Three Weeks Ago Today...

Dulywed: Year 3

Dear Mack,

I was watching Top Chef on Tivo today and the challenge was to create a dish using the hotels of Las Vegas as inspiration. The Bellagio and Mandalay Bay were among the featured hotels, and the whole subject took me back three years ago when we spent the weekend at the now-demolished Frontier hotel, to that fateful night when you and I went to the courthouse and promised to be best friends for the rest of our lives in front of three complete strangers.

I remember wearing cowboy boots and picking the most ridiculous bouquet in the little chapel. I remember the minister pushing the play button on his tape player and cuing me to walk down the 6-foot-long aisle. I remember thinking how silly this whole show was and how tragic that some of the other couples there were actually taking this seriously. Our wedding, the one that legally bound us, was a joke.

But then, standing up at that ridiculous alter wrapped up with silk roses, something happened. Since no one else in the entire room mattered, I became fixed on you. I robotically uttered familiar phrases about sickness or health, richer or poorer, and looked into your eyes without being distracted. When I was told to say that I would be your best friend forever, I was jolted. That was a serious commitment, one I naively hadn't considered before that moment, and I had to make a decision right then and there. Staring at you in your grandpa sweater with your big smile and dangerous eyes, I agreed. I promised to be your best friend.

I know that there have been days, weeks, maybe even months in the last three years that I haven't been your best friend. In fact, it's possible and likely that at times I've been your worst enemy. But even in that darkness, in that indifference and carelessness, I'm still glad that I made the promise of friendship. It's created a bridge that keeps our marriage from going under, that gets us over the bad times and back to the good ones, that binds you to me and me to you.

This past year has been full of ups and downs, just like the roller coaster ride we went on at the New York hotel moments after we got married. You graduated from college and I got laid off from my job. You started med school, I started nursing school, and we both stopped doing dishes. We moved away from your family and came closer to mine. We traded endless sun, weekends at the beach and a constant state of poverty for rainy days, mosquitoes and feeling like millionaires. You lost judo the way you liked it and I lost fire dance as I was just falling in love with it, but you gained a judo friend who loves it as much as you do and I reconnected with the arts activism that gives me a sense of purpose. We got my older sister back, we left your baby sister behind. You had your issue with ProstaStrong and I had mine with Metamucil. We drove across the country in a state of delirium, shared the discovery of shadow people, almost died trying to move in and then sat on the porch swing swilling cold beer and getting bored of unemployment. I built a dollhouse, you dissected a human body.

I guess you could safely say this year has been unlike any we've ever had.

A few weeks ago when you were about to burst from resentment for a state narrowed by its dominant whiteness, we escaped to the cemetery to sit by the pond and preserve your sanity. In that small afternoon, while you held my hand so I could hang over the pond and get garbage out of the water, while we watched the fish have a feeding frenzy on bread, while that super fat ugly bird waddled over to our bench to get some attention, I felt like we were best friends, like we are appropriately balanced between helpful and hurtful, between together and apart, between supportive and disruptive. I felt like I did that day at Shakertown, when the whole world fell away and it was just me and you and cartwheel practice.

Of course I love you. Of course I care about you. Of course I think you are deliciously handsome and sexy and smart and funny. But as we spend more and more time together, the thing I value most about you is your friendship.

Thank you for the last three years and for the one we're starting today. Happy anniversary, Mr. T.

Things I Am Thankful For (in no particular order)

1. My family being so close.
2. A husband who knows how to download movies and tv shows.
3. Having friends all over this country.
4. The chance to go back to school.
5. An interesting, centrally located apartment.
6. Babies.
7. The Lexington Art League.
8. In-laws that I actually enjoy.
9. Being smart.
10. Having a gym membership that includes access to treadmills with televisions attached.
11. My mom's turkey with cornbread leek stuffing.
12. Radishes and beer cheese.
13. Beer.
14. Bourbon.
15. Cheap but cute Christmas cards at Marshall's.
16. My bicycle.
17. 40% off coupons at Banana Republic.
18. Tall boots.
19. My silky.
20. New underwear.
21. Hair cuts and curling irons.
22. Poi.
23. The UFC.
24. The Internet.
25. Student loans.
26. Fake down comforters.
27. Tivo.
28. The library.
29. Not getting tickets even though I speed all the time.
30. The snails that come out when it rains.

America's Next Top Models

While in NYC, Heather and I decided to do an impromptu photo shoot in our hotel room to showoff our new threads. Having watched every season of America's Next Top Model, I knew we had to focus on our body angles and smiling with our eyes.

And now, our portfolio.

Transformation

I realized while we were on the plane to New York City for our No Nonsense Between Friends trip that Heather and I started our friendship on a plane. She had a bag of O'Boises potato chips on a flight back to Louisville after our 5th grade day trip to Washington, D.C., and she offered them to me not knowing that I had/have a chip addiction. As I looked at her this time, 20+ years later, I felt a whole new gratitude for her... and it had little to do with the mommy snacks I knew she had in her bag.
Our trip to NYC was incredible. From the moment we walked into our hotel room and discovered a gift basket that put the Easter Bunny to serious shame, the trip just got better and better.

We met with a stylist, were allowed to pick something from his suggestions rack, and then went to eat some of the best pasta I've ever eaten. Then we slept above Times Square in a swanky hotel room and woke up to a view of the Hudson River and a day filled with shopping, with trying on beautiful things without the slightest regard for the attached price tags. We dropped hundreds of dollars without a thought and came to adore the women who fit you for bras at Macy's. Then it was off to another extraordinary dinner, this time sushi that literally melted in your mouth, followed by Mamma Mia on Broadway. Sunday was just more of the same upward trajectory. We donned our new threads, headed to a salon and were treated to a facial and a hair experience unlike any either of us has ever had.
Did you know that lurking under this mass of confused waves and supernatural frizz there is supermodel hair? It was too beautiful to be mine, but there it was attached to my head.
We had our makeup done to complete our new looks, and I can't really describe how this whole makeover experience affected me. I haven't felt this good about myself ever. And I haven't seen Heather treating herself so well our entire lives.

I think that's what's most precious about this whole experience. Seeing someone I love dearly reconnect with who she is, beyond who she is to other people, was the best gift of all. I'm so grateful I was able to play some small part in getting her to that place and that I got to see it happen.

Our trip just kept getting better and better and better, and when it finally hit me how wonderfully lucky I am to have won this, how incomprehensibly blessed I am to have such an astounding friendship with someone who is so extraordinary, how delicious my life is, well, when all those realizations finally settled on me during the stillness of a carriage ride through Central Park, I cried. And I have never in my life been more grateful to have Heather at my side than I was in that moment.

The Cure

Here's what I know.

Betsy was born with hip dysplasia that left her with medical bills so long and impossible to pay that my parents, who had three other kids, just started wrapping her up in them and taking her picture. There she is, in a body cast on the couch, and a bill no less than 12 feet long swirls around her. My dad worked full time, and when he got home my mom went to work until 10 or 11 at night. Sometimes he had two jobs. Sometimes after Betsy's surgeries, my dad couldn't stay at the hospital with my mom because he had to get back to those jobs.

Jennifer was diagnosed with CLL in 2005 after having surgery to have her adenoids removed. Fortunately she was employed at a fabulously supportive accounting firm, one that helped her relocate closer to home to pursue chemotherapy and one that gave her time off during her treatments. It was also one that came with incredible health insurance. And it is exactly that health insurance and the chronic nature of her disease that keeps her in that job. She knows her disease will flair up again at some point, she knows that she will need treatment, and she knows that the only way she can get the treatment she needs is to have health insurance. Which means that even though she wants to try a new career, wants to stay home with her future babies, wants to have the life she chooses rather than the one the health insurance industry forces on her, she can't.

Heather has two sons. The older son has a sensory issue of some kind. He has been to therapy to learn how tricks for how to deal with it. Because of this issue, he was traumatized while trying to pottytrain and had to be admitted to the emergency room. Heather is a stay-at-home mom who has worked as a nurse and an insurance assessor. She told me once that when you put bandaids on a patient in the hospital, the patient is billed for the entire box of bandaids even if they only use two. Same thing for gauze. Some thing for fluids. And the sticker price of these drugstore items are hugely inflated because, hey, it's not the person we're charging, it's the insurance... In trying to get her son the intervention that he needs, she has had to hound insurance companies for thousands of dollars. Normally a financial genius with a safety net that makes me jealous, Heather and her family have gone into debt trying to bridge the gap between paying for the therapy and being reimbursed by the insurance company, which sometimes doesn't happen.

Charles and Shannon were living in England one year and they came home for the holidays. Normally they buy traveler's insurance, but this time they forgot. This was the time that Charles would get appendicitis and spend Christmas Day in the hospital. He came home after one day, back to his old self, except now his old self had a $20,000 bill attached to it. With no way to pay it, they went back to their country, where if I was visiting I could have surgery for free, and hoped for the best.

I have lived without insurance at several points in my life, as has Mack, and fortunately my politics allowed me to take advantage of Planned Parenthood and the services they offer, which come with fees based on your most recent pay stubs, my health allowed me to stay alive, and my luck kept me from drowning in debt. I eat pretty healthily, I exercise at least once a week, I maintain my weight within 10 pounds, I do regular breast exams, I take vitamins, but I am not invincible to disease or illness.

Thanks to the representatives who stepped outside of politics and looked at what Americans need, I may not have to be. The United States may just catch up to other first world countries in providing this basic service to our citizens. We may just be able to stop worrying about how we're going to take care of our parents and how we're going to afford having children. We may just start taking responsibility for our own health, which is something that, like it or not, insurance companies do not let us do.

It's going to be collectively expensive if we get it, one of the biggest barriers to the public health option, but it's no more expensive than paying the overinflated costs we're personally paying now. (Insurance for me and Mack was $400+ per month at my last job... imagine if I donated that money instead to universal health care and it didn't matter how sick I or anyone else got!)

This really isn't about politics. It's about people... Betsy, Jen, Heather, Charles, me, Mack, our parents, the babies we love, you. It's completely doable, it's long overdue, it's anti-American to let people die.

Click here to find out how to nudge your congresspeople to be brave and forward-thinking. And here to educate yourself on what's really at stake.

Scary

Sometimes, when I have my camera out, I get kind of demanding about everybody making the same face. This is probably because my friend Giovanni, the cutiest Italian-American filmmaker ever born, introduced me to crazy eyes.

Crazy eyes are where you take a photo as you would normally but you open your eyes just a little too much, just a little bit crazy.

My mom, Betsy and I will demonstrate. Here we are doing crazy eyes during the Murder Mystery train ride we took. Sometimes my mom confuses "crazy" with "stroke," which is common when you are first mastering this fine photographic pose.
Annnnnyyyywaaaayyyy, on Halloween I got into another mandatory photo fit and made everyone do their best scary face. This may become a new Halloween tradition, so consider yourself warned.