Keeping Up With The Joneses
2004-10-11, 11:12 a.m.

Matthew Jones is my all-time favorite person. He actually has been for some time now, but I thought I might make this clear, especially in the wake of our 10th anniversary this past weekend. Maybe that's not worth mentioning to some, but to me, it was a very big deal, mainly because it's amazing that someone would actually put up with me lo these many years (not that I'm hard to live with, oh no!) Without going into too many gag-worthy cliches about him being my best friend and how he makes me feel beautiful, safe, and loved and how he makes me laugh every day of our lives, let it suffice to say that I just feel really lucky. We got married (too?) young, just out of college, and we've had a rocky road of it along the way, and somehow we've made it out the other side of all that madness. So much for not using worn-out pithy cliches! Wheeeee.

So this weekend Matt and I (and the Sade) went to the mountains to celebrate our joyous union. I think it's important to preface this story with a brief synopsis of our wedding day. Aside from the fact that I married Matt, nothing really fit the preposterous dream that some girls fall into about their wedding day. It's not that it was bad per se, though it did cause long-lasting strife in our families, but it was more, just, whatev. Funny, kinda, but mostly, a day totally overrated and not living up to ridiculous expectations. First of all, I made Matt wait 45 minutes at the altar as my hairdresser made hideous curls along my face--curls that completely obscured my face in my wedding pictures, pictures that no one in our families has seen to this day. Matt dosey-doed me around the dance floor a couple six times, and then the rest of the wedding consisted of stopping by tables to thank people for coming, and then the cake, and then the bouquet, and then the caterers were like, "OK, get OUT. We have to set up for Ira Kabermowitz's bah mitzvah." The day flew by. But I think the image that best exemplifies my wedding day is following the reception, somehow everyone had left and gone back to the hotel, except Matt and I and Andreas, and we were rideless, as I forgot to arrange for the limo to take us back from the reception, so the three of us, all still clad in our wedding attire, took the hotel bus back to the hotel, though stopping at the Exxon station along the way (where we took money from a card) to buy a pack of cigarettes. Afterwhich, I thought I was going to shit my pants, and then we consummated our marriage. The next day we drove to Vermont for our mini-moon (later had a honeymoon), and after driving for five hours, we arrived late to a small town where the only food available for our first nuptial dinner was a pre-made tuna fish sandwich and spaghetti-o-s which we heated up in the store microwave. I didn't know it then, but in the ten years hence, this all is very much typical of "Matt and Michele".

On the morning of our anniversary, Matt and I woke early to take a sunrise hot air balloon ride. This completed Phase 1 of us actually becoming hot air balloonists ourselves--that is to say, actually taking a ride? It was all really quite intimate and beautiful--except for the other eight people in the balloon with us. And me, being the consummate professional photographer that I am, having waited for this moment for who knows how long to capture the cherished images of our anniversary ride, conveniently brought a camera with a near-dead battery and was able to snap two pictures of the balloon inflating before it died. The camera, that is, not the balloon. Despite all of that, it was a glorious experience, in truth, and a great way to start our anniversary. We hurried back to our hotel in time to check out, and moved on to our house in the mountains for the rest of the weekend. Perhaps we were spoiled by our house in Colorado this summer, but I had expected something beyond the double-wide we found waiting for us. How the pictures deceived me! But it did have a bed, and a hot-tub, and a fairly decent view (though the foliage has not yet decided to change for me), so we settled in nicely. After a brief nap, we pulled ourselves together for dinner at the only restaurant in the quaint (read: assbackwards) town that we were staying in, and had a surprisingly excellent filet-minon dinner for $12.99. Though we briefly considered heading off to The Stomping Ground like all our other fellow diners, we headed back to the house for a dip in the hottub with a bottle of champagne. Following our sexcapade in the hottub, I pulled a muscle in my back on my last "Ohhhhhh!" and hobbled out of the hottub onto the leather sectional with recliners where I lay in sweatpants for the remainder of the evening. The anniversary night wrapped up with the presidential debate and me hallucinating (courtesy of two Vicodin) to a very drunk Matt walting on about how he'd run this goddamn country. "Are you listening to me, babe?" "Yeah, but why is your wallet in your ear?" We carried each other across the seven feet of our trailor, and collapsed in bed, thus ending our celebration. And so it goes with the Joneses.

Somewhere in my foggy skull, though, moments before I passed out, I remember thinking, it's not so much what you do in your life, it's who you're with along the way that makes it memorable and worthwhile. My wedding day and my anniversaries since may not have lived up to expectations, but my everyday life with Matt, my marriage, has exceeded even my wildest hopes. These last ten years have been nothing if not memorable, and certainly, worth every last ridiculous second.