it's august eve.  r is out with his friend for some man time (encouraged by me) and i just finished some vacuuming and dusting (yay!).  i've been on summer holiday for just about one month now, and i'm finally getting used to it.  i was seriously having trouble learning how to live without a 9-3 teacher day, but by week 2, i quickly threw myself into my summer job - changing my name.

for some, this is the penultimate ritual and rite of passage into marriage-dom.  i know some people who are content to switch over on day 1, and even some more fanciful folks that start practicing their new names on the second date!  for me, the clincher came at a bar some months before we were married.  we were with some friends, all duly equipped with smart phones, and somehow we got around to "googling" our names.  some aspired to be number 1; some aspired to have the most entries.  me, i just wanted to be able to see myself free of all other identities that were not me.  i'm not a gymnast, physicist or teenage doodler.  incidentally, the teen turned out to be the most enterprising of us all, nabbing the precious (yet now defunct) "www.minakim.com" domain.  someone googled "mina leazer" and in subdued fanfare, there i saw it...a white page of nothing but (future) me.  i can't say i didn't sit a bit more smugly amongst all the guys who were there vying for top this, most that...but with a little two word name, there i was, topping them all.

ha, i hope my haughtiness is not starting to choke here, but that was when the panic of potentially changing my name started to quell.  i actually wanted to change my name precisely because a fair number of my friends HADN'T.  what i had considered a causal relationship was not so with my friends, who have even since had children.  they go through the awkward times of registering their babies at daycare and in halting sentences insisting that they are the mother and yes, they have different last names.  i know in Korean culture, the bride keeps her name, but surely most of my friends seemed more American than that.

and yet, the "new" American woman asserts independence and rights to her name as well - or by using a complex slew of hyphenations and dual names.  i had some Latina friends whose names eternally confused me as their names were the mirror images of their husbands and children whose names reflected the union and priority of names.  needless to say, changing a name seems to port a certain weight in any culture.

r and i are a bit more "traditional" or "Midwest" in that sense.  there was never really a question of whether or not i would change my name - only one of how i might feel when i did it.  surprisingly, there was no drastic change when it happened.  a couple of hours at the social security office, an interview with a jaded officer who barely looked at me, and there was my new identity on an 3"x8.5" perforated paper.  i've since been tracing down all the minute locations where my name has inserted itself so i can update my identity - employer, health insurance, banks, driver's license.  perhaps the weight of shedding an old name hasn't quite hit me since the bureaucracy of it all has been so methodical...but little by little, i am realizing that i've got a new me to consider.

so world, let me introduce you to mina leazer.  nice to meet you.

© a fellow who said the picture might not be straight

The other day, I ran into someone I hadn't seen since before I married.  Maybe it was the heat or just a lull in the conversation, but she asked me several times throughout the night, "How's married life?"  At first, I replied with the traditional happy thoughts and good will that I'm used to saying, but by the third time, I was running out of answers, and for some reason, I said, "It's good!  It saves time."  The other person, being a bit tongue-in-cheek by nature, replied, "Oh great, that's really what I look forward to when I get married.  Saving time."

That answer really irked me the past couple of weeks. I wished to say something meaningful and grandiose, but instead, I said the truth!  I've thought about it a lot, and I think I said that because time was one of our biggest (and still is) stressors before we got married.  R would leave work, ride to my place, and by the time we ate dinner, we had an hour before I had to go to sleep because of my teacher schedule.  We always bemoaned not being able to spend enough time together, and not being able to get our own business done.

I've been reading Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages after years of avoiding it, and I was surprised to find out that my love language is quality time.  No wonder I replied what I did.  Not that we have all the time in the world, but I've been relishing sharing my life with Randall...err, in every way.  Tonight, he came home drenched in sweat and humidity.  It is a heat wave after all!  I was making Korean dduk bboki as per his request.  After we kissed, he told me about his crazy day, and I told him to wash his face!  Dinner was ready.

We had dinner, shared some yummy cookies, and talked about our days.  I told him about my home improvement projects and my conversation with an irate mom who's garden had been weeded of her prize plants!  He told me about work drama and some photography equipment he had purchased on e-bay.  After dinner, he went to his desk and worked on his computer, and I got on my laptop (which I'd spent way too much time on during the day) and started playing a game I found on an old blog I used to frequent in my single days.  R cracked up when he realized I was playing an escape-the-room RPG.  Yes, full geekdom come.  I cringed as he saw the screenshots I had taken to figure out some of the puzzles, and yet R exclaimed, "I admire your drive to solve anything at all costs."  [Blush!]

I caught up on some e-mails, Facebook, and looked at all the Google Doodles from past to present (did I tell you I'm on summer break?) while R caught up on photoblogs and shopped for some new tungsten lights.  It was glorious.  Hours of time to just "be" together AND get "alone" time.  I'm out in the living room since R has fallen asleep, and I'm just so thankful for marriage.  R named ours "Two weirdos living together."  Originally, I had meant to come out here and write a post about our differences - namely because we've been sleeping with a fan on our nightstand, and I still fear fan death - but now I'm glad that our differences help us to run along side of each other and marvel.

I once heard an analogy of meeting your mate like this.  You, as a single, should be running after God with all your heart.  And then as you run, you happen to glance over and see someone running parallel in the same direction.  A glance turns into a dance and then a negotiation.  So then marriage then becomes a slight intersection of two paths running towards the same goal.  I'm understanding this a bit more everyday.

p.s. Next time, I'll write about fan death and other things that have been the source of hilarity in our day-to-day.