Welcome to Night Vale - The First Ten Years, Year 5: 2014

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

A sometimes hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking, and always entertaining joint memoir by Joseph Fink, cocreator of Welcome to Night Vale, and his wife, writer and performer Meg Bashwiner, chronicling the first ten years of their relationship from both sides. There are two sides to every love story. Coming May 11th. Pre-order your copy at your local bookstore or any of these places: Oblong Books (for Personalized Signed Editions) HarperCollins Amazon Barnes & Noble Books-a-Million Indiebound Bookshop Apple Books Google THE FIRST TEN YEARS BOOK TOUR! Joseph and Meg will be on a virtual book tour in May. Come see them live online via these fantastic booksellers: MAY 11 - Politics & Prose (DC), in conversation with Dylan Marron MAY 12 - Oblong Books (NY), in conversation with Jeffrey Cranor MAY 13 - Powell’s (OR), in conversation with Symphony Sanders MAY 14 - Brookline Booksmith (MA), in conversation with Erin McKeown MAY 17 - Malaprop’s Bookstore (NC), in conversation with Jonny Sun MAY 19 - The Booksmith (CA), in conversation with Mara Wilson MAY 20 - Books & Books (FL) MAY 24 - Anderson’s Bookshop (IL), in conversation with Hal Lublin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, here's a heads up. What you are about to listen to contains adult language and focuses on adult topics. So if that's not for you or for who you are listening with, now is a great time to turn this off. Hi, it's Meg Bashwinner, reader of Proverbs, Nightvale Live Show MC, Good Morning Nightvell co-host, and portrayer of your favorite polyamorous, sentient patch of haze, Deb. I also hold the esteemed role of wife to Nightvale writer Joseph Finn. Joseph and I have written our first book together. It's called The First Ten Years, and it's a memoir telling our love story from each of our perspectives. It is out May 11th, which is next Tuesday. In 2019, Joseph and I started writing this book going year by year

through our relationship from its start until 2019, without conferring or consulting with each other at all. The resulting book chronicles the past 10 years of our lives from our unique and occasionally differing perspectives. Starting with our meeting in a grungy downtown New York City Theater in 2009, through the unexpected rise of Night Vale, losses, gains, fights, and funny stories. This book is funny, sad, hopeful, weird, 100% honest, and 100% available for pre-order right now. What follows is an excerpt from the audiobook from the 2014 chapter. The audiobook is also read by Joseph and I, in case you are interested in listening along.

You can pre-order the audiobook as well. Pre-orders really help out authors, especially new authors, like me. This is my first book, and I'm so excited to share it with the Night Vale audience. We hope you enjoy it, and we hope you find connection with our stories, whether you are married, single, not interested, somewhere in between, or a polyamorous patch of haze. More info at welcome to nightvale.com slash books. And hey, thanks. 2014. And so we hit the road.

The success of Nightvale allowed us to start touring the podcast as a live show. Meg quit her job, and then Jeffrey did too. We rented a few theaters on the West Coast, booking everything ourselves. The entire touring party was me, Meg, Cecil, and Jeffrey. We rented a minivan and booked a few Airbnbs. An opener musician, Jason, drove his own car behind us. Our first stop was a two-show night at the Neptune Theater in Seattle. Afterward, we went out to sign autographs,

and the line took over an hour to go through. We were giddy, and we were lost. At the show in Portland, we realized that none of us had thought to order dinner. The only place that would deliver to the theater was pizza. The pizza arrived mid-show, and the event manager for the venue tried to come out on stage to let our performers know dinner had arrived. I'm really not sure what his thought process was there. In San Diego, our Airbnb was owned by some recent college graduate bros. The carpet was crunchy, the kitchen was sticky, and the only items in the pantry were a giant tub of protein powder and a bottle of Grand Marnier.

There was one towel in the bathroom, and it was one towel in the bathroom, and it was. was stiff as a board. The next morning, before dawn, a neighbor tried to see how loud he could rev his motorcycle for an hour, while two cats either fought to the death, or had deeply passionate sex. After that, we started staying in mid-range hotels, where the breakfast is mediocre but free, and every room, in every hotel, from Phoenix to Paris, is exactly the same. We had no idea what we were doing. There was no booking agent and no tour manager and no merch seller. We scrambled and did our best to do all of it ourselves. It was exciting and scary and exhausting, and I'm so glad Meg and I were able to be in that experience together as a couple. During the early tours,

everyone took turns driving and took turns navigating. The driver picks the music or podcast. The navigator gives directions. Everyone else stays out of it. But being a passenger makes Meg nervous because she likes to be in control. And being a driver makes me nervous, because everything makes me nervous. So gradually, Meg took over the driving, from little hatchbacks to 15-seater vans. I took over the navigation. These are the roles we felt most comfortable in, Meg with her foot on the gas pedal, and me making sure we're going the right direction. It is baffling to me to think that when we first started touring, Meg and I had been together only four years. More than moving in together, touring is a true strain on a relationship. It has all the stress and discomfort of

travel, plus the hazy work-life boundaries and bickering of working together, plus a complete inability to ever be apart from each other, spending all day in a van, then an hour in a hotel room, then all night backstage, then do it all over again the next day. And those first couple of years saw real fights. Still in our mid-20s, and having only just started sharing our home, we were putting our relationship through the ultimate stress test. But we didn't think about that at the time. We saw an exciting leap, and before we could think about where it led or how far the fall, our feet were off the ground. I had never really seen the country. Now, together, we were seeing all of it. In Oklahoma City, we booked the nicest hotel in town because it cost less than a normal hotel

anywhere else, a bit of luxury to ease the strain of tour. In Fargo, we looked out at the acres and acres of new houses and shopping centers that fracking had built, and we hesitated to drink the tap water. In Milwaukee, we performed at the Papps Theater, which has the best backstage in the entire world. It has a free-to-play arcade, a full coffee bar, a fridge with every time. type of domestic beer, a record player with an extensive collection, a full catering spread, and a TV lounge. It was like hanging out in a cool uncle's basement before the show.

Our first time in New Orleans, our venue was a tiny church. They surprised us on the day of the show with the news that they had no amplification system, so we had to rent it ourselves from the local guitar center. Our opening musicians, Danny and Kerry, set everything up for us. The venue had also stopped selling tickets after 100, even though they had the capacity for three times that. We were not sure why they had done that. Also, they had no backstage. We huddled behind a sheet they had hung over a dark corner,

our only illumination, a tiny reading light hanging by a string. But we had done it. We had pulled off this difficult day, and we laughed quietly with relief. The show started, and a few minutes into it, there was a strange sound. an awful smell wafted to us from the audience. Then the sound of someone getting up and running off.

One of our audience members had puked something truly potent right in the middle of our tiny audience area. Ah well, we finished the show, as we've finished every single show since. For the first couple of tours, we went to a bar after every performance, usually the one in the hotel lobby, or whatever was closest to the hotel lobby. If their kitchen was open, I would order food, something stupid like a pulled pork sandwich. During the first few months of touring, I gained nine pounds. We stopped going out after every show, and I definitely stopped eating after shows.

Now Meg and I only drink on Tour Friday, which is whatever day of the tour has a day off the next day. When your job is to be the nighttime entertainment for a crowd of people, it can be easy to slip into the feeling that you too are out for the evening, to drink, to relax, and to party. But it's work, and work is usually better and healthier if you are sober and get enough sleep the night before. A touring van is just sitting in the same tiny room, with the same people, for hours on end. A touring van is the changing landscape outside, sometimes aspects of nature, so astonishing that the pictures snapped with our phones can't replicate the panoramic matter.

And sometimes a disappointing blur of concrete and box doors and fading billboards so boring it feels intentionally oppressive. A touring van is the constant negotiation of when and where to go to the bathroom. The best place to go to the bathroom is Buckees, a chain of absurdly large truck stops in Texas that advertise the cleanest bathrooms in America. The strangest place to go to the bathroom is a tiny bar in North Dakota, with no windows, a small crowd of patrons at 10 in the morning, and a video poker machine in the bathroom facing the toilet. A touring van is its snacks, picked up at gas stations and lunch stops.

At first these were myriad, most deadly of all being the peanut butter pretzels that single-handedly contributed to a good deal of my weight gain in that first year. But gradually tastes shifted to jerky, which is filling and light and often locally made. Every gas station has a jerky aisle, and I've browsed many of them. A touring van is just sitting in the same tiny room with the same people for hours on end, and yet each hour is a little different. Through the weeks and the months and

years of touring, Meg and I learned. We learned what we wanted out of a hotel. We learned how to get by in different parts of our country and our world. We learned how to eat relatively healthy while on the road. But most of all, we learned each other. the first true way we saw who we were at our worst moments, at the most stressful times, when the plane was delayed or almost missed, when the hotel stank of sewage, or still didn't have rooms ready at 5 p.m. When the venue was lacking a backstage mirror, or lights, or a single staff member who was aware a show was happening that night. We learned how to be there for each other, how to act not in opposition or as two individuals, but as a team. As a member of a

a unit who supported the other and took care of what the other could not, that never took out their stress on the other, or at least tried hard not to. When, later, we got married, it didn't seem scary or that big a step, because we had already toured the world. Anything after that seemed easy. Somehow, we found a British booking agent, and set off on our first international tour. We hired a friend, Lauren, to tour manage. She started to start a friend. it to feel an intense pain on our first stop. Two stops later, in Manchester, Meg had to take her to the hospital. We went on to Birmingham without either of them. It is one of the few shows in Nightville's history that Meg wasn't at. As it turned out, Lauren would need to be in the hospital

for quite a long time. We hired a last-minute replacement as tour manager, and Meg helped out the new hire, the start of Meg's transition into permanent tour manager for Nightvale. In Sweden, we played in a theater that was in the hotel, a hotel that was owned by a member of Abba. There was an elevator backstage that went up to our hotel floor. We called it the share elevator. The backstage snacks consisted only of the largest bowl of potato chips we had ever seen. We played a church in Berlin with a huge Jesus statue on the pulpit. We were told that, no matter what, we were not allowed to touch Jesus.

No touching Jesus, the venue manager sternly told Meg, and then we passed the message among ourselves. No touching Jesus, we earnestly explained to each other throughout the night. No one touched Jesus. Our flights between Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen were somehow all cancelled. I don't remember the details. I only remember that we had to rent a van at the last minute and drive the six hours from Stockholm to Oslo. Do a show, then get up early the next next day. morning to drive seven hours to Copenhagen for the next show. The drive to Copenhagen was miserable,

and we arrived to find that the promoter had put us up in a hotel that was both inside the train station and under construction. Everyone was grumpy with one another. Everyone was just grumpy, period. Then Meg and I realized that Tivoli Gardens, one of the oldest amusement parks in the world, was across the street. And so we went and rode the mine cart ride. twice, at the climax of which, an animatronic cow turns its head slightly to look at you, and then you go down the big drop, and took pictures of the flock of peacocks that wandered the park. As the sunset, we got into the tall swings that were hoisted several stories up a pole, swinging round and round. It was not the kind of ride we usually take, but it was exhilarating,

and it was beautiful, the lights of Copenhagen swirling below us, and for that minute we were once again on the grand adventure of our lives. And then we went back to the hotel and the train station, and then to the dingy theater, and we got on with the business of performance. When a person who doesn't tour hears that we are going to a town they know, they send recommendations. Check out this restaurant.

This museum is incredible. You should go there. But the truth is, when we pass through on tour, we are not in that town. It may look like we are, but actually, we are on tour, which is a whole different physical space. What we see of the town is only the local mid-range hotel.

We see the cheap sofas in the lobby and the plate of room temperature cookies on the front desk that I get excited by and then disappointed by every time. We see the hotel gym, where those of us interested in working out, get a quick one in between our arrival and sound check. And then we see the backstage. The backstage is not the fantasy of backstage that you may have. It is usually dirty and run down. Sometimes it is nice and well-maintained, but either way, it is boring. Imagine a room with a few chairs, a few outlets, and, if we are lucky, a mirror.

You have now imagined every backstage. Once we did a show with a famous rock star, known for his big, hard-partying personality. Backstage at our show, he found a room no one was in, turned a folding chair to the wall, and sat silently, looking at the wall until it was time to go on stage. He did his part with all his usual energy, then returned to his vigil in the chair. The energy and freedom the audience sees on the stage is an illusion, or, more literally, it is a performance. In every backstage of every show, there is, in reality or in essence, that rock star sitting in his folding chair, staring silently at the wall, waiting for his cue to go on.

Not only were we seeing places we'd never seen, but over the years we were returning to them again and again, getting a sense of familiarity and relationship with neighborhoods and cities all over the world. I know where to get coffee and where to get lunch and where the fun bookstores are in Boys Town in Chicago, and in Islington in London, and in Fitzroy and Melbourne. They feel like home neighborhoods in some tiny way, which expands and makes more abstract the idea of home. especially because touring meant we spent less and less of our time in our actual home, a slightly larger apartment in the same Brooklyn neighborhood that we had rented once my first book advance check came in.

It had a dishwasher and didn't have black ooze dripping down the heating pipes. We felt both rootless and always at home. The only constant sense of home Meg and I had was each other. Occasionally we would sign the walls of the backstages we waited in. Some theaters invite this. They're hallways covered in scrolls from touring bands and from community theater productions of the King and I from 1995. Our lead actor Cecil would draw a character from our show,

the glow cloud, and we would all sign around it. The years passed on, and eventually we would find ourselves back in those same theaters, seeing those signatures on the wall and realizing, oh, that's right, five years ago, here I was, doing exactly what I'm doing now. As of this writing, we've done 375 shows over six years of touring. Our biggest show was in Seattle at the Concert Hall.

We sold 2,320 tickets. The only other show that sold over 2,000 tickets was in London, at the Palladium on the West End. We've done 56 shows with over 1,000 tickets sold, and another 82 shows with over 900 tickets sold. Our smallest shows were at a coffee shop in Greensboro that invited us to perform right when our download started to pick up. Cecil and I flew down,

stayed at a motel across the highway from the venue, and did four shows of 90 people each. The musical guest was a guy who owned the comic book store next door. He was, in my memory, pretty good. When we played the main stage of the Sydney Opera House, our parents flew out to watch. We took a lot of pictures, both in front of the building and from the dressing room.

It is not the kind of thing that people like us get to do twice in our lives. We've done some exciting things on tour, but it's not the same as playing the main stage of an international landmark, the kind of place that Carmen San Diego would have stolen. Our security passes, printed by the venue, identified us as, Welcome to Nightingvale. And then, after all the excitement, we did the show. The same as we had done it on stages from Oklahoma to our own. Ottawa. The moves are the same, but sometimes the scenery astounds. Now Meg's and my relationship in the car is set in stone. She is the driver. I am the navigator. This is true on tour, and it is true when we are

on vacation, and it is true when we go to the grocery store at home. There may be better measures of a relationship, but here is one, and I stand by it. Across three continents and countless countries, Meg has never crashed the car and I've never gotten us lost. After six years of touring, we move with confidence through the world. The two of us can navigate airports and train stations, customs lines, and foreign ATMs, with speed and with practiced ability, and mostly without having to talk about it. We know what each of us is in charge of, because we know what each of us does best. We can tell when I'm getting hungry and so I'm likely to get grumpy. We can tell when Meg is feeling overwhelmed, and so is likely to get grumpy.

I'm not saying we are perfect. There are still times when travel is hard, because there are still times when life is hard, and certainly there are many, many times when touring is hard. No one who has toured for more than a few years doesn't feel the sharp edges and deep shadows of a tour, but we are not alone out there. That makes all the difference.

A picture taken by our friend and touring musician Mary Epworth in November of 2014 sums up not only our touring life, but much of our life together. In it, Meg and I are waiting at the gate of a crowded flight. Meg is in her big red cowboy boots that were the main shoes she wore for several years. My coat lies tossed in a pile on the ground. I'm reading a book, engrossed in some fictional world, ignoring the crowd around. me. Meg is fast asleep, her head on my shoulder. In this way, we lived our lives and continue to live them. Life on tour is extraordinary, but it is above all life, and together we learn to live it.

How to propose marriage. Step 1A. Want to be married. This is a good place to start. If you don't want to be married, then by all means, do not do it. There is no dress or party or kitchen appliance that is worth entering into a legally binding agreement that you don't want to be in. If you do want to be married, it's important to examine why you want to be married. I always thought that one day I would get married. I grew up in a culture that placed a lot of pressure on women to find a man and get married, a culture that reinforced the toxic idea that a woman's value is derived from a man's desire for her. I see more and more that this culture is diluting, and I hope that it continues to do so. Getting married because you are indoctrinated into a culture that values

on a scale determined by a man's want for you is a terrible reason to get married. Even if you're in a same-sex relationship, it's important to consider this, because, as I'm sure you know, heteronormative mores have a way of leaching into just about fucking everything. I knew I wanted to be married for sure in November of 2014. I was in Jersey visiting my family for the night and sleeping in my childhood bedroom alone. I called Joseph before I went to bed to say goodnight, and he didn't pick up. One of the strings holding my shit together popped, and I allowed myself to go down the spiral of, What If?

What if he was dead? What if he was dead? What if? if he ordered chicken kebab because I wasn't home to cook for him and he got too excited because he loves chicken kebab and he choked on it? And I wasn't there to not actually know how to do the Heim Lake but still to be helpful in the panicking department. What if he went out to see his show and fell down the subway stairs onto the tracks and was seriously injured and would need a lifetime of caretaking but the police didn't have anyone to contact and he was hurt and all alone? As I slipped down this spiral, it wasn't fear I was feeling about him being in danger.

It was lack of control. I wanted to be in control of what happened to him, but I knew there was no way to do that. I wanted to be in control of what would happen after the horrible thing. I wanted to take responsibility for him. I wanted to make the chicken. I wanted to plan his funeral and box up all his books. I wanted to take him to physical therapy and make sure he took his medicines. I wanted to be his person.

I wanted that decision to be made. I wanted there to be no question about who was supposed to sign the important paper. or to pick him up. I wanted to love him for the rest of his life. Dark, I know. But if you want to marry someone, this is what you were signing up for. It's easy to be there for someone in good times, but actually wanting to be there in bad times, needing to be there to care for them is a really good sign you want to be married. He turned out to be fine. He fell asleep early after playing video games and not choking on his chicken kebab and didn't hear me call.

Step 1B. Consider the patriarchal and capitalist implications of the institution of marriage. Growing up, my sister and I would play a board game called Perfect Wedding. I'm fairly confident that in the history of this game's existence, no one has ever purchased it for a boy child. I wonder what games boy children spent their time playing. Probably perfect Fortune 500 company, or perfect president, or just okay at stuff guy who is still really successful. How perfect wedding works is you take turns rolling a dye

where each side of the dye has a different dollar amount on it, from $100 to $600. And this is how much you are allowed to spend on a category of item, dress, honeymoon, flowers, venue, etc. Whoever is able to purchase all of the items first has planned the perfect wedding and wins the game. I remember the $100 dress being the most tragic thing that could happen to you. I was seven years old. I had been conditioned from early childhood that an expensive wedding was something I needed, something I should start planning before I even learn multiplication and division. For the bulk of human history, marriage has been the transfer of one man's property,

traditionally the father, to another man, the husband. Women had little to know agency over who they would be forced to live with and fuck for the rest of their lives. They were traded for parcels of land, livestock, and straight-up cash. How is this system, even in its neutered say-yes-to-the-dress era, something that a modern woman with the right to vote and access to credit would want to be a part of? Step 1C. Resign yourself to the culture you live in and allow your wants to not necessarily come from the most considered feminist place. But ultimately decide that it's okay, because you're not going to deconstruct a lifetime of societal

pressure masquerading as your own desire with one choice. And yes, you understand that you make the rules in your own life, but goddammit, sometimes you can just give yourself a break because existing in this system is already fucking hard enough. This is definitely something I struggled with. My father doesn't own me and has never acted as if he did. He always taught me to take responsibility for myself, to use power tools, build fires, ride horses, and to not be afraid of anything. He never believed he had the agency to offer permission to anyone if they were to ask to marry me. That being said, I still have no way to square the circle of participating in this institution. Other than that this is the world I live in, and I wanted to be Joseph's irrevocable next-of-kin for life,

and marriage is the most wildly accepted way to do that. I also possessed a great amount of disdain for the institution of marriage because of its exclusionary nature. The right of marriage did not exist for all people. and as such it became meaningless, and yet somehow incredibly powerful in terms of legal standing. Getting married in a time before marriage equality was law was a shameful privilege, one in which I shamefully abided, as I hoped and fought for inclusivity. Step 2. Want to be married to someone specific. Wanting to enter into the institution of marriage is one thing.

Who you are entering into it with is the more important thing. Marriage is a partnership, in the business sense, and in the romantic sense. It's not having to go through this terrible world alone. It's having someone at your side to make the terrible things less terrible. It's someone to take out the trash while you shovel the driveway. Someone to call the plumber while you go get the car inspected. Someone to take responsibility for loving you, even on your worst day. You need to be damn sure you are picking the person that you would have the best time doing the worst things with.

I love Joseph Fink. You get that, right? I love his silly walk, his furry chest, his tiny hands and feet. I love the way he thinks about things and how he makes decisions. I love the way he forms an opinion. I love how he thinks about justice and society. I love the art that he makes and how he thinks and feels about the art he does not make. I love his t-shirts. I love when he bakes and when he brings me coffee in bed. I love how organized he is with spreadsheets. I love how he plans trips. I love how after we watch a movie, he goes on the internet to read critiques and trivia about it. But also, he gives money to charity. He doesn't have a bad temper. He doesn't gamble or drink to excess or do drugs recklessly. He has a good relationship with his family, who are lovely and smart people. We mostly agree on politics and can still have respectful political disagreements.

He's good with money. He's kind to animals. He's a good tipper. He showers and brushes his teeth regularly. He has a very nice dick. For me, this is a really good partner. It will be different for you. Please consider more things than just good dick,

but don't forget to include that if that's something you're into. Step 3. Decide to ask someone to marry you. If you are ready and you believe the other person to be ready, decide that you are going to be the one to ask them. Don't wait for them to ask you. Because it is your life and you should ask for you. for what you fucking want.

Not on the coldest day in hell was Joseph ever going to propose marriage to me. I knew that he wanted a life with me, but he eschews any sense of conventional formality, ceremony, or tradition. He didn't attend his high school or college graduations. He doesn't own a suit and hasn't worn once since his bar mitzvah. He eats cereal out of a mug.

There was no down on one knee coming my way from him. I was so fine with that. I preferred that. I like to be in control. Step 4. Get really drunk and tell your friends about it. It's a good idea to test this idea out on people just to see how they react, and most importantly, how you react. Try it out on close friends, on family, on people you don't know well at all. In theater, we rehearse our lines in front of other people before we say them to our intended

audience. We don't just do that because we are self-important make pretenders who love to hear the sounds of our own voices. There's a lot of value. and saying important shit out loud at least once or twice into someone else's ears before you have to say it for the big time. Joseph and I were planning on going upstate for New Year's Eve. I was thinking of asking him then. I had not spoken this plan out loud to another soul. The day before we were going to leave was my annual brunch with a group of women who I worked

on a show with in 2012. As often happens with this group, brunch turned into drinks, which turned into a drunken sandwich crawl around Brooklyn, which turned into a bar. crawl and then into a sleepover. Joseph was pissed that I was partying so hard and that I would be hung over for our new years away. He was actively fighting with me this whole day via text. When we got to our last bar, I thought I would try out telling people I was going to ask

Joseph to marry me. We had picked up two of our gentlemen friends by this point in the night. When I said it out loud, all of the ladies were like, hell yeah, you get a girl. You get that KitchenAid's Dan mixer. And the two dudes were like, you can't do that. needs to ask you. And these were feminist woke dudes, as if I would voluntarily share oxygen with anyone who wasn't. I then explained that I was my own goddamn person, and I don't wait around for anyone to tell me how to live my life, and that they should examine why they think men are the gatekeepers

of marriage. And I explained the whole Joseph hates formality and that he eats cereal out of a mug thing, and then they got it. When I heard myself saying the words out loud, they made sense to me. It felt right. I felt a boon of comfort. for my lady friends encouraging me, and that same boon of confidence from my dude friends telling me I was doing the wrong thing. And that is the true test, that no matter what you hear from your friends,

you are still just as confident in your choice, if not more so. Because the choices you make about how to live your life only need to be okay with one person, and that person is you. Well, until you ask someone to marry you, then that person gets a small saying. The next morning I woke up desperately hungover,

but ready to drive upstate to bag a husband. Step 5. Ask someone to marry you. There are lots of ways to do this. I would recommend doing this in private. It's a huge life choice that you want your partner to make without the coercion of a film crew and an entire baseball stadium full of their loved ones watching. Looking at you, Kanye.

Marriage is ultimately about you and your partner. For me and my partner, we are most comfortable making huge decisions in private. But hey, to each their own yay. Joseph and I drove upstate for our New Year's trip. We checked into a very adorable bed and breakfast just outside of downtown Hudson. I believe it had the word manor in the title to really double down on its old world's stately warmth. Our room had a skeleton key, and we ate venison that was killed on the property that morning. It was that kind of place.

We walked around downtown Hudson that afternoon, and I kept circling the question of how I would ask him over and over again in my head. I was definitely acting a little off all day, but I could just blame the hangover, a perfect plan after all. When we were browsing a bookstore, I found a book with marriage in the title. I thought that maybe I could ask him that way, because he loves books and I love prop comedy. But ultimately, I chickened out. I realized that making a big deal of the ask would just make both of us uncomfortable. So I opted for another route, the steered conversation. We went back to the likely featured in at least one hallmark movie about a hot young Santa bed and breakfast and got into a warm bath.

I started steering. We should buy a house up here and move out of the city. Maybe a bit of a big swerve, but we were still on the road. He agreed. That's a softball when you're tucked into a warm bath miles away from the bodily crunch of a packed rush hour L train. And we both want to have kids one day, right? Maybe an overcorrect on the wheel, but again, he was there with me. Yes, we should have kids. Cool, cool, cool. And finally, do I get to be your wife? I steered us over the cliff.

Sure, he said. We landed safe and on a new road. We were both still alive, had the framework of a five-year plan, and our fingers were not even pruning yet. It felt incredible. I got out of the bathtub, ending my displacement of three-quarters of the water in the tub. leaving Joseph in a shallow pool. It didn't matter how much water I displaced. He agreed to be with me forever. Step six. Buy yourself a fucking ring. Maybe.

Do it. Don't do it. There are certainly better ways to spend your money, and there are worse ones. The ubiquity of diamond engagement rings is the result of shrewd capitalist marketing by Debeer's consolidated minds. What a romantic name!

The sourcing of diamonds for these rings, has a terrible history of financing warlords and insurgents in regions embroiled in violent conflict. But the marketing and the manipulations of the diamond market worked. In addition to being problematic as all get out, there are a huge status symbol among women who have been indoctrinated to believe that someone needs to place an expensive diamond chip on your hand to show the world that you are worthy of love and partnership. Joseph bought himself an expensive painting to commemorate this life event for him.

You can take his example and get yourself something else that you will hope to have forever and pass down to future generations. Or you cannot and save your money. Or you're laughing at me right now and saying, What money? I'm about to spend $700 on a wedding cake that tastes as if a cardboard factory fucked a pixie stick factory. I wanted a ring. The years of playing perfect wedding eroded any shot I had at bucking this norm.

The day after we got back from Hudson, I took myself to a ring shop in Williamsburg and bought myself a $2,500 black diamond ring. A few roles of the perfect wedding dye for sure. I wanted a diamond ship, and I was proud of it. I could afford it after spending most of 2014 on tour. For me, it celebrated the fact that I didn't need to silently wait around for something that I wanted. All I needed was to be sure of what I wanted and ask for it.

Step 7. receive a kitchen-aid stand mixer. In this specific capitalist culture I was raised in, this overpriced kitchen appliance is the brass ring of modern womanhood. You are to keep it on your counter in a prominent place. It's a little reminder of forced domesticity in the history of marriage, a small monument to all the women who came before you, who had no choice about whether they wanted to spend their life confined to a kitchen.

Like a cross above your bed or a mizuzzi, at your front door. Your life is better now because you have a machine to need your bread, a machine that you can choose to use daily or choose to never even plug in. My KitchenAid stand mixer was a gift from my mom. It arrived three days after we told her we were getting married. A few days later, I was walking home over the Williamsburg Bridge after midnight. I saw a Hasidic woman with a double stroller running as fast as she could up the ramp

toward the Manhattan side. What was she doing? out so late? Why was she running so fast? Exercise? Maybe. Running to something? Maybe. Running away from something? Maybe. She had small children. She looked afraid and wild. She was younger than me. I wanted to help her, but I did nothing. I walked home a free woman. I think about her more than I should. I wonder if she has a kitchen-aid stand mixer. Step 8. Live in a new world as a new person because even if you didn't think your life was really going to change all that much, it did. And that's a good thing. Creating change is what making big life choices is all about. People will send you champagne and ask if you've set a date. They will see you as something different. You are something different. You've stood up and said that even with everything you know about divorce rates and the patriarchy, you want to be permanently.

permanently linked to someone else in the eyes of the law, that you believe in yourself and your partner enough to file paperwork about it. I can't say if this is good or bad, right or wrong, feminist or oppressive. I can say that it made getting a mortgage a lot easier. And it makes me sleep a lot better, knowing that Joseph is taking care of by someone who really wants to be the one to take care of him.