Last week, I got my Learner's permit. I'd been struggling with that a long time. With all the happiness surrounding the receipt of my passport last year, I had forgotten to check if everything was ok. (You have already guessed that it wasn't, haven't you?) It turns out they didn't give me a last name at all. My full name was my first name. So when I was issued a visa, it said that my full name was my last name (because whatever else you don't have, you need a last name). As a consequence my first name was listed as "unknown", and I have been having trouble trying to prove to the people at the DMV that I do, in fact have a first name, and it certainly isn't "Unknown". It might be funny if some parent named their child Unknown, just for kicks. When this person has trouble getting his license, he can just stand his ground and say, "No ma'am, my name is Unknown, and I can prove it to you", pulling out his birth certificate.
Anyway, all's well that ends well. The next step is the road test, which I am going to think about only after the wedding. Salman Rushdie once said with absolute certainty that he knew why women got so excited about their wedding. It is all about the dress, he declared; and he would know, he's quite a veteran when it comes to weddings (his own weddings, in case I wasn't clear enough on that point). One columnist tried to disprove that, but she ended up further proving his point when all the brides-to-be she interviewed could talk only of their ideas for their wedding dress. I know I am not getting married for the dress. Or the jewellery. Or for being the center of attention (that's just scary). The way I see it, the ceremony is the part you'd want to fast forward through/ completely skip over years later, when you sit reminiscing. Isn't the wedding just supposed to mark (or celebrate) the beginning of a new phase of your life? A phase where your life becomes linked to that of another person, and where you learn to stop thinking so much of yourself and take your significant other's likes, spoken or otherwise, into consideration, while making decisions that you normally would in the blink of an eye, being a part of a new family and adjusting to their way of life. The 'wedding' isn't just the ceremony. It is everything that follows. Maybe I have no idea what I am talking about. So far, the main questions most of my girlfriends have asked about the wedding have been along the lines of, "So, what about the dress and ornaments? Have you selected them already? What's it like?" :) Fortunately, at least the married ones seem to think the way I do.
