Marriage and web services

A post in red_frog's journal about dealing with cluelessness reminded me that I had forgotten to post this story when it happened a month ago.

Picture it: April 2005. I've spent a few weeks slogging through my first same-sex married couple tax filing process and has also had to complete a ton of paperwork related to a new job. Some of this paperwork includes questions about my marital status. I am checking the "married" box unless the form goes to the federal government, in which case I am scowling and checking the "single" box. I go to a weekend-long symposium on Java and web services in a nearby town.

Saturday afternoon, I'm attending a lecture on web services. There are maybe 20 people in the room. I'm sitting near the front. The speaker is pretty good, he's very funny and energetic and he's got this kind of crazy long-haired guy thing going. He starts explaining the pitfalls of representing objects in a hierarchy. One of those pitfalls is that cyclical relationships are not so hierarchical. He needs a demonstration. Marriage is an example of a cyclical relationship between two parties, because each is married to the other. So he turns to the only woman in the room, which is me, and says "stand up." Slightly surprised, I stand up. He says "are you married?" I get very confused because this question is way the hell out of context. "Is this state or federal?" I wonder.

I decide that it's probably state. I say "yes." He says something unintelligible, so I say "what?" "Is he here?" he repeats. Now I'm really confused. Is who what where? I realize that I've been mistaken for a straight-married chick. The previous day I almost got mistaken for a guy, so clearly there's a widespread shortage of gaydar. I debate the relative merits of subjecting 20 innocent software engineers to a brief lecture on same-sex marriage and the danger of making assumptions. I decide it's better just to say no so we can get back to web services. He picks a husband stand-in from the other side of the room and goes back to making his point. I spend the rest of the lecture distracted by thoughts about how I'm the worst married lesbian ever and a blight upon the gay rights movement. I apologize to Kelly as soon as I get home. When she's done laughing, she says it's okay. I'm lucky that she's so understanding.

In which I try to get some exercise...

Today was almost not my day for a workout. I woke up early and managed to get to the gym in time for an 8:15 yoga class. I had not done yoga in a very long time, but the last time I had taken classes with this teacher they had been very beginner-friendly. This time, not so much. She did a few warm-ups and then went into a vinyasa flow kind of thing in which everything happened very fast and there wasn't any explanation of how to do the poses. After about 10 minutes I was dizzy and frustrated because I knew I was doing everything wrong. So I left about 5 minutes later and drove home. Strike one.

The drive home was sunny. Back at the house, I managed to catch Kelly before she headed to her gym. We had been unable to use our new book of nature walks in Eastern Massachusetts for the past few weeks because of rain, so she was up for a walk. We loaded up a backpack and drove for half an hour to get to Bald Hill Reservation in Boxford. We parked and set off on the trail. At the first place where it split, one side was totally flooded to the point where Kelly's walking-in-mud tolerance was exceeded. When we tried to go the other way, we ran into a sign saying that trail was closed for ecological reasons. We headed back to our car and tried a trail entrance on the other side of the road, which was a town forest. We did manage to wander around for 40 minutes in there, on what looked like horse trails, and then we headed home. Strike two and it wasn't even noon yet.

It started to rain very lightly as we got back to the house. This did not look very promising for the afternoon's softball game. I spent the rest of the day reading and hanging out around the house. Miraculously, it didn't start raining before the game. It did rain lightly during the game, but not enough to matter and the ground was pretty dry when we started, so it was okay. We got our first win of the season. I played catcher, got two singles and had one great defensive play (great in the sense that it worked, not in the sense that it was technically impressive). Playing softball still doesn't really count as a workout, but it was a good game.