Layers of Waiting and Stories Untold

[pen_grunt]

I've had a lot of things happen in the last few days, and practically no inspiration to write about them. Still, I feel like I should be recording and sharing things somehow, so here's a half-written (and now supplemented) thing. More shall trickle out later, I suspect:


So we're irresponsible people. Thinking that we had plenty of time to get our marriage license (and being warned MANY times not to get it too early) we waited until this week to go apply for the license.

The bad news: There's a 5 day waiting period for marriage licenses.
The good news: You can get a judge to waive the waiting period.

I'm not exactly sure why they would want you to wait 5 days. To make sure you really want to get married? To discourage quickie-marriages? Anyway.

So we went to the Public Health Building.
We were at the wrong building.
We went to the building across the street.
We filled out our license and were "sworn in".
We had to testify that "one of us is a man, and the other a woman" (This was said in a deliberately neutral way, as if the official had no clue which was which, and didn't want to offend Derrick by calling him a woman, or me by calling me a man. I knew I should have worn makeup.)
We testified that we were free of mental defects. *twitch*
We testified that we were not first cousins and/or brother-sister.
We were given a waiver form to fill out.
We were told to go to the courthouse.
We drove to the courthouse.
We were assigned to room 70.
Room 70 is the room where they assign you to rooms. Yes, that's right. We were assigned to an assignment room that would give us our true, assigned room.
We went to the judge, looking appropriately sheepish.
His assistant lets us in.
His assistant tells us he's on the phone.
His assistant kicks us back out.
His assistant lets us back in.
We explained to the judge that we're dumb.
The judge asked us questions about the upcoming wedding and such.
He signs the form and directs us back to the correct Health Building.
We go back to the Health Building.
The lady at the desk quizzes us about our wedding plans again and chides us for not thinking ahead with the license.
We pay for the license.
We wait for 30 minutes for said lady to type our names on a certificate.
In triplicate.
Apparently the envelope takes a while to get too.
We get our license and go home.

We embarked at 8:30 and got home at darn near 11:00.

Whew. Won't do that again...

Where do people get off assuming that others are supposed to know everything about something they've never done before and are only going to (hopefully) do once in their lives? Am I supposed to memorize marriage license requirements and then forget all that now-irrelevant information after the wedding? I don't think so. Be a little nicer about first-time experiences people. It really wouldn't kill y'all.

Comments

[irishsbuffy.livejournal.com]

Dont worry honey...in a few days.... you will be married and the bitter troll at the health department will still be alone.

Enjoy~

[starsechos.livejournal.com]

I totally understand where your coming from. People like to act like you have done all this before. Planning a wedding is basically like flying blind! If you havea good helper/ someone who's done it before, you have some instumentation. But otherwise, your forced to fly on instinct alone. Sometimes that just isn't enough.

Ack. People