Can I Vote on Your Marriage Now?

At one of my jobs, I study how neurons work when they are healthy, and how they change when they are diseased. I keep the lab organized, supplied, and productive. I manage and mentor three undergraduates.

At my second job, I teach Korean immigrants between the ages of 10 and 17 English and science.

In a few weeks, after the paperwork goes through, I will start volunteering at an after school program for under-performing Hispanic kids.

I play on a women’s roller hockey team once a week. I suck, but I love it.

I’m picking away at a novel in my spare time.

My other hobbies include obsessively watching and reading the news, loving California weather but missing the east coast, annoying my tiny grey kitten, doing yoga way less than I mean to, listening to world music and singer-songwriters and audiobooks, watching football, talking to my few close friends, worrying about my family (including my parents who won’t stop smoking and my three younger sisters who are out there dealing with budding careers, impending marriage, and. . . high school, which might be hardest of all), and constantly planning and re-planning my future.

I am 80% through a withdrawal plan from prescription drugs that I started taking in graduate school so that I could stick it out and get the degree, because I didn’t see any other choice. I’ve stuck to it like glue, and if I continue to do that, I’ll be free before 2009.

I like to think of myself as, if not a good person, someone who is working on it. I’m nothing special, but I see a lot of ways things could be better and I am trying to figure out my talents so I can use them to be part of a solution.

I am highly-sensitive, easily exhausted, overly emotional, sick all the time, and frequently, selfishly lost in my own internal universe.

I’m always trying to do too much because I want so much, and I know how overwhelmed I get, but I can’t sit still.

But I couldn’t do any of this, be any of this, attempt, succeed, fail… I wouldn’t be here in this place, doing the things I’m doing… I wouldn’t have the centeredness or groundedness or any semblance of stability from which I can branch out and put myself out into the world. . .

If I didn’t have my girlfriend Dana.

We have lived together for going on three years now.

We pay the rent and the bills together. (Some months it’s easier than others.)

We go to the grocery store together and argue about whether we can afford the $15 bottle of wine or not.

We sit around the living room together on weekday evenings watching bad TV, drinking that $15 (or $5) bottle of wine. She browses for deals on furniture online and I make vague, ever-changing plans for a road trip up the California coast. I nag her about keeping up with her class work, she chastises me to stop reading infuriating political commentary on the internet.

I do the laundry, she does the dishes.

I cook dinner, she takes out the trash.

I fix our bikes, she fixes our computers.

I do all the driving, she has to clean the bathroom.

She lets me borrow her clothes, I let her watch Gossip Girl.

I wake her up in the morning by pulling the blanket off her sleepy head and kissing her cheeks.

If I have a busy day and don’t have a chance to check in with her online by lunch time, I make sure to email before she gets worried. If her internet is down and I haven’t heard from her– that happens a lot – I call her office.

She almost always knows the details of my day way before I get home. We don’t leave our workplaces without saying “I love you” and “Good-bye”, even if we’re going to see each other in just a few minutes.

When I get home she hugs me, no matter how yucky and sweaty I am from my bike ride. She only grudgingly lets me get into the shower, because she doesn’t like to miss me all over again right after I’ve gotten home.

We lie in bed and giggle about silly things or cry about serious ones.

I cannot go to sleep anymore without one of her arms under my neck and the other one wrapped around my chest.

I love her beautiful hair and her gorgeous face, and her little voice even though (okay, especially because) it has a teeny little Texas accent. I love how her hands feel protective and so much bigger than they are when she touches me.

She talks to me in a cartoon lamb voice to make me laugh. She has a repertoire of about 50 ridiculous song parodies at her disposal at any given moment. She often dances the whole distance between our apartment door and the elevator, and between the couch and the bathroom.

Just like me, she has so many plans she’ll need three careers.

We fight, and make each other cry, but then we hash it out and promise not to do it again even though we know we might.

She is the only person who knows what to do to get me through my worst anxiety attacks.

Twice now we have decided to move across the country together.

We also decided together, when our kitten’s kidneys failed, to go into a few thousand dollars of debt to save her life.

We each spend time, money, and air miles getting to know the families the other grew up a part of.

We have a savings account where we’re building a down payment on a house.

We have baby names picked out.

She makes me feel loved, and sexy, and funny, and smart, and safe, and taken care of.

Two days ago I could have married her.

Yesterday our fellow Californians decided we don’t deserve that right.

This post is for them.