people make about me if told, and how should I respond, if at all? Why should this matter to anyone?” and so on (and on, and on). So I’m learning, and sometimes feel like I’m teaching, as I keep making up answers to those questions as they come along, internally and otherwise. A more fun and easy take-home lesson is that, to my ever-increasing relief, a big chunk of my discomfort with marriage does in fact turn out to reflect my violent allergy to weddings (I’d been suspecting this for a while, but still, the legal and political stuff is plenty broken without the bridal-industrial complex piled on top, yowza). Finally, I am particularly delighted to report one more bit of personal good news: Just as I had hoped and expected, not much has changed beyond our legal status. We love each other, and life is good.
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was…
