Tag: miss manners

Going to the Chapel and We’re Going to get Married!

First things first: the party!

More formal invitations will be forthcoming, but since I need a headcount for food and I don’t still have postal addresses for everyone I want to invite (especially Mills folks, but anyone who has moved in the last few years, I may not have a current address for), I have created an Evite “save the date”: http://www.evite.com/celesteh@casaninja.com/aug2. If you are reading this, you are invited! (unless, like, you’re a complete stranger who has stumbled upon this blog or you once murdered my cat out of spite or something…) Please please RSVP!

Not going to Niagra Falls

Ok, so we’re going to kind of elope, since the USA is not very nice and won’t let us get married, we have to go to Canada. Earlier, we talked of going to Niagra Falls, but same sex couples can’t get married there. Technically, it’s legal, but the churches there are resisting on moral grounds (which is their right under Canadian law) and justices of the peace quit doing marriages there several years ago for some reason. So no honeymoon in Niagra Falls. We’re going to go to Toronto instead, while moving the car and the dog across the country. So the party will actually predate the wedding. We’ll probably get married on August 16th. There is a Vegas-type gay wedding chapel just opened where folks can be walked down the aisle by an Elvis impersonator. Some folks might call this “tacky,” but they aren’t very open-minded. We have no plans actually set, though. Like Vegas, you can go to Toronto and get all the paperword together in an afternoon.
I hope we can get Xena into Canada!. Anyway, the good news is that Toronto was just declared SARS-free! yay! Plans may change again if gay marriage is legalized in some east coast state, where the state supreme court is supossed to issue a ruling in a week or so. Not that we don’t love Canada (what’s not to love?), but we’d be coming from a stronger legal position (i think) if we got married in the US. Since any legal recognition of our marriage will require litigation, we’ll go with the best strategic advantage.

Oh Canada!

did you know that Canada has the only fishery in the world that is not over-fished? Perhaps the most civilized country in the world, Canada also has socialized medicine, unlike the US. In the US, for example, if your college required you to have a checkup and be declared SARS-free by July 15th, you might have to go to an urgent-care center just to get a stupid checkup if you don’t have insurance and pay more than $300. And have no idea how to track down your vaccination records from the first year of your life, even though your mom saved them someplace, cuz she can’t find them for you now and your dad wouldn’t even begin to know things like that. *cough* So I think I might go to the Cupertino walk-in clinic tomorrow, if it still exists, cuz it’s walk-in and because they might have my records someplace. It’s a long drive (and a long-shot on the records), but any walk-in clininc I can think of in the Oakland/Berkeley area is a bit more chaotic. I need the boring burbs. Or something. Maybe I should just stay home from school, as this is too much trouble.

I need to have less stuff

I’ll still have the party of course. Miss Manners says it’s impolite for about-to-be-married folks to mention gifts around a wedding, but note that is not the reason that there is no registry. Dyke Action Machine used to have these kind of anti gay marriage ads that said, “I became boring for a blender!” I was already boring. And, conviently, I already have a blender. I have a fondue pot (despite being vegan). I have a toaster. I have an electric mixer. I’m about to move across the country to a small apartment that will Christi will also be living in 2/3 of the time. Anyone who comes bearing a kitchen appliance will be beaten with it and have to take it and one other used appliance home with them.

Behind the times

When I was a kid, I was a big beleiver in protest. My mom always told me I was born in the wrong decade. I should have been marching in the sixties instead of being trapped in the suburbs in the eighties. I still harbor all these dated radical notions, even though I’m trying to get more postmodernist.
My queer identity is often similarly old-fashioned. Some mock me for wanting to move onto a Womyn’s Land Collective (otherwise known as a Lesbian Seperatist Commune) or liking Alix Dobkin or whatever. For this I blame my upbrigning. The Cupertino library didn’t have a single lesbian-topic book printed after 1973. I read every lesbian book in that library and absorbed all the pre-1973 notions. Also, my parents were a generation behind. They were not baby boomers. They were over thirty when you weren’t suppossed to trust anyone over thrity. They did not share identity or values with boomers, but instead looked down upon them with the disapproval of the establishment. (Although my mom did go to some hippy gathering in Golden Gate Park once. Someone there got a contact high. It gave her a terrible headache. anyway…).
On Saturday, before going to the anti-war protest (retro is in!), I helped my friend move. After getting the truck to the destination house, we were all taking a breather in the living room. Somebody brought up the topic of Miss Manners. “I love her!” said one boomer gay man. The other boomer queers concurred. They started quoting her. “‘What do you say when introduced to a so-called homosexual couple?’ ‘How do you do? How do you do?'” and “‘What is the proper way to eat potato chips?’ ‘With a spoon and a fork . . .'” (that last one is ironic, btw.)
Good lord! Gay folk of the age my mom said that I should have been all adore Miss Manners! This must be how gay men who come out and find out that everyone else loves show tunes too must feel. I think that this is not entirely randomness. Miss Manners is a voice for equal rights and feminism. That “so-called homosexual’ question and answer was published right in the midst of the struggle for gay liberation. She’s brilliant because she showed that manners are necessarily compatible with a progressive agenda. To deny rights would be rude. She is a leftist in establishment clothing. Miss Manners is a friend to the opressed and a comforter of the polite in rude times. I’ve got to go get her new book.

Christi has reported in her blog that I no longer answer the telephone. This is not entirely true. I don’t answer the phone in the mornings.
When I had the flu several months ago, I was reading Miss Manners books and I got to a chapter on the telephone. I thought she was going to talk about telephone manners, but instead she talked about telephone’s lack of manners. It’s a machine and you are free to ignore machines. And anyway, it often rings when you’re in th midst of something important, like dinner, or a bath or staring out the window and you don’t need to answer at those times. I felt freed. No longer did I need to be a lsave to the phone!
And what sort of messages come through the phone anyway? The governor never calls me to say, “we’ve decided to succeed from the union to form an eco-socialist-republic.” (Although Christi once got a call from President Bill Clitnon, back when she was a democrat, telling her to go vote. It was a recording on the answering machine. Too bad you can’t transfer your voive mail when you move.) No, it’s always your uncle saying your grandma had a heart attack or your grandma died or your mother has a brain tumor or somebody is dead. These messages are infrequent, but they’re bad. Worse than I can deal with before lunch.
Otherwise it’s you boss or somebody’s boss wanting to know where you or whoever is and could you do some more work. Or your credit card company is trying to sell you more stuff to get you deeper in debt so they can own your soul. Telemarketters, surveys, impersonal strangers calling up to part me with my money. This is a disease of capitalism. I reserve my afternoons to deal with diseases of capitalism.
My friends hardly ever call, probably becuase I hardly ever answer. But telephone conversations are awkward with long silences and it’s hard to read the other person’s reactions. Am I talking too much? Did that last joke hurt her feelings? How can I tell, it’s the telephone.
Telephones exist to carry terrible news and they’re excellent at that. The first telephone message was when good old what-his-name who invented the phone spilled acid on himself and needed his assistant to rush to his aid. This set a precedent. And it can wait till lunch time.

Miss Manners on Baby Showers

Showering a Relative

Dear Miss Manners:
My Daughter-in-law is expecting her first child. I have a shower planned for her, because her only sister, her mother and her best friend live in California. My son is an only child so I am not able to put a daughter’s name on the invitations as many of my releatives and friends have done in the past for showers both bridal and baby. Will it be in bad taste is I put my name on the invitations? My husband feels we should do this if that’s what we’d like to do. I feel a bit uncertain.
Gentle Reader:
Showers are tricky, and a lot of people get caught up in them. The word “shower” is used here as in “to shower with presents,” making this the only form of gorwn-up entertainment at which a present is mandatory. Therefore, such an event is not properly given by any member of the guest of honor’s immediate family – daughter, sister, mother, or mother-in-law. However, since your relatives and friends have been making mistakes about this right and left, Miss Manners suggests you do not worry about it and go ahead and give your party. If you want to be perfectly correct, call it a tea, not a shower, thus establishing that you wish to bring joy but not bounty to the family.
Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior 1979. p.22

Sexist Showers

Dear Miss Manners:
You seem intolerant – and justifiably so – of nonsense masquerading as corectness. But what about sexism and opression disguised as polite tradition? I’m referring to wedding and baby showers. Do these traditions not have considerable sexist and oppressive components? Are they not designed to reinforce women who accept the roles society deems most acceptable for women, rewarding them with vacuum cleaners, kitchen utensils, and baby paraphernalia when they assume their rightful roles as wives and mothers?
Are you sympathetic to such thinking? How should a person with such views respond to an invitation to attend a shower? A simple “No, thank you” seems too unfriendly, or, worse, cheap. A political discusion is probably counter-productive.
Gentle Reader:
Few of our social institutions can bear severe philosophical scrutiny. Neither can using an invitation to participate in other people’s pleasures as an opportunity for dampening them with one’s disapproval. It is not impolite simply to decline an invitation that goes against your principles, provided you do not explain the fact.
In the matter of showers, things are changing. Miss Manners can’t help but noticing that your signature indicates that you are a man, and pointing out that a few years ago, you would not have been invited to showers. Presumably, the bridegroom or father will also be a guest of honor at such a shower, and your presents should be given to both husband and wife. Vacuum cleaners and baby clothes are not, in themselves, sexist objects. They become so when it i presumed that only the woman should put them on the rug or the baby
Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior 1979. p.23-24

Miss Manners on other showers

For the Bridal Couple

Dear Miss Manners:
In recent years, the prospective bridegroom has been present at all bridal showers that I have attended. Lavish as these affairs have become, am I wrong in assuming that they still should be considered “girl parties,” with all the appropriate gushing, giggling and gossiping? The man must be bored to tears. Is it an omen of things to come? Will the bride-to-be soon be expected to pop out of a cake at the stag party and have to listen to raunchy jokes told over a few steins of beer? If one, why not the other? Do I sense a double-standard here, and if so, why? Are all the traditional bastions of ettiquette crumbling like a house of cards?
Gentle Reader:
Cards don’t crumble. However, Miss Manners does not mind if some customs do. The gender-seperated wedding party, based on the idea that the bride and the bridegroom have opposite notions of social fun and are bored senseless by each other’s friends, is not a tradition that Miss Manners is going to go to a lot of trouble to rescue from oblivion.
Not that she objects to it. giggliness and raunchiness are all right in their place, and sharing a session of one or the other with compatible souls of one’s own gender is al very well. The specific bridal customs you mention often overdo things, with an unpleasant emphasis on materialism for the ladies and unacceptable forms of entertainment (such as ones that end in the bridegroom’s being arrested) for the gentlemen. For this reason, and because of the increasing tendency for friendships to be formed on the basis of common interests regardless of gender, the sort of divided party you mention is becoming less and less popular. So be it.
Miss Manners’ Guide for the Turn of the Millennium 1989. p 573-573

Dear Miss Manners:
I am at the age when a lot of my friends’ parents are dying. Is it proper to attend a funeral of a parent I didn’t know? My thoughts have been that I got to a funeral to honor the family members, i.e., my friend, who has lost a parent or sibling. I don’t want to be improper on such a solemn occasion. But I love my friends dearly and would appreciate if they came to comfort me and acknowledge a death in my family, even if they didn’t know my relative personally.
Gentle Reader:
Miss Manners seldom receives the question and answer in the same letter. Yours don’t leave her much to do but congratulate you on your sensitivity and commend your attitude.
Martin, Judith; Miss Manners’ Guide for the Turn – of – the – Millennium p. 671