Underpants On The Outside

Thursday night I proposed to Wonder Woman. She said yes.

Some of you might think that it’s tasteless to distribute this entry via blog message. Well, up yours - I need the traffic. Also, when you tell someone you got engaged, it’s not like,

“Hey, I got engaged.”

“Sweet.”

(High Five)

Everybody wants to hear a big long story. And as much as I like talking about myself, it is, in fact, a big long story, and not one I want to tell eighteen times today. [Editor’s note: for instance, I started writing this on Friday. It is now Sunday.] Instead, I figure I can tell the story on the Underpants, then send people here - it’s one stop shopping: z’s engagement story AND dick jokes about the latest episode of Lost!

Now I can only hope our marriage will go a hell of a lot more according to plan than the proposal.

Wonder Woman has been bugging me for over a year to marry her, and being a lawyer, she had several stipulations concerning how I was to go about it. Above all she wanted to be surprised, which was going to be difficult since she was on the lookout like an unmarried-and-thirty-year-old hawk. In order to surprise her I’d have to be a Ninja o’ Love. Well, fear my Tiger-Crane style!

Here was the plan: on a random weekday (in this case, a Thursday) I made up an excuse for WW and me to go to our usual date-night restaurant: a sushi place around the corner. It’s nice as far as we’re concerned, but not enough to for her to go to WedCon 2. (WedCon: WEDding preparedness CONdition. Hovering at an elevated state of urgency - WedCon 3 - ever since WW’s thirtieth birthday. Analysts fear an unprecedented WedCon 1 alert sometime in 2009.)

Despite what you may be thinking, I wasn’t about to get down on one knee (in accordance with paragraph 4, subsection 17 of the “Propose to Me Already, Dickhead” memorandum sent to me in April of 2007.) Nor was I going to have the waiter place the ring in a glass of champagne. (Paragraph 32, subsection 6) What I did is I wrote a custom prix fixe menu for the waiters to give to us as we sat down. Each course had a romantic sounding title, then a funny caption with cutesy inside jokes, and finally a contextually relevant dish to tie it all together. For example: on our first date WW and I ate cheesesteaks. This was the 2nd Course…

“The Circle of Life” - No matter what hardships we may face, no matter what we may disagree on, two truths are eternal: our love for each other and our love for beef. As new lovers, as newly betrothed and in every stage of our lives, we hope to be filled with both. Beef Negi Maki - “The Cheeseless Cheesesteak”

In retrospect that could be read that I hope we are filled with both beef and each other, which is kind of gross. I meant that we would be filled with beef and love. But whatever - the menu was adorable. I even worked in a reference to our second meeting, when WW flew out to L.A. to stay with me but I spent the entire time in bed because of an insanely painful TESTICLE INFECTION. (Apparently you can get them from the flu, which I had had a few weeks before. Trust me, it wasn’t a VD - I was in a very very dry spell at the time.) Do you know how tricky it is to come up with a barely-tasteful sushi-based reference to a testicle infection??? Pretty freaking hard, as it turns out - the local sushi place doesn’t serve a Swollen Goose Egg Roll.

The menu was also dated March 1, 2009. I thought this would really be the tip-off, because a while back Wonder Woman latched onto an offhand comment I made and convinced herself that I would propose in March. “March 2009!” I’d reply, and laugh uproariously. Even though I told it about two hundred times, she must have not gotten the joke, because I swear she never laughed once. Lastly, to really tie the whole thing together, the last line of the menu was, “Price: you have to say ‘yes.’”

It cannot be said enough times that I am an adorable motherfucker.

This is how I imagined it: first, the waiter would give us the menus. After a moment of confusion, it would dawn on her: this is actually happening. A sharp intake of breath; her hand covers her mouth. Tears well up, and she looks at me with the unspoken question, “Can this be true?”

Then I’d hold out both fists and tell her, “pick a hand.” (I may be adorable, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.)

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

WHILE this would be going down at the restaurant, Ex-Roommate Mary (who punched me when I told her about the “pick a hand” plan) would go into our apartment, straighten up, and leave a bottle of champagne on ice, surrounded by rose petals and a lovely flower arrangement sitting in a vase. When we arrived home WW and I would sip champagne, discuss our future together, then hump. Even better, my co-workers (very, very sweet of them) bought me a bottle of Dom Perignon, which was a lot nicer than the Korbel I was going to splurge on.

But if the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry, you can imagine what happens when a halfwit like me gets to thinkin’…

I called WW that evening while she was still at work and told her that I’d received some good news about a bonus at work and we should go out to celebrate. I suggested the sushi place. She loved the idea, so much so that by the time she got home, she was starving. This may have been the start of all the trouble.

We got to the restaurant and I made meaningful eye contact with the waiter. He knew the plan. He came over and told us there were special menus that evening, and handed them to us. I discreetly palmed the ring and watched Wonder Woman’s eyes for the moment she realized what was going on. That’s how I was able to see them SCAN THE MENU FOR A HALF-SECOND BEFORE DROPPING IT AND MOVING ON TO THE REGULAR MENU. (As I mentioned, she was hungry, which usually means she’s not in the mood to mess around with frivolous time-wasters like reading or exchanging pleasantries with me.)

Z: “Uh…Did you check out this menu?”

WW: “Yeah, but I’m probably going to get the usual stuff.”

Z: “Yeah, but…did you read it? It’s really weird. You should check it out.”

WW: (picks up the menu)

WW: “There’s too much going on with it…” (puts menu back down.)

[At this point I can feel my plan spinning wildly out of control. I start to panic.]

Z: “No, I’m serious. Read it.” [Editor’s note: WW recalls that I was acting a little scary right around this point.]

WW: (picks up menu)

WW: “You know what’s really weird? It’s not March.” (PUTS MENU BACK DOWN)

[Editor’s note: “It’s not March”????? By the way, that’s a direct quote; I’m not exaggerating. I mean… C’MON…]

Z: “Babe? Read the menu. Pick it up. Start at the top, read to the bottom.”

WW: “Why?”

Z: (angry glare)

Even when she had finally read it, I would say there was much more confusion and unease than emotion and compulsion to have sex with me. Certainly no tears, and I’ll be damned if I hadn’t earned a bucketful. I was close to drop-kicking a puppy if that’s what it took to make her cry. Desperate to get my plan back on track, I held out my fists, but I had jumped the gun - instead of cute, joyous frustration at me stalling the moment she’d been waiting for, the “pick a hand” game only increased the bewilderment. By the time I asked her to marry me, this was her response:

“Really??? I mean, of course, yes, but… really???”

Here I had put together a really cute bit and she was fucking it all up. In her defense, she told me that at that moment she kept waiting for the punchline. I had had so much fun making jokes about proposing to her that by the time I actually did it she figured it was a gag, so I got what I deserved.

From that point, we shared a terrific meal together, though frankly I could have done without this moment:

WW: “I still amazed you were able to surprise me… I mean, I can’t believe you didn’t m-… that no one screwed it up!”

Z: “Just so we’re clear, I know you were going to say, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t mess it up.’”

WW: “…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I mean, just because we’re both thinking it doesn’t mean it needs to be said. I also thought the peanut roll (included for reasons you can probably guess now) was not so wonderful. Overall, though, a very special meal, even when WW, completely unprovoked, said, “I’m not drinking a thing tonight. I want to remember everything.” Well, good thing I didn’t have a bottle of really expensive champagne being put on ice as we spoke…

This is getting long, so let’s just say that WW was able to convince herself to have a glass once she saw exactly what kind of champagne it was. Then she rushed off to spend the next four hours on the phone. I was fine with that because it gave me time to watch Lost, but Wonder Fiancée informed me that she and I were reveling in a very sacred moment, and was important to her that we share this moment together, though ‘together’ did not mean that we would necessarily be talking to each other or even in the same room. If I wanted to, I could either speak with friends or play online Scrabble, but I could not watch TV and most certainly could not go to sleep. This got a bit annoying around two in the morning.

One last thing: at 7:45 am on Friday, I woke up to find WW staring at me. I had just enjoyed five and a half hours of sleep. She looked into my eyes and said, “I’m so excited we’re engaged… How many groomsmen are you going to have?” [Editor’s note: again, that’s a verbatim quote right there.]

Something tells me I’m going to have a lot of material for the Underpants over the next year…