On Marriage
A big stack of invitations (but not all of them) is sitting on our dining room table and freaking me out. It is freaking me out because:
1. They're addressed, stamped, and sealed. Now we have to finish the rest of them - the handwritten ones and the foreign postage ones. Our chicken scratch handwriting - blah.
2. I'm pretty sure the name/address aggregator script that C wrote to print out the address labels may or may not have disregarded some individuals choice in their married names. So, if you are a married person, and your address label says your "maiden" name + partner's name, or says Mrs. HisName, and that is wrong, I apologize. It certainly wasn't intentional, or even thought out. Proper address grammar blows.
I also just found this blog, which is amazing, and the specific post linked to back there may have my new strategy on married name changing. I don't think I am going to change it. Yet. But our kids may have some spanish patralineal/matrilineal system that I think is genius. The blog also has this post and another on money matters and marriage, in which it is nice to know that other people wonder how the hell this is going to work too. Oh, and my last link for the day is this article in the NYT, which is a crazy account into the world of marriage-counseling-before-you-need-counseling.
Yeah
Name changes are a difficult decision to make. Nat and I had long ago debated making up a new last name, but that wasn't very feasible for me by the time we got married because I had published so many papers it would have been difficult for my scientific career to change my last name. People would have had a hard time finding my publication history. So my decision, as with most men, was very easy.
I'm intrigued by the idea of having a combined last name for the children, but that could become unwieldy very quickly with long last names, e.g. Schwarzenegger-Bbjornstrand.
...
Agreed - after 10 pages I was thoroughly convinced I didn't want to go thru marriage counseling.
I'm definitely tempted by the double-barrel hyphenation lineage thing, though my hang-up is that I find hyphens ugly. An umlaut would be so much more fun to write as a three-year-old.
Also, wedding is at 5pm. Dad conceded after printed evidence suggested we stick with that time.
Patralineal/Matrilineal System
That system historically led to some crazy last name combinations, especially in Spain, which is kind of what they're poking at here:
That NYT article was pretty
That NYT article was pretty unsatisfying at the end. Seriously? It took ten pages to say that basically nothing changed?