In Which I Make an Odd Discovery

So apparently I’m a bigamist.  It was on Facebook.  It must be true.

You can imagine how much of a surprise this was, particularly since I somehow managed to marry a woman nearly twenty years my junior even while recuperating from surgery. 

I am the man.

I’ve been home most of the last few days, not really doing much of anything constructive other than encouraging myself to heal and continuing with my “Read All of the Discworld Books Again, In Order” project – a project that has been instrumental in preserving what sanity I may yet retain in the current political climate.  Also, there has been much tea drinking, because it is cold outside and because there is nothing that goes better with a good book than a nice cup of tea.  Plus I retain hopes of reclaiming that beverage from the subversive elements who have adopted it as their political symbol.  I’m a dreamer that way.

Needless to say I’ve been spending a lot of time online as well.  So I got the wedding notice fairly quickly.

Emily was one of my docents when I worked over at the museum.  We hired a lot of high school kids to give tours of the place – on some weekends the only people staffing an entire National Historic Landmark were a pair of fifteen-year-old girls – and after I returned to academia several of them befriended me on the new-fangled Facebook machine.  That was nice of them, I thought.  They were – and remain – good people, and it’s been fun keeping up with them.

She got married yesterday to someone else named David.  Not me – I checked with Kim and she says I was nowhere near the place.  I’m a little uncertain myself.  Given how much of Friday disappeared into an anesthetic black hole (apparently I also had a long phone conversation with Lauren from the recovery room, in which I asked about her rabbit several times – who knew?) I suppose it might be possible for me to have attended an entire wedding I knew nothing about, but if Kim says I am only married to her then I am happy to believe it.

Now to convince Facebook.

Facebook insists on organizing people by their first names, which strikes me as a bit of enforced jollity that we can all do without.  It’s like those dorm parties where your RA is constantly insisting that you’re having fun as you get to know each other so, so much better and making friends that will see you through the college experience and last a lifetime, even though mostly what you want to do is go out with your roommate and get a pizza the size of a bus wheel and eat all of it, right down to the last greasy spot on the table, before returning to your room to lie on your bed like a beached whale and contemplate the insides of your eyelids for a while.  Your roommate can get his own pizza if he wants, and he will because he is your roommate, chosen specifically for compatibility on important issues such as this one.

Ah, bright college days.

So when Emily went to update her status to announce to the world she had married her David, she clicked on my name instead.  And then it wouldn’t let her unclick.  So we’re Facebook Married now.  I wonder what that does for my tax-filing status.

Now, it seems to me that there should be some algorithm in the Facebook machine that would check this sort of thing.  “Hmm.  This person claims to have married this other person, but that other person already has someone in that slot – something is not right.”  But apparently not.  Anyone can claim to be your spouse, and it will go through just like that.  Friends.  Ex-lovers.  Stalkers.  Random strangers.  Anyone!  Collect the whole set!

For an outfit that routinely censors breast-feeding photographs as somehow too lascivious for the refined American sensibility, they sure do have an open mind about polyamory.

It’s a strange old world.