The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life Read Online Free PDF

myriad of hairstyle options and wedding favors and whether or not to have her bridal portrait taken in the back of an old vintage truck or in a field of sunflowers. I would have had to put my head between my knees and stay that way for the rest of my life had I known about all those things. It took me a full twoweeks just to decide if I wanted the baked Brie or a fruit plate at my reception. The option of cookies iced with my new monogram would have sent me into a seizure.
    I am not a woman equipped to handle a world where I have to hold a small chalkboard with our wedding date written in some sort of handcrafted calligraphy.
    And all the pressure to come up with creative ways to ask your friends to be bridesmaids and then sending out save-the-date cards? You want to know how I did that back in ye olden days of 1997? I called them on the phone (probably a phone with a cord that couldn’t find the nearest Starbucks if its life depended on it) and said, “Hey, make sure you put August 16 on your calendar because I’m getting married and I’d love for you to be a bridesmaid.”
    That was it.
    No chalkboard. No balloons filled with white and silver confetti. No creative photos of my new diamond ring or Photoshopped pictures of a bubble coming out of my mouth that read, “I said yes!”
    Not to mention the whole “trash the dress” phenomenon. The other day on the news I saw a feature about a girl who set her wedding dress on fire WHILE SHE WAS WEARING IT and then ran into the ocean as someone photographed the whole thing. Trust me when I say this is a terrible idea. The future just called and said thank you for not giving yourself third-degree burns in exchange for some edgy photographs.
    Looking back, I feel like our big day was just a hair shy of the lack of pomp and circumstance when Nellie Oleson married Percival in Little House on the Prairie . In the late ’90s, none of us knew it was even an option to get a portrait made in your wedding dress while sitting on a mattress in a river somewhere. It was a simpler time.
    We had the church and the reception site booked within twenty-four hours. (It’s easy to pick a wedding date when met with the stipulation that it can’t be during hunting season. Perry has always been a romantic fool.) And then, just two days into our engagement, I was offered a new job. A great job in pharmaceutical sales. A job I couldn’t turn down even though it meant I was about to spend seven weeks of my three-month engagement out of town at training meetings learning about the respiratory system and various medications and how to spend your days taking doctors to play golf.
    So the next three months consisted of my flying home on various weekends to attend wedding showers and parties, check on wedding details, and then fly back to various nongarden spots all over the United States for another grueling week of training and getting up early and sitting all day in a “classroom,” which was basically just a fancy term for a hotel room with tables and chairs instead of a bed and a nightstand with a lamp bolted down on it.
    There came a point in this process when I was so exhausted I could barely function. Unfortunately, this came on the morning my training class was meeting with a Department of Public Safety officer for mandatory defensive driving tests.
    The officer had us file into a plain, white-walled room and lined us up to check our driver’s licenses. And when he walked up to me, he informed me that I wouldn’t be able to complete my driving course that morning because I was clearly still drunk from the night before.
    “Umm, officer? I didn’t drink last night.”
    “Young lady, it’s obvious you did. Your eyes are bloodshot, and you can barely focus. It appears you’re having a hard time just standing up.”
    Yes. I call this particular affliction 7:00 a.m. Some would say it’s embarrassing, but I just say it’s an excuse to explain why I can’t commit to any activity that