I find myself sitting here writing this hoping that at some point tonight I will have an internet connection to steal from one of our neighbors so I can share this all with you.

This is the Marriage Eve. Tomorrow I will be married. As much as some people talk about how scary marriage is, I have not felt any of that. Yet. Right now takes me back. I am sitting in our apartment all by myself. You know, the bride and groom are not supposed to see one another, it is bad luck. It takes me back to all those years I spent at home, alone by myself on a Friday night. My parents would be up at the lake and so would my sister and I would have the whole house to myself. That is just the kind of dork that I am that I spent many nights, at home by myself when other people my age were out partying, meeting new people, or just generally indulging in whatever kind of behavior our generation uses to escape. Knowing this fact it is pretty amazing that I found anyone to marry me at all.
I mulled over my options for tonight. On the way home I thought about stopping at B-Dubs, sitting at the bar drinking soda in pure obscurity while watching playoff baseball. I thought about going to see a movie all by myself (the only other time I did that was when I was utterly depressed and had a teenage girl tell me how horrible her life was because she had to change positions for softball). I thought about coming home, calling Keith and seeing if he wanted to stay with me for a few hours. But after thinking all those options through in my head I decided that me here by myself was the best course of action. Why? Well this is what I came up with.
When I would spend all that time alone I would do nothing most of the time. However, there were times when a creative force would just take hold of me and I would be compelled to write something, pick up a guitar and play until my fingers hurt, or just merely wax philosophically until I had so many good ideas in a row that I could not write them down fast enough. I thought tonight had that kind of potential. Besides this, what you are reading now, I think nothing else is going to happen.
For me, those nights of philosophical thought seemed to happen sitting in my room. While it was nice when my parents were gone and I could do anything I want, but did nothing, it was always better when I could be locked away in my room late at night. The nights I liked to be the most creative were the nights that were supposed to mean something. I would stay up really late on Christmas Eve in those years. Locked away in my room, watching TV, all those Christmas commercials on, everything decked out in green and red. I would lie under my blankets in my sweats, the heater turned on and the sweet smell of hot metal because it had run for too long. I would wonder about this Christmas, or what the year had been like and how next year could be better (or I would just swear off commercialism as the downfall of American civil society and go out the next day and buy stuff). It was a mixture of optimism and hope that got me going, for a long time that was all I had to cling to. That is what tonight feels like.
I have all the optimism and hope in the world tonight. It feels like Christmas Eve, but 10.000x bigger. I am getting the best present in the whole wide world. God has sent me the world’s biggest Tootsie Pop. For two years I have slowly been trying to get to the delicious center and tomorrow is the day it finally happens. Tomorrow I get a wife, and that is the best present a man could ever get.

1 chasing my dream | discovering the flaws