Putting My Wife for Sale on Craigslist in Honor of Traditional Marriage

07. September 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

In honor of traditional marriage, I am putting my wife up for sale.

Let me explain: in the upcoming election, Minnesota voters will be deciding whether to prohibit same-sex couples from marrying. A ‘yes’ vote will permanently ban same-sex marriages, enshrining that position in the Minnesota Constitution. A ‘no’ vote would ensure marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

Many of the proponents of the amendment have argued that a ‘yes’ vote will help defend “traditional marriage.”

Well, I’ve done my homework, and I have to admit, they have been very convincing. I had no idea how many types of traditional marriage there were. I assume that since one type of traditional marriage is allowed, the others are too. That’s great news!

To be honest, when I learned about traditional marriage, I felt duped!

In my current marriage, all my wife does is work a full-time job, love our little infant (and me) unconditionally in a committed relationship, and act as my closest confidante and best friend. Clearly, THAT IS NOT TRADITIONAL ENOUGH. When I got married to my wife back in 2008 2010 (doh!), I hadn’t even considered my other marriage options!

As I now know, for most of history, wives were chattel, a form of property. This was even codified in the Ten Commandments in the Bible, a book the defenders of traditional marriage refer to often.

The tenth commandment makes this clear:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house [his property] thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife [property], nor his manservant, nor his maidservant [slaves, equivalent to property], nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s. [property, biological property/donkey, all other property]

*[Annotations obviously mine.]

This couldn’t be clearer.  Your neighbor’s wife is clearly viewed as property, as they are lumped in with all their other stuff (their house, their slaves, their cat., etc.)

This wife-as-property idea wasn’t an exception, either. It was the rule! (More than that, a commandment!) The moral of that story is clear: You shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s wife because she is not your possession.

So now that I know my wife is my possession, I imagine putting her up for sale is no problem. So while I wait for offers to pour in (I imagine there will be a robust market for her), now I can to get to the fun part: Considering the other traditional marriages.

There are so many options. I mean, do I want to have one stable wife-relationship but with boatloads of concubines? Do I want to go all Henry the Eighth (minus the obesity and executions) and trade my old wife in every twenty-five minutes? Do I want to be a polygamist? (No, too much work.)

Obviously, the concubine option is alluring. Multiple partners without all the gravitas of the “until death do us part” nonsense. I can just see it now: a new partner every few months, no guilt, it will be like college all over again!

And this idea has such a history. I mean, it was practiced by the likes of Abraham and Solomon. Abraham—that guy was the patriarch of the big three monotheistic religions! Judaism, Christianity and Islam all look up to him! So if he did it, why can’t I?

And don’t get me started on Solomon. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines. And while that didn’t turn great for him (moral of the story: You should never have 1000 women simultaneously in your life), it was more a matter of degree, and not a problem with concubinage generally. (Also: Concubine is a funny word. It sounds like some sort of hat. Or a seashell. Concubinage sounds like a disease.)

So now that I’m considering acquiring concubines, I don’t know to start. Is there some sort of concubine store? I guess I could go down to an adult store like Sex World, but the last time I was there (in high school), I don’t recall see any women for sale.  Instead there were just a lot of DVDs and all sorts of battery-powered equipment and what appeared to be miniature jackhammers. It looked like a creepy hardware store.

Hmm. I just searched online, and didn’t find any concubines for sale. Is concubinary a hush-hush sort of thing? Given popular culture, it doesn’t seem like it. (Jersey Shore is about concubines, right?)

Anyway, maybe I need to establish an advertisement seeking a concubine, too. That’s what the “casual encounters” section is for on Craigslist, yes?

Wait, after re-reading through all this, now I’m confused. If traditional marriage varies so much—and clearly it has—then what’s the difference between a man marrying have a dozen women, or marrying one and sleeping with a bunch on the side, and a pair of men in a committed relationship getting married or a woman and another woman tying the knot.

In the end, the biblically sanctioned notions of traditional marriage seem a lot wackier—and more socially pernicious—than what I would call real traditional marriage: two people, irrespective of their gender, committing to each other for life.

That’s why I’m voting no on the Marriage Amendment in Minnesota (and similar bills elsewhere) and encourage you to do the same.

Oh, and one quick note to my wife: I love you, honey. Sorry for putting you on sale on Craigslist.

 

Letter to My Future Son #6 | Subject: Baby Boot Camp, Chemical Weapons, Umpires, Construction Sites

19. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dear Oliver,

I’m sorry for the delay in writing; your mother and I have been pretty busy lately. We’ve been organizing the house for your eventual arrival, and we’re getting ready for a whole bunch of baby showers in your honor.

We also signed up for a couple of parenting classes. One of them is a day-long class, and I’m assuming that it will be like a parenting version of basic training. But instead of drill sergeants ordering us to do this many pushups or peel so many potatoes, the drill sergeants will be actual infants and they will not be quiet until they get a good burping and you give them their nooky-nook.

I also expect that instead of running and push-ups for physical training, there will be fathers practicing wind-sprints to get ice cream for their screaming wives, and we’ll practice pulling up Pull-Ups and diapers on mannequins of small children. Like in basic training, there will also probably be exposure to chemical weapons, but instead of being exposed to actual chemical weapons, they will probably make us change a really, really smelly baby raised entirely on breast milk from a mother who eats only cabbage-filled bean tacos and washes it down with pickle juice. (OK, that actually wouldn’t cause gas in the baby—just the mom, but still, you get my point.) And of course, there will no doubt be lots of practice marching around, but instead of the “You will love your rifle! You will care for your rifle!” you might hear in the U.S. Army, we will march our sample-babies to the crib, to the floor for tummy time, and so on.

If it’s like any of the marching I’ve seen on TV, we’ll no doubt be marching and singing. In fact, I’m already preparing for this—and for your arrival—I’m already trying out songs to sing to you when you get here. One of my current favorites is “Ollie, Ollie, Ollie, get your adverbs here.”

About the singing: You can blame your Grandpa Ortler for this. He is always walking around singing songs he makes up on the spot. (And he wonders why I ended up liking writing and poetry.)  For instance, just the other day, he and I were talking about one of the rovers that has been cruising around on Mars, and I mentioned that it has survived for years and driven over 15 miles. He said, “That’s a long way to go without talking to anyone. I bet it’s humming as it’s driving along.” Now every time I think of it, I think of a Mars rover driving along and doing a little dance, probably holding some sort of umbrella drink.

Anyway, you should know that your mother looks absolutely adorable. Because her center of gravity has shifted, she carries her weight differently. When you combine that with her now-noticeable belly, she looks something like an adorable umpire. And when she’s on the couch and attempts to get up, there’s a moment in her ascent where she’s essentially in a half-crouch, as if she’s standing behind a catcher. And sometimes, her attempts to get up aren’t entirely successful, so she’ll hover in that position for a second, and it’ll look like she’s calling a game and can’t decide on what her call should be (continue getting up, or return to the couch). Usually, this results in a return to the couch and a request that I go get whatever she needed.

Of course, I don’t have much of a problem fetching her whatever she needs, especially since I’ve been reading about the biological processes at work. It’s like a construction site in there. Her hips are moving, her organs are shifting around, and all the while, you’re whirring about, like some sort of adorable dynamo. Most of the time at the ultrasounds, I expect to see orange cones all over the place and all of her organs in reflective vests and wearing hard-hats. (I wouldn’t quite know what to make of a “Men at Work” sign, though.)

While my organs haven’t moved much, a lot has changed for me too. I mean, everyone says how much a child changes your life, but they never tell you how. I never realized how often I lived in the present tense. I’d decide to go to a movie or I’d go camping on a whim. If anything, I planned things out one weekend in advance, or a few weeks at most.

When you have a kid, that kind of planning will no longer do. Suddenly, everything switches to the future tense—where you want them to grow up, what schools to look into, all that. Your mother and I have had more conversations about the next four or five years in the last few months than we had in the years we’d been together. Until you, everything else in the future had been hypothetical and tentative, like a report of a spate of beautiful weather on the horizon, but when we saw you on the 3D ultrasound, you were concrete, imminent.

It’s a good change—and one that we are ready for—but there’s no real preparing for it, I can tell you that. One day, it just sets in. For me, I looked at your mom’s belly and I said, “Yep, I think it’s about time we finish that bedroom.”

Take care,

Pops

 

 

 

Letter to President Obama #65 | Subject: Wedding Planning and War

07. December 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: war, weddings · Tags: , ,

Dear Mr. President,

I haven’t written you for some time, about nine months actually. No, I didn’t have a baby, and neither did my fiancee. Actually she’s my wife now, as we got hitched about two months ago. That’s one reason I stopped writing for so long; after we got engaged, my life was dedicated solely to wedding planning.

We started out by looking at various websites, books, and magazines, and we drafted a checklist. We tried to print it but my printer ran out of paper (there were many steps!), so I floated the idea of putting it on a scroll, as it’d be easier to carry around. (By the way, I’m all for bringing scrolls back.  I mean they can do so much and all you have to do is whip them out. That last sentence didn’t sound good, but I’m leaving it. Sometimes Freud is right.)

Anyway, by the time we’d figured out what we needed to do, it was clear that we needed to recruit a small army. And really, planning a wedding is a bit like organizing a small war. Once I realized that my years of playing Stratego and Risk weren’t for naught, I put on my Napoleon hat and my epaulets and set to work.

Recon

We started out with reconaissance, and since recon is a pretty dangerous job, we decided that we’d delegate this task to the lowliest members of our unit. Sadly, that meant Kayli and I were going to do the job.

We knew we wanted to hold the ceremony at the Como Zoo’s conservatory, one of the most lovely places on the planet, but we didn’t know where the real battle—the reception—would take place. We scoped out a few places we were interested in—the Minnesota Zoo, the Minneapolis Central Library, the Science Museum of Minnesota, among others.

While scouting out the venues, we naturally viewed all other unmarried couples as potential brides and grooms—the enemy.

We treated them accordingly. If they seemed interested in the venue, we took action, audibly muttering things like, “Honey, that chick totally checked me out.” True or not (usually true!), we’d proceed to mutter other inflammatory things like “Brett, he gave me his number?!” and “Honey, I don’t know if I’m comformtable with what she’s proposing, we don’t even know her.”

And if we met a married couple, we were aware that they could get divorced, remarried and celebrate their reception at any moment, so we said, “You are such a beautiful couple!” even if the husband was as round a blimp and the wife looked like the subject of a cubist painting.

(OK, we’re not homewreckers, and we never did any of this stuff, but we briefly thought it. Getting married is a cutthroat business.)

Cost

Along the way, we started to find out how much the wedding would cost. This gave us pause. Many of the bridal magazines feature articles where you plan to spend only ten thousand dollars.

Mr. President, for only ten thousand dollars, I could get my wife something nice, like a bunch of diamond something-or-others from Tiffany and Co. In fact, we could probably buy so much stuff from them that we could make a fort with all those blue boxes. (Our neighbors would probably think we were crazy, and then rob us.)

With 10K, I could buy 10 floor-cleaning robots from the iRobot company. That’s enough to hit a button (OK, a few) and have a veritable ballet of household maids hunting down dust bunnies. Most importantly, I could buy breast implants for myself, twice. (I don’t know where the second pair would go. On top of the first pair? No. Perhaps on my head? That would make hats difficult, but it would be a conversation starter. Anyway.)

So only ten thousand dollars didn’t turn out to be such a great deal. Thank goodness we have generous parents and generous family and friends. Still, it wasn’t easy. I actually stopped contributing to my 401K—you know, that financial device that is suppposed to support my wife and me when we’re old—in order to get married.

Of course, we tried to avoid some of the financial burden by stretching the old war metaphor a bit. We explained to each vendor (the caterer, the DJ, etc.) that since planning a wedding is like planning a war, then that’d make us general and admirals, and that all our legions of “warriors” would be compsenated not by temporal things (like money) but by the eternal and everlasting honor granted by your ever-thankful  country (a hastily improvised “Kaybrelistan.”)

This did not work.

I then suggested that we could barter, that perhaps some sort of trade could be made. For instance, I volunteered to attend a party where they would have an unwanted guest—but someone that etiquette dictated they had to invite. (Let’s call that person “Bile.”) As a trade, I’d then do my best to make sure that Bile canceled next year. I’d do so by being myself—weird and more than slightly awkward. If they brought up the weather, I would loudly exclaim, “What, you supported Apartheid!?” and other such faux pas.

Needless to say, this bartering scheme did not work.

There’s more of this story to tell, Mr. President, but I’ve got to go finish making spaghetti. Stay tuned for Thursday.

Take care,

Brett