What a scam. Truly. I felt like a horrible trick had been played on me. We were really counting on having to purchase only one ticket for this trip. Alas. I shake my fist at the joke that is award tickets.

So, on the advice of a coworker, I introduced myself to Bing.com. And looky there! I found two round-trip, direct flights to Salt Lake City for about $500. Five hundred dollars is still a chunk o’ change, but with some budget re-adjusting we could do that. Hot dog! I messaged the Dork Lord to confirm the times and sat back feeling rather pleased. But in the time it took him to get back to me (an hour? Less?) the price of the cheapest flights had soard to an unconscionable $900, for the both of us. In what world does that make any sort of sense? Yes, the seat that you wanted to sit in for $250? Well, tick-tock, we decided it’s now worth $450. BECAUSE WE CAN.

I didn’t cry, but I wanted to. You know how life is not fair sometimes? Yeah, not cool. Really not cool.

With a little research, I’ve learned that the cheap fares are released at 12:01AM Wednesdays, after a couple days of price warring by the airlines. Which, I suppose, explains why some of them were still around yesterday at 10AM, and then extinct before noon. So, guess who’s got two thumbs and will be staying up way past her bedtime next Tuesday night? This girl right here.

And if that fails? We will be taking extra time off work and driving to Utah. So what if the Dork Lord gets a little antsy in the car after four hours, never mind twenty four. It’ll be a test of our deep and abiding love.  Ahem.

As for that zipper story: Biscuit, my date and hotel-room-sharer (the Boy and I could not both afford to travel to Boston for the event), was in the shower when I threw my dress over my head, tied the halter and zip…

“Biscuit! Gah! I need you! Mydressohmygod it’s stuck!”

The zipper had stopped a few inches from the top and would neither go up nor down. Biscuit scrambled into some clothes and to my rescue but no amount of tugging (or less physical but ingenious solutions) had any effect. It was going nowhere. At first I hit dead panic. The contents of my suitcase covered events like sleeping, eating take-out on Eleanor’s couch and um, not much else. That dress was IT as far as wedding apparel and I was going to have to make do. And I did, while praying to as many deities as were on call that the zipper didn’t suddenly quit altogether and expose a church full of innocents to my left boob. In the end, my zipper fears were totally in vain, because at the close of the night, Stuart had to use brute force to break me out of the dress, while Krissa and I squeezed our eyes shut in anxiety. Clearly, Stuart knows his bodice ripping, because the only thing damaged in the process was the rogue zipper. The dress will happily live to see more cake. 

Tomorrow morning, I’m getting on a plane and heading off to Boston for a few days. The lovely woman who held my hair while I gagged and heaved and wished for death in a Moroccan backpackers’ hostel, who zipped around the tip tops of the Costa Rican jungle with me, and who taught me the meaning of Stupid & Fancy is getting married. I cannot wait.

The expected high in Boston is a balmy 37 degrees. I love her just that much.

One of the beautiful things about this wedding is that Jen is a New York friend, getting hitched in her hometown of Boston – which, happily, is also one of my old hometowns. This visit will be like the winner-winner-chicken-dinner of visits, lacking only a handful of beloved friends and the family element to make it perfect.

The point is, I’m habitual. I fall into patterns – good and bad – with amazing ease and break out of them almost never. Because I find comfort in predictability. Every day, I park in the same spot – all the way on the very tip top level, even if the rest of the garage is empty – because it eliminates the need for the Parking Garage Confusion Dance. I follow the same make-up regimen every day because I can rely on the outcome.

I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that I apply the same cause-and-effect behavior to relationships. For years, I latched on to the same type of man, with the same type of personality flaws who would let me down in exactly the same way as his predecessor. Self loathers. Cheaters. Weaklings. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it’s what I knew. I knew what it was like to feel the humiliation of public infidelity, of being undermined and undervalued. When I say I developed an addiction to disappointment, I mean I fed myself on the stress of living out dramatic, unhappy plot lines year after year. It gave me something to react to. It gave me an identity. I expected men to hurt and disappoint me and they, in turn, sure didn’t disappoint. And once again, I could blame someone else for my unhappiness.

And then I quit cold turkey. I don’t remember the catalyst. But in part, it was having watched both of my parents over the years, having grown up loving people whose unrealistic expectations and constant – and I do mean constant – discontent ate holes in the fabric of our family, that I decided I would not live that way.

Deciding and doing, though, are two very different things. When I met the Dork Lord two years later, I knew that was it. He was it. He knew it, too, and treated me the way you treat someone when you’ve decided you want them around for a long, long time. But I hadn’t exactly broken my attachment to old patterns. Rarely, but there was a time or two early on when he had the gall to be human and make a mistake and my first reaction, shamefully, was to lump him with the others. Asshole. I’d show him! Obviously that feeling didn’t last long (nor did I act on it), or we wouldn’t have lasted this long. But I did a lot of self talking at first. Old habits being the kind to die slowly and with agony, I hadn’t quite gotten rid of my instinct to get mad and get even.