I’m writing this from our villa at the winery (which is a very rich person thing to say, bragging!).  There’s wi-fi here, which is what’s helping me type from the bedroom.  I would type in the living room, but some people we know are sleeping out there.  For free.  So we and the couple staying in the same villa essentially paid for these people to come out here.  Because they certainly didn’t pay for shit.  They’ve known about this wedding for over a year and they still couldn’t plan accordingly, I guess.

I’m also not pleased with the way everyone else seemed to view our fridge as their own personal stash.  I guess I took Shannon’s advice to bring our own stuff seriously, while most everyone else viewed it as a flexible recommendation.

This wasn’t how I wanted this entry to go.  I am on vacation.  It’s just that I went to bed a little early last night because the drunkness was getting out of hand and now I’m up at 7:30am and thinking about how I paid a shitload of money for all this and a lot of people seemed to take advantage.  Friends schmriends, you people need to contribute.

GIRL YOU ARE ON VACATION.

Right.

The wedding was beautiful, and I had fun there!  My tits looked amazing in the dress!  I slept in a king size bed!  I met Julia Segal, who is Internet famous!  The weather is gorgeous and we can leave the door open all the time!

Jesus, that was exhausting.  Exclamation points really take it out of me.

While I was getting ready to leave the house yesterday, I decided to write down the driving directions.  I pulled out an old notebook to write them down and flipped through to find an empty page.  One of the pages had an itemized list of stuff on it.  Each of the items had a monetary value.  There were two lists, actually; one was next to my name, and the other was next to my ex-husband’s name.

Oh.  Huh.  This notebook was from 2004, then, which is when I came back to St. Louis after leaving him in California.  And this list must have been written back before I knew he drained my checking account.  Back when I was blaming myself for wanting to leave.  When I was still trying to be fair.

Here is what fair is after you know someone has already been all kinds of a bastard: the monetary value of the stuff he was going to get was $3400.00.  The monetary value of the stuff I was going to get was $1010.00.  On one hand, it’s sick and sad that I would consider letting him have more than he deserved just so I could get out of there.  On the other hand, it’s kind of comical to see on paper how very little we actually owned.  On the third, nuclear fallout mutant hand, it’s pretty gratifying to realize how far I’ve come in the past six years by myself.  It’s not like I ever doubted my ability to come this far, but when you find yourself broke but for $30 (which couldn’t even buy a tank of gas because I was living in California and that shit was expensive even then) because some asshole took off with everything, the world kind of seems like it’s coming to an end.  What’s perhaps the most gratifying of all is to realize that I don’t remember ever once being afraid of being alone.  Getting to St. Louis and paying my rent were my top concerns.  Realizing that I wasn’t going to be married anymore barely even entered my consciousness, and when it did, the thought was “if I had a cave wall and some chalk, I would totally Robinson Crusoe this bitch because I am counting the fucking days, motherfuckers!”

That’s probably not the best thing to reflect on at a wedding.  I realize this.  But I’m also cranky as fuck here in the bedroom while some freeloaders take up all the other available space.  Also I have no breakfast foods.  I really should have made more biscuit dough.  The ones from yesterday were terrific enough that they vanished by noon.

I’m fine with people freeloading those.  If you can’t say “hey friend” with cheddar and bacon inside of bready things, then what kind of a monster are you?