Stealing a line from Ozma: This game is over.


I started this blog in June 2001 writing about Mexican food and a Taco Mafia. A surprising four years later, this site has long since run its course. As of today, there will be no more posts. If you want to know what’s going on with me, you’ll actually have to pick up a phone or send me some email.


Jill and I are getting married this weekend and I’m as excited as one can be. I hope I don’t cry. That would pretty much be the lamest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve been known to get a little misty-eyed at the end of the movie Rudy, so I’m guessing the wedding might send me over the edge.

From as early as I can remember, I never wanted to get married. I looked around at other married couples and I didn’t see why people would choose to go through with it. As I grew older, I started to date and that only compounded my anti-marriage feelings. Relationships seemed to be filled with a few ups and way too many gut-wrenching downs. I just didn’t understand why anybody would commit to that. Without marriage, I knew I could just pick up and move on after one too many nonsensical emotional outbursts.


Jill and I went to the same high school, but never knew eachother. She maintains that, once she knew who I was, she just assumed that I was pretentious and stuck-up. At some point my girlfriend-at-the-time asked me to get Jill a job at Dillards. I obliged, Jill starting working with me, and a great friendship was born. We were friends for quite a while until the eventual dissolution of our prior relationships. It was at that point that people started trying to get me to take our friendship to the next step. George pushed pretty hard and probably deserves the most credit for moving things in the right direction. Derek added words that probably aren’t fit for print about what he’d do if he were in my shoes. There were all-night sessions of listening to music and watching bad television and I realized that, in spite of my disdain for dating, we had something that appeared to work.

I think it was mid-March when I dropped the infamous:
Ken – Jill
Jill – Yeah?
Ken – Uh…Uh
Jill – What?
Ken – I think you’re swell.
Jill – Swell?
Ken – Uh, yeah. I think you’re swell. You know?

Two days later I was at a party with some of her friends when one of her roommate’s boyfriends walks up to me and says, “Kenny, you’re swell.” That was a tough pill to swallow. I’m glad I’m taking myself off of the market. After saying something that retarded, I’m quite thankful that I never have to hit on girls again. Seriously - swell? Who talks like that? Not to be forgotten is my semi-inebriated 30-minute falling in love monologue at Rick’s wedding. She spent the entire thing just staring blankly at me.


We’ve been hanging out ever since and she seems totally OK with all of my quirks. I burp, I fart, I lick my plate after eating, I watch too much sports on TV, I don’t cook, and I’m more than a bit wrapped up in myself. Oddly enough, she seems to embrace all of this stuff. I think the secret to our success is that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. I can’t remember a time where we’ve been mad at one another for more than two minutes. Life is all about looking at the big picture and we simply haven’t seen anything worth getting mad about. From Day 1, the entire relationship has been like something you might see in a super-cheesy movie. Spending all of my time with Jill changed my mind about marriage. It was almost as if somebody just flipped a switch in my head.


I couldn’t possibly be anymore excited about the rest of my life.


Take care of yourselves and those around you.