That’s the sound you want to make. It’s one of those sounds you learned by reading it, connecting it to actual sounds you’d heard or made yourself. You can thank Bill Watterson for this, for argh and fwisshhhh and thhbbthpbbbtt.

In this case, argh is what you’re looking for. Argh covers the bases, accurately describes your frustration with the weather, with this shifty behavior it’s been exhibiting. Two days of gloom and rain had you feeling happy and content in your little home, waking up next to the girl with rain ticking at the windowpane, falling asleep to the same. Two days that have given way to — what, really? Ninety-three degree heat?

Blarghh, that’s another one, although one that you sort of coined yourself, or think you did, over the years. It’s a state of mind, of being, of resignation. It’s such an apt term that it’s caught on; a couple of times a week I’ll get an IM from N. that says just that, and if it comes at 3pm then that’s an average day, but if it comes at 9:15am, then the day’s got the makings of disaster, most likely.

Blarghh, that’s how I’m feeling now. The argh has passed and I’m looking out the window at stunning blue skies and still tree branches, and the love of my life has just texted me to tell me that it’s baking-hot inside our house, which bodes so unwell for the evening, particularly when you’ve planned to run yourself into a sweaty torpor at the gym. A house so warm that the walls are sweating isn’t really what you want to come home to after you’ve pounded the treadmills.

So a movie tonight, a cool theater, something to make us laugh. No snacks, not for me, at least, because I’m trying to eat like an intelligent human being lately, and the past week has been a tormentor of collapsing motivation and crumbling intentions.

But this heat. Blarghh. This isn’t what I’d have segued into, not from such a fine, wet intermission as we’ve just come from. I’d have gone with wind, maybe, and kept the sun tucked away a little longer. And ninety-three? No, no. We’re done with that this year. Ninety-three can make a reappearance next summer, but we’re done, done.

Superman: The Movie
This, one of my favorite movies, was screened on ABC in the early ’80s. I was very young when it first debuted on television — only three years old — so I must have seen it a couple of years later. I remember seeing promos for the movie and begging my parents to let me stay up. (Some of this memory may be pure conjecture, though I’d swear it isn’t.) They gave in, but told me I had to go to bed as soon as Christopher Reeve turned into Superman. So I stayed up, eagerly waiting for the big reveal. Any Superman fan knows that your first glimpse of Superman, live and in costume, doesn’t occur for quite some time. Forty-five minutes, maybe? Maybe not that long, but it’s a while. And then, with Lois Lane perilously dangling from a helicopter, there he is! There’s Superman, finally, flying around, saving people, talking like a hero — finally, after forty-five minutes, there’s the billowing cape and etc. and oh shit, here’s Mom and Dad, ushering me off to bed while the ABC Sunday Night Movie plays on without me.

This, by the way, may be the same promo that started it all:

Musicals in general
My parents were great advocates of the classic Hollywood musicals. So we grew up on Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the whole Rodgers & Hammerstein catalogue. Donald O’Connor’s hilarious physical comedy in Rain, and his “Moses Supposes” duet with Gene Kelly, were some of my favorite moments. I loved the intrigue of the final act in The Sound of Music. One of the first times I consciously noticed, on my own, that actors appeared in different movies was when I saw Cyd Charisse in Rain and later in Brigadoon. It took a little longer to realize that Debbie Reynolds, who I first saw in Rain, was the same person as the scrappy title character in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Years later I had a similar revelation when I realized that the sullen badgering father-in-law from Fargo was Harve Presnell, the very same man who sang of Colorado, his home swuh-eeeeeeeet home, in Molly Brown.

Not all of the musicals they showed us were hits, however. We finally threw in the towel when the folks made Liz and I watch Flower Drum Song, which I still regard as one of the worst movie experiences I’ve ever had. (Perhaps because we were fairly forced to watch it.) Even now, all I remember is some atrocious song about chop suey.

Alien
This is the great movie moment of my childhood. I was in the third or fourth grade when my folks brought home a rented movie and wouldn’t tell me what it was. Dad pressed play on the VCR, and I watched this. Precocious little bastard that I was, I figured out what we were watching long before the title sequence finished unfolding, and turned around excitedly to ask if I guessed right. Just watch, my parents told me, and so I did, completely captivated. This movie set my standard for horror, established my love for movies that show just enough but never too much, and turned me into the detail-obsessed movie fan that I am even now. Since that wonderful day I’ve seen so many movies starring Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerritt and John Hurt and Ian Holm and the lot of them, but they’ll always be Ripley and Dallas and Kane and Ash to me.

Going to the movies
Alas, I was born just a few years too late to say that I saw Star Wars and Superman and all of the other grand childhood movies during their initial theatrical releases. (I am a 1978 baby, one year too late even for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which even now is one of my five favorite movies.) So while my peers talk of seeing Christopher Reeve fly on the big screen, or of watching Quint get his ass chewed up by the great white, I cringe just a little bit. Because confessing the first movie I saw in the theatre to my movie-fan friends is much like confessing my favorite ballplayer of all time to, well, anybody who likes baseball even a little. My favorite ballplayer? Darryl Strawberry. And my first movie?

Yep. D.A.R.Y.L. And, since we were raised Pentecostal, and Pentecostals only go to the movies when they’re on vacation and in places where nobody knows who they are — because movies are bad, see — my second movie was An American Tail. My third was Oscar. My fourth was Jurassic Park. And to make up for all of this, I spent all of 1996 ditching school and work to see every movie I possibly could. And this is probably as good a reason as any why I never managed to complete more than a semester of any college I attended.

I’ve always imagined that my thirties would be the best decade of my life. That’s something you tell yourself, and in doing so, maybe you set yourself up for a little bit of disappointment. You muddle through the twenties, reminding yourself that in a few more years you’ll be older, you’ll be thirty, and that’s when the good stuff will really start happening. It’s something you tell yourself and you can’t believe could be wrong — the thirties will be the best because the twenties could have been a whole lot better in many respects.

Sometime next year I’m getting married. Longtime readers know I’ve done this before, and the results were fairly disastrous not only to my poor heart but to the tone of this site’s content. Longtime readers also know that there’s a cancelled engagement behind me, too. So count em: that’s two women that I gave commitments to, and two women who aren’t in my life anymore. It would be easy to say that the difference now is that I’m engaged to the woman I’m meant to be with, to the best woman a man could hope for.

So: I’m engaged to the best woman a man can hope for.

Her name is Felicia. It took me six months of Starbucks hot chocolates to find out that much about her. I was a little bit gun-shy since the last breakup; I’d put several reactive and very poor decisions behind me, and now I was trying to figure out who I was outside of the context of another person, and maybe this made me a little shy in general. So every day I would visit the little Starbucks near my job, and on the days that Felicia worked, I would visit twice, and she would smile at me, and she would take out a grande cup and scribble my order on it without asking, because she knew my order never changed. (I found out later that she thought of me as the grumpy hot chocolate guy. Grumpy, who knows why — I don’t deny the charge, but I can’t recall being particularly perturbed while in her store in those days.) One day as she made my drink and I stood by, waiting patiently, she wrote her initials in chocolate syrup on the whipped cream in my drink, and then told me that she’d just done that, and man, that smile. And that was maybe the first time that I thought: hmm. Because it’s not unusual for me to completely miss signals. Hit me over the head, hold up a sign. These things might work.

What finally lit the fuse was Top Gun. I’d been plotting a random event with some of the guys at my office — we all bought custom Top Gun t-shirts with the actors’ call signs on the back, and planned to serenade one of the girls, and then screen the movie at lunch. I wore the Goose t-shirt. That morning Felicia took my order, and I said something about it being Top Gun Day. She was intrigued, and popped her collar in honor of the big event.

At work the serenade went off almost without a hitch — Maverick flubbed the first line of the song — and then we spent lunch in a conference room, eating pizza and watching the movie. I took a break and darted to Starbucks. Felicia asked how it went, and I told her, and mentioned that we’d captured the whole thing on video. She wanted to see it, so she wrote her email address down for me. I wrote her back a little after that, and we wrote back and forth all afternoon. And yes, I asked her out. In an email. We went to dinner and a ballgame the next day, spent twelve hours talking and getting to know each other. I called it a date. She called it a ‘hangout’. We eventually straightened this out. It’s one of the few times I’ve been right, and she’s been so wrong.

I was pretty much gone for her right away. She’s adorable and small, has the most expressive face I’ve ever seen, and has amazing hands that spin rough fiber into gorgeous yarn, and gorgeous yarn into wonderful creations. She’s younger than me, but far more adult, and everything I thought I had figured out, she’s taught me more about. She eats octopus and folds origami. She loves creepy movies. She’ll eat an artichoke and then a Fruit Roll-up and then a bowl of macaroni — she has flexible taste buds. She’ll tear you up at Guitar Hero and Halo. Sometimes she snores, but damned if she doesn’t have cute snores. She can pout like nobody’s business, and bust you up laughing two seconds later. She sings, she bakes, she plays guitars and pianos and ukeleles, she cooks, she dances, she can kick your ass. And she’s hot. Goddamn, is she hot. I’ll just fess up to that one right now.

We broke up for a little while, for reasons I take full responsibility for. It’s easy to become boring when your job and all of your interests revolve around staying home, getting lazy, gaining weight, watching your social life decline. Over the two months that followed I spent a lot of time realizing just how much I missed her, and worked hard to win her back. I started taking stock of the things that hadn’t been working so well, and started attacking them. I must have done something right, because a few weeks ago Felicia accepted when I asked her to be my wife.

And oh, the plans we have. We’ve already begun turning the spare room into a craft room, where Felicia’s many spinning wheels and knitting projects will have room to sprawl about, free from the threatening claws of our two cats. Every weekend from here to 2012 is booked, it seems. We’re running together, starting new traditions together. She’s teaching me to love new foods, teaching me about wine. In the evenings while she spins yarn I camp out in the handmade rocking chair that she gave me for an engagement present, and I read wonderful books to her. We’re training our little dog to be a little grown-up dog, which maybe means we’re kind of grownups, too. We’re debating tropical destinations for the honeymoon. Tahiti? Belize? The Maldives? Anywhere warm and blue and a few thousand miles from here. Between her job and mine there is the potential for much stress, so we’ve both decided fuck that, we’re young and who needs that pressure anyway? Making the decision to be positive and happy actually seems to work. Felicia does not believe in luck, and I agree with her. Rather than a lucky man, I am a fortunate man. One who realizes with great clarity just how fortunate.

This week I will turn thirty-one. Thirty was my transition year — I got more wrong than right, and then started doubling back to fix those things. Which means that thirty-one will truly be the first of the best years of my life. But I don’t think I’ll limit myself to my thirties. With this woman at my side, I think I’ve got a whole lot more than that.

Not to end on too sappy a note, though — did I already say she’s really, really hot? Oh, right. I did. But some things are worth saying twice. In fact, some things are woth saying three times, because that third time is the one that really, really matters most.

Happy engagement, darling. I hope I am always the man you deserve.

Here’s the rocketship and the blossom frame, as they currently stand:

More progress snapshots to come.

You talk about the wedding, that particular event which is born in the moment you put the ring on her finger, and along with all of the expected first discussions — when? where? how many? — you talk about who will perform the wedding, neither of you being particularly religious anymore. And that’s an easy decision to make: nobody religious will perform the wedding, and you both agree, and you move on to finer points.

And at some point the subject of readings come up. Do we want someone to read something? At so many weddings you’ve both attended, the reading is — well, religious in nature. Or it’s a poem, which we’ll avoid, thank you very much. So you ponder this, both of you, and nothing springs to mind, and then the lovely woman next to you says, I’ve got it.

She says, The Annie Druyan interview.

And you know right then that you’ve chosen the right girl to spend your life with.

Because what she is talking about is not only a sweet moment in an interview between a science journalist and the widow of Carl Sagan. It is that, yes, but it is also perhaps one of the most honest and sincerely romantic things you have heard in your life. And you’re a rather jaded person when it comes to these sorts of things — when it comes to obviously romantic things, that is; you’re kind of a sap when it comes to things that bob and weave and then thump you right in the heart.

I’ve written about the interview in question before. In it, the Radiolab writers talk with Druyan about her part in the historic Voyager Interstellar Record Project, in which Druyan, along with Sagan and others, gathered important cultural artifacts from around the world to be shipped into deep space aboard the Voyager probe. The project itself is a romantic one, to be sure: that we might say hello, in any number of languages, through a catalog of our species’ music, to any intelligent extra-terrestrials who might happen across our Voyager probe many, many years from now.

What emerges from the interview is a romantic tale of another sort altogether. Sagan and Druyan fell in love during their collaboration on this project — and one must imagine that it wouldn’t be so hard to fall in love during such an ambitious, creative, heartfelt endeavor — and then spent the next twenty years together, until Sagan’s death in 1996.

It seems a little strange that someone might want to quote Druyan at their wedding, I suppose, but if you know me and if you know Felicia, then you might understand why this passage appeals so much to us. It speaks of love in a way that avoids romanticizing the concept, that leaves fate and divine intervention out of the equation, and instead expresses profound gratitude at such fortune.

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl.

But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous –not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance … That pure chance could be so generous and so kind … That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time … That we could be together for twenty years.

That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful … The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Call me a sap if you must. But I’ll take sentiments like this one over another New Testament rendition any day. And what I love most? So will Felicia.