Wedding preparations are under way.

The, uhh, fiancée and I are going to check out The Hastings House this weekend. For shits and giggles, I think we're going to check out The Ritz-Carlton too, but I can tell you right now, they're going to laugh me out of that place when I roll up in The 1997, 4-door, 98 horsepower, manual everything, Geo Prizm (mine's white for further emasculation [although that light, sparkly bronze is pretty bad]). How's that?! I just used a bracketed expression inside a parenthetical expression! The grammar gods are going to torture me for an eternity, I just know it.

Anyway, what I want to say is that I love being engaged and I think that I'm really going to like being married. I like seeing Jen's ring on her finger. I like thinking about the years we have ahead. I'm excited about having children and pets and a house and a life together.

In previous relationships, I hated having to compromise, but I really don't feel that way with Jen. I mean of course there are times when I want my way, but it usually works out that those are times that Jen is willing to compromise. It works the same the other way around though, too. Jen will want something a certain way or will want to go do something that I don't really don't want to do, but I realize that doing it will make her happy and that I don't feel that strongly against it, so I compromise. Typically, I end up being fine doing whatever it was I was against doing in the first place anyway.

Maybe my success with this relationship is the result of growing up, but I think that growing up is really the result of being in a relationship that I want to make work. I can't see myself without Jen. For those of you out there that think that our relationship is really easy, let me tell you somethin'. We met when we were 20 years old. Do you think that's an easy thing to deal with when you're 20? Knowing that you want to be with that other person for the rest of your life? I sure wasn't ready to meet my future wife at 20. I had run halfway around the world to give myself some time to work out who I was and what I was doing and that's where I met Jen. Talk about a kick in the head. It took a while for me to get accustomed to the fact that I needed to be ready for anything and that I couldn't be the selfish prick that we all had come to know and love. But I guess that's just what you do.

Anyway, that's my thought for the day.

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Confession: sometimes, when I'm writing this late at night, I feel a little like Doogie at the end of an episode, when he's writing in his computer diary. Good times, good times.