How Does Your Garden Grow?

HERRRRR MEHR GERRRDDDD

 

Hi there!

READERS, HELLO!!  Hello, Readers, if you even still exist!  If you have not given up on me in the MONTHS is has taken to sit down and try and type out a single thing!  A love letter to you, from me, if you have not turned your back on me and my negligence!  Hello, a heartfelt if slightly manic HELLO from me to you!

It's fine!!
*gigglesnort*

Sooo many things.  I planned a wedding (fun!), got married (Fun!), we went on a honeymoon (FUN!!), and then went back to Family Camp (FfUuNNnNN!!!!), and are finally, FINALLY home!  Like, literally two hours ago.  The past month (ok, six months…) have been a little surreal and potentially disconcerting and some might say too much but it’s FINE, it’s all FINE, because now we are DONE and HOME and MORE WORDS IN ALL CAPS because this is in fact all REALLY, REALLY TOO MUCH. 

(Exhibit A: on the family vacation, my dad (we’ll call him “Dad”) asked me if I was coming to see them for Thanksgiving.  This is a perfectly reasonable question: every other year we do Thanksgiving with him and my step mom and my sis and all the step sisters and it’s been that way for like 15 years. 

This is our year to do that and he was just checking in and Thanksgiving is far away in November and when he asked me I almost burst into tears and was like, I CANNOT HANDLE YOUR OBSESSIVE NEED TO PLAN and that was not the most emotionally mature or fair reaction but also don’t talk to me about November right now, I am not in the best place for making plans.  It has all been a lot.)

It is all been good things, very good things, but also back to back and non-stop.  I have been on a lot of airplanes.  I haven't done laundry in like 45 days.  I just had to clean messy cat poops off the upstairs landing because we’ve been gone for yet another week and the monsters were apparently also feeling the stress.  

All I want to do is take a week off and be at home and do relaxing projects and be covered in cats.  Unfortunately, that is now WAY off the list because I’ve been gone so much from work that my next vacation day is never.   The last 35 days in particular have been a real flash-bang whirligig and I’m sure you don’t care that I’ve been so exhausted by doing so many wonderful and fancy things like a wedding and international travel and a ridiculous family vacation but HOLY JESUS I need it all to stop and I just want to make some pickles, bake some bread, and plant a garden.

And really, speaking of gardens, who brings a textbook about small scale commercial organic vegetable farming to read on a family vacation anyway?  Here’s a hint: it’s me.  Of course it is.

I have Cadillac garden-dreams on a
Datsun energy-to-water-and-weed budget.

And I read almost all of it!  I got through it til it got to things like advertising and building your own mobile farmer’s market stand and I decided we’re not there yet and I can pump the breaks.  Theoretically at least.  All of the paragraphs above sort of indicate that “break pumping” is out of character, but still.  We’re not starting a business here, it’s just…I have a lot of community garden plots to play with, and I want to see what I can do.  Which leads us to today’s topic: garden fraud, and too much produce.

So there’s a community garden two miles from my house that my little borough runs through the little city government.  A bunch of raised beds at the end of a dead-end road, some fruit trees around it, and an imposing fenced-in area that says WARNING: BEES on the side of it.  

I am VERY EXCITED about the bees,
and even harassed the beekeeper when
I finally ran into her.  Was she covered in bees
 at the time?


Maybe.

There’s even a high tunnel for winter crops, and water hoses, and little bleachers for classes or something.  I discovered this gem in the spring, and looked into how to get a plot.  There is another one around the corner, in the next little city, and it is a thriving garden that really pulls the community together, and plots cost like $35 for the year. 

Ours is not that garden.  It is newer, and almost unused—there’s like 35 4x8 foot raised beds, but when I went by it  mayyyyybe six had evidence that once, someone tried to grow something there.  Everything else was overgrown by weeds and I could find no signs that they had recently been in use—no volunteer garlic making a go of it after last year’s crop, no scrawny collards or doing-their-best carrots.  Just grass weeds and neglect.  Plots were free—well, technically the fees were “waived” for 2019, which I take as further evidence that no one is signing up for them.

Great! I thought.  I will transform this space, I thought. I will revitalize this community resource, I thought.   I will commit garden fraud, and get six plots when I’m only supposed to have two, and grow all my wedding flowers, I thought. 

 

I felt like this about it.

I was right about the garden fraud—technically, I have my two plots, and so does “Andy”, and also his son, bringing the household total to six—but wrong about successfully cultivating all my own wedding flowers.  There was a whole adventure around carefully planning my approach, selecting the flower seeds I wanted, starting them inside before the last frost date, planting them out, watering them, etc.  I did the thing, but the thing (as literally everyone predicted all along the way) did not work out.   Now—like, right now—I have three plots of lovely flowers thriving and being beautiful (in a garden two miles from where I can see them), but the wedding was in May and me and a friend instead raided an abandoned lot next to a church and we got wedding flowers out of the ditch and they were fine.  It was lovely; no one walks away from a wedding being like, “Well it was a good party, but did you see those boutonnieres?  They must be mortified.”

Wedding flower theft: a story in pictures

Et Voila! Wedding time!

Now I have all these garden plots and like….if you dig into the annals of this blog, you know it all started on Forever Farm.  I worked on a big organic farm for a year and I. Loved. It.  Farming is deeply satisfying to me, it checks all my boxes: projects, tangible results, physical exertion, making things, being able to look back on your day and your week and your season and your year and being like, look what I DID, what I MADE, and it’s hard to overstate the satisfaction for me of creating such a useful thing as FOOD.  And now I have alllll these garden plots….

I really do highly recommend this book.

So, I read a textbook.  I recommend it.  But here are a couple of things I am now painfully aware of.  The trick to good plants is good soil.  We are not smarter than the soil.  It has been working its system out since the actual dawn of life on Earth, and we only sort of understand it.  Our best bet is giving the soil what it needs, then letting it soil well, and getting out of the way.  (Yes, there are things we know help, and things that make it better—like add compost!—but mostly you do that so that it can do what it does best.  It’s like throwing ingredients into a kitchen with a millennia-old chef, and then later, there’s delicious food.)

My soil isn’t great.  In some plots it seems better than others, but in the worst plots it’s just super-compacted red clay that exhausted me digging six regular holes to plant some eggplants I got at Home Depot.  I googled “hardpan” and it seems right.  No topsoil, bad drainage.  It’s bad soil.  

I will also be planting too much squash,
which never stops producing,
even when everything else has given up in the heat
and you have decided you hate squash,
things that rhyme with squash,
and bananas because they look like squash.

I AM VERY GOOD AT THIS.

Also, what am I going to do with six plants worth of eggplant? I don’t want that much eggplant.  We grew one eggplant plant at the house last season and ate none of it.  We don’t really eat eggplant, and it doesn’t freeze.  I know, Reader.  But man, I want to GROW that much eggplant. I want to grow SO MUCH eggplant.

In another plot I have now put in like 20 seeds for black eyed peas.  Assuming they germinate and I actually build a trellis, I will have one million black eyed peas.  Also, and this is particularly fun, they all get ripe at the same time and then they're done.  So I will have one million peas (and pea pods to shuck) all at the same time.  I am very good at this.

On the better plots it was more diggable but like…I did no testing to know how good or bad the actual dirt is.  For the record you can get free soil testing done by digging up a
bit of dirt and sending it to your local extension agent.  I did not do this.  I assumed it was probably mostly fine, or at least fixable, and that is a sentiment I still have even knowing some of my soil is garbage and having recently read a textbook on how fixing specific, different soil problems is helped tremendously by specific, different approaches.  It’s going to be fine. 

Look…I’m going to do things to make it better (like plant deep rooting cover crops that break up the hard pan and fix nitrogen!  See, I was paying attention to the book!).  Any better is better than no better.  And I don’t know if you, my sweet still-hanging-on Reader, has been paying attention, but good enough is good enough for me.  As my friend “Jen” said recently: anything worth doing is worth doing half assed.  

Good enough is good enough for me!

Sounds like not what your high school counselor told you, right?  But here’s the thing: if it matters at all, then any small step you take towards it matters.  It is okay if you don’t have it in you to do it all.  You can do some, even crappy-some, and it is better than none, because it matters.  

(My dentist once got me to admit I didn’t floss, and she was like: look, it’s best to floss three times a day.  But if you do it once a week, that’s still 52 more times a year than you are doing.  And if you had done that, you wouldn’t be looking at a root canal.  So like…maybe, once a week or so, give it a try.  It’s not best but it’s still better.  She changed my flossing life.)  

It is fair to say I am comfortable with—even inspired by—this worldview. 

So I sat down with my organic gardening textbook, and started to make plans around all the veggies I want to grow on my crappy soil in a garden plot I barely have rights to, and now I am so excited to go set up cover crops and green manure and a crop rotation and there is a horse farm nearby, can I get some of that nitrogen-rich horse manure? I bet I can.  

This is kind of a multi-year plan, and I struggled to even go water the flowers for my wedding, and I know this.  So we'll see if it works out.  If not, the worst I did was try, and improved some soil a little bit for the next people who care more than me.  I got six plots to fill, a plan, and an activity that requires me to be close to home.  I think it’s a win.

Ima get that horse poop.

I'm Pregnant.

I'm not pregnant.

So, I go to the gyno.

As we all (all of us, even this guy, so I assume we ALL) know, this is not the best day, but fine, I’m due, whatever.  Here’s the thing, I haven’t been in a couple of years and I really should, because of all the normal reasons but also because I had LEEP procedure like a decade ago cuz some bad business was taking up shop in my hoo-ha and it’s important to keep checking to make sure they got it all out (they did, but you’re supposed to keep checking).  

And I have been Johnny-on-the-spot with going to get my annual pap every year to make sure we’re all good downstairs but like…just not last year.  I got busy, I hate making appointments, whatever.  I took a year off. 

An IUD prevents pregnancy (and lessens periods)
for 5-10 years (depending on the type) and is a
solid contraceptive option for many women.

Anyway, point is I for sure had to go this year on time because my IUD was set to expire ril soon, which I assume happens in some sort of catastrophic way so I needed to go get that handled before the clock ticked down to zero and, I don’t know, it exploded.  Went sour like milk.  Became sentient.  Whatever, def go see the doctor before that.

So I go in and I’m like, “a couple of things, lady-doctor friend:  My IUD is set to blow, I need my pap, and I just got engaged.”

“Oh!” She says.  “Congratulations!”

Thanks, says I.

“Are you thinking of having kids?”

Yes, says I.

Then she does not say—she did not say these words, Reader, nor were they implied in her manner or tone.  She does _not_ say, “Well, your body is a desolate wasteland, similar in life-sustaining properties to the surface of Mars, as infertile as the dead sea, as barren as the salt flats.”

That is not what she said, Reader.

But it is what I heard.

 She did say something like, well it might not happen at your age, but let’s just pop this IUD out and you go live your life and maybe make a baby!

She pointed to a chart on the wall describing women’s fertility by age.  Then, she did not say, “you’ll notice here you are already stumbling off the cliffs of insanity, there is no hope for you because your eggs are as old, tired, and spent as your bitter, poison heart.”  She did not say that. 

She did point out the steep decline in fertility that happens, on average, at my age right now.

My eggs, marching towards their inevitable destiny.

Then I put my feet in the stirrups, she went on downstairs as I sat wrapped in a paper towel with arm holes, and she removed the IUD.  While she was down there she did the pap and poked around, and 

Who killed the world?  I did.

did not say, “Oh, I see the movie Fury Road was filmed inside of your uterus, perhaps you can use the residuals from that to pay for the fertility treatment you will definitely need, if that is even an option for you any more, you decrepit hag.”  She just yanked the IUD strings—shlooop!—and was like, great, have a good day.

I said, so what do I do for birth control between now and trying to get pregnant?

And she did not laugh out loud at how quaint it is that I, dried husk of a woman that I am, could even think to worry about such a thing.  

She did suggest condoms, the least reliable of contraceptives, or “just pull and pray.”  And that was really the crystallizing moment.  When my gyno suggested the withdrawal method of birth control, that is when I knew it for sure: we are not in Kansas anymore. 

So I leave the gyno—she has given me a pamphlet, and told me to maybe start taking prenatal vitamins—and drive myself home, roiling with feelings. 

You see, I am currently on no birth control.  Just, none.  The house is unlocked.  I have been hyperconscious of keeping the house locked since I was like…born.  And now we’re just…free-wheeling it.  Au naturelle.  I have not been au naturelle since ever, and part of me is 100 percent, to-my-bones sure that I am pregnant already.  Let me be clear-- I was sure I was pregnant as I left her office.  The wind blew, I was pollinated like a flower, there’s somebody in my house.  It must be true, because the house is unlocked and that is what happens when you leave the house unlocked. 

At the same time, I am equally sure that I will never be pregnant, pregnancy is a dream of an earlier era, a time before my fields were salted, crusted, and cursed.  Bathed in the napalm of time.  I am but a memory of a woman, no thing can live inside of me. 

At the same same time, I am suddenly very aware of how weird pregnancy even is.  There is just a thing alive but inside you but of you but not of you, and then at some point it has to come out, and by all accounts that ish sucks. 

So I took a deep breath and very calmly and with complete rationality explained to “Andy” when I got home that I was both barren and pregnant, both at once, for sure immediately right now, both.  Then I proceeded to drink all of the beers because Schrodinger’s Baby needed a nice buzz to deal with it’s weird non-existence existence.

Here are a couple of things that I know: I know that I will be 39 by the time I get married.  I know that any pregnancy after 35 is already considered high risk.  I know that fertility in lady people slants off with time….although, I also know that that data comes from a study on 300 French milkmaids in the 1700s.  Don’t take my word for it, read it yourself.   It is still the study referenced today.

The estimated figure is that miscarriage happens in around
1 in 4 recognized pregnancies,
with 85% of those happening in the first trimester.

I also know that plenty of women lose pregnancies—those numbers are much higher than we recognize, socially.  It is a crushing, devastating reality of life and women don’t talk about it.  Miscarriages are common, and borne silently, often shamefully, alone.

So even if I get knocked up, I know I might not carry to term, and then would have to try again with the echoes of my biological clock crashing through my psyche while my heart mourned a tiny life I never got to know.  




I know we're getting ahead of ourselves here…but let’s not go into this with eyes shut.  Lady-doctor is right, I might not have a baby.

I know enough about how my body works that I am already familiar with all the info in the delightful packet I was given at the gyno’s office:  You can only get pregnant around when you ovulate.  That's actually a pretty small window in your monthly cycle.  You can get a sense of when you ovulate based on things like when your periods are, the quantity and 

Cervical mucus is the most reliable
indicator of your fertility window!
It is made of the same stuff
as man-jam, but minus the sperm.
It gives the sperm something to eat
to keep them alive until your egg drops.

Science!
Biology!
Baby making!

quality of your vagina-snot, and what your cervix feels like. Also your Base Body Temperature but that is less reliable and a pain to track.  

You want there to be sperm around when you’re ovulating, assuming pollen and carnal thoughts have not impregnated you already, so then you get to do fun things like check your mucus and schedule sexy times, obviously making them all the more sexy. 

The pamphlet I got from the doctor’s office pointed out that the ideal baby-making tadpole-load takes 36-48 hours to build up, so don’t bang it out nonstop in your baby-making window because, and I quote, he needs time to ‘reload’.  This is not my favorite tone to find in a medical pamphlet.  To be clear, I am a woman who prefers cold, awkward doctors who are too smart to socialize normally **far more** than folksy, warm, charming doctors who I immediately distrust because they were building their CHA score when they should have been leveling up in INT.  But thank you, helpful pamphlet, for giving me a reason to throw you away.

The point is, I should start tracking my cycle, and luckily there’s an app for that.

Live footage of my uterus right now.

And let’s talk about these helpful fertility apps.  Look, I am a lady person, and I want to make a baby (in the desolate hellscape that is my ancient womb) in the near future (before I hurl myself off the cliffs of fecundity into the cold abyss of sterility) so it is helpful to track the things that indicate when the (negligent, shrinking, rusted over) windows of opportunity groan open.  I get it.  And I can make up charts and spreadsheets and stuff, but the internet has already done that and I can download it onto my phone from helpful companies that presumably want everyone to make all the babies all the time but more likely want to sell all the baby stuff all the time.  But fine.  Sure.  Helpful tool, I get it.

But the apps are like….frustratingly, terribly awful.  Not on the face of what they do, I’m comfortable dealing with my va-goo.  It is not what they do that is the problem, it is the way they do it.  Everything all pink, all the time.  Curly girly fonts and butterflies.  Mermaids and glitter and idk what else, I couldn’t handle it, I uninstalled. 

I am a woman I do not need you to teach me how to be a little girl.

I have never in my life paid for an app, never not once, because there is always a free option I can deal with or I can go without.  An example: I used to do crosswords every night to turn my brain off, but switched phones and the free crossword apps for my new one were garbage.  So now I don’t do crosswords.  I don't have iTunes, because free Pandora is fine.  I have never played candy crush (no, really I haven't, I don't even know if it's a pay app or what.)

I don’t pay for apps.

But now I have a free trial for a fertility app that, when the 30 free days end, I will pay for, because it doesn’t make me feel like I’m in some surreal nightmare celebration of the girliest parts of prescribed girlieness every time I click on it.  I mean—I know I am a female person, otherwise what exactly would I be tracking here, can we please all just get on with it.  Just give me competent, usable tools please, I do not need fireworks in pink (or purple, for my edgy ladies!) to go off every time I check my cervix.  It’s just a cervix.  Like half of everyone has one.  Everyone just calm down. 

I’m not trying to ruin your day if that doesn’t work for you.  I know I’m the strange one.  I once went to a gyno that had plush comfy pink robes instead of paper towels and orchids everywhere and I hated every minute of it.  That’s just me, different things work for different people.  

I also once went to a gyno who was
uncomfortable with me having an std!

But, just some casual info for the Base Body Temperature takers out there, you can buy a digital thermometer for fourteen bucks OR you can buy the same digital thermometer but this one is called a fertility thermometer and it is PINK (also available in purple for my edgy ladies!) for a 

mere thirty dollars.  For a HUNDRED DOLLARS it automatically updates via Bluetooth to your phone, which you are def holding in your hand already while you’re taking your temp because NO ONE DOES THIS just alone, in nature, for fun, and I am sure that service is worth the additional $85.  Did I mention it was pink?!? 

So yeah.  The house is unlocked, but also condemned, and also I want to just burn it down.  I have very rational feelings about the whole situation, obviously.  Schrodinger’s Baby wants another drink.

But I’m probably pregnant tho.

An Ode to Red Pants

I am zen af right now

Oh Reader….I am engaged, and in all the easy breezy, stress free 

paradise of wedding planning (Are you married, Reader?  Yeah, you know what I’m talking about!  Remember how simple and care free this was?!) I would like to take a moment to tell you about someone I love very dearly, and why.

His name is Red Pants. I have mentioned him once or twice before.

That’s not really his name, really his name is Shinsuke Nakamura, and he is marvelous.  He is a professional wrestler.  He is my favorite professional wrestler.

He is perfect.

I mean it’s hard to pick a favorite, I know.  There’s Khal Drogo, and I like him a lot but he’s on sick leave.

The Swamp Witches were...memorable, but have been gone for a while. 

Other-Prince is a delight.  

Bouncy Guy is a joy to watch.  

Jericho seems like the best kind of wise-ass.  

Asuka is my second favorite wrestler, because she looks so dang cool, her mask-makeup-thing gives me chills, her coat is flawless, her costume looks like Lisa Frank designed it, but she's not cutesy and she'll kill you.  She gets to go by her real name in my head because “Wears her underwear on the outside” is a lot.  

Anyway, there are many iconic wrestlers from whom to pick.

But Red Pants is the best, and don’t worry, I am going to tell you why.

Here’s why:

1. I appreciate his body.  Don’t make it weird, Reader.  I don’t mean I sit over here staring at him like everyone stares at Aquaman.  What I do mean is that he just looks like a dude.  A fit dude, yes, absolutely— a dude who works out, sure.  But also a dude who gets excited when girl scout cookie season starts, and has hobbies outside of

 the gym, with a body you might encounter irl.  He has better things to do than slavishly pursue some crazy cut-like-a-diamond, look-at-all-my-veins, slathered-in-baby-oil, once-had-a-regular-body-but-then-someone-filled-him-up-with-helium-like-a-balloon-and-now-he-has-no-neck-and-a-solid-B-cup, hard-body ridiculousness.  He just looks like a dude. 

2. BUT THEN HIS STYLE COMES POURING OUT AND HE IS LARGER THAN LIFE AND AMAZING.  

He is called The Artist Known as Shinsuke Nakamura, and he is aptly named—he is an artist.  He is a performance artist, giving his audience everything within him in every match.  People think all kinds of things about wrestling, but you can’t pretend it is not a performance art.  This man leaves it all on the floor whenever he does anything.  He gives 110%-- and holler if you hear me, any Reading performers out there—he doesn’t just give it to himself.  He works hard to make everyone else shine. 

Takes it like a boss.

He takes his hits hard, he makes his opponents look good.  He is a PROFESSIONAL.  Which means that when I watch him, I begin to respect wrestling as a profession ß NOT A THING I EVER THOUGHT I WOULD EXPERIENCE.  

Look Reader, I know next to nothing about wrestling but I know something about performance and this is a man anyone would beg to work beside.  

"Does he even sing?"
"Don't worry, this is going to be amazing."

Just look at that joy!

3.  He has so much fun doing all this, and that is refreshing.  So many of these guys are super hyper angry and intense and it's just boring to watch.  But Shinske Nakamura, the King of Strong Style, is having fun.  He is full of joy, and his joy is contagious.  

4. Finally, and this is really the clincher, let’s just talk about his intro for a minute.

I am.

All wrestlers have their own special intro, when they enter the arena and approach the sacred ring to hurl themselves around for the benefit of bloodthirsty fans.  Some intros are funny, some are Super Serious, some are Very Hard To Take Super Seriously, but all are intended to capture the flavor of the wrestler and prime the crowd for the scripted violence that is about to go down.

Red Pants has an intro too and….Look, you’re just going to have to watch it.  I’ll wait.

DID YOU WATCH IT??  DO YOU NEED TO WATCH ANOTHER ONE??

ONE MORE AGAIN BECAUSE IT IS SO GOOD??!?!!!?!

Ok ok…Let us unpack: First, you see what I mean about his joy, his showmanship, his beautiful ridiculousness, and those red pants.  But on a deeper note.....Shinsuke Nakamura brought the violin to the World Wrestling Entertainment crowd.  He could have chosen anything, and he chose culture....and made it cool.  The violin is the nerdiest instrument.  I know, I used to play it and have utmost respect for it.  It can draw tears out of a stone, but it is not widely considered cool.  But now it IS cool.  How cool?  SO COOL.  Are there little WWE fans appreciating the violin now?  Thinking about playing the violin now?  Or at least thinking about not bullying violinists now?  I believe there are.

Furthermore, his violinist is a black dude.  Who he bows to, out of one artist’s respect for another.   He brought a black nerd violin player into the WWE and MADE HIM COOL and goes out of his way to show him respect.  Are there little (and big) WWE fans, a predominantly but not exclusively white crowd, taking in this respect that Mr. Nakamura, this gem of a human, has for a black man, a black violinist man?  I BELIEVE THERE ARE. 

FURTHER furthermore, he is ridiculous, and he manages to be so purely genuinely ridiculous that you believe it, and you believe in it, and you believe in him.

I mean just look at this man.  Behold him, and my love for him.

Just some anecdotes about Red Pants: he is Japanese and came to the WWE in the last few years.  His English is not great so they almost never give him a mic, and never for long.  Having said that, he’s been here for years.  And yet, still very little mic time.  One time, at an interview, when he was just ready to be done being interviewed, he said “No speak English.”

Then, at a different interview, he was totally having a conversation in English.  When that interviewer said, a little snidely I might add, “Oh, I thought you no speak English?” he REPLIED IN SPANISH.

THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT THIS MAN I DO NOT LOVE. 

Some dear friends got me a Red Pants figurine last year, and it has shared some important moments with me: a harrowing airplane ride, a trip to Denver, graduating from Space Camp, and Christmas.  My King of Strong Style t shirt is featured prominently in the engagement video.  I am a fan, is what I am saying.

You can't really see, but that's
him in a place of honor

Welcome to my adventures, tiny person.

Red Pants in Space!!!

Talking me down from airplane anxiety

Talking me right back up in airplane anxiety

Peaceful contemplation

Trains are better than airplanes

Denver!

More Denver

Hotel party

Somebody get this champion a drink

I'm not the only Red pants fan (I mean, they make a figurine for crying out loud).  He has a
following because he's good.  He recently won a very big fancy belt that I assume he and his lovely wife used as a centerpiece at dinner parties.  In fact, just this week, he won that fancy belt again, rocking a red Elvis-style jumpsuit and reminding me yet again what a gift to humanity he is.

So here’s where all this came from: “Andy”, my beloved betrothed who lives in the garden of my heart, knows a guy who knows a guy who is legit a wrestler in WWE

Specifically, this guy, Xavier Woods.

Who is a part of this group, the New Day, who also get high honors for style and fun

(Xavier Woods is also a DnD nerd so we love him extra for that.)

who knows Red Pants.  They work in different…divisions?  Idk how this stuff is organized, but while they aren’t in the same part of the organization structure, they do cross paths.  And “Andy” asked his guy to ask his guy to ask Shinsuke if he would record a little cell phone video wishing me a happy wedding.

This did not occur.

This did not occur because WWE’s legal team apparently hate fun and abhor weddings.  (That is why I know about this—it was a secret, but then “Andy” got the official no, so he figured he may as well tell me he’d been working on it for the last six weeks.  Six weeks, people.  I’m going to marry the crap out of this man.)

But that’s not the point.  The point is: it got to the legal team because it got to Shinsuke.  The point is: he said yes, until lawyers decided that both love and fandom are for chumps and nobody can have nice things.  Shinsuke said yes.

SHINSUKE SAID YES.

SHINSUKZE NAKAMURA KNOWS MY NAME.  He knows I’m getting married, and wanted to wish me well. 

omgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomg

As I lay here freaking out (there is not enough oxygen in the world for my gasping), just some updates for the burgeoning new Red Pants fan I know you are:

Before

After

He recently went from face to heel (a little industry jargon for you: face is for babyface and it means they’re good guys in the wrestling story arch.  Heel is for tarheel, the bad guys, because apparently wrestlers are Duke fans) for match-after-match punching Mom Hair, another popular wrestler, in the nuts.  

So now he occasionally wears blue pants—do not be fooled, it is still the man we all know and love.  Also, when he switched from good guy to bad guy, he switched his music from the black violinist to an all Japanese hip hop/rock band that raps in Japanese and offers no translation.  It is dope.  Also also, the original intro song was known as the Rising Sun, and the darker, bad-guyish revamped version is called Shadows of the Setting Sun.  See what they did there?  I say again, there is nothing about this man I do not love.

Thank you Red Pants, from the bottom of my adoring heart, for trying.

Now I have to find a Japanese translator who can turn this into readable Japanese so I can send it along with a wedding invitation to my favorite wrestler.

Until then we will start with:

どうもすみません、ありがとうございます  

 

RED PANTS FOR LIFE!!!!