About this Blog

"After the Wedding Bells" aims to unite all young marrieds who dare to redefine marriage. My husband Jonathan and I believe in living small but dreaming big (we hope to one day travel overseas to document injustices worldwide). I started this blog not long after we married on May 27, 2007 in Lexington, Ky. We work together as newspaper journalists.

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• August 2008
• March 2008
• August 2007

I feel like Sarah Jessica Parker now as I type on my new Mac laptop. The only difference is, I’m not in NYC, but rather in Decatur, Alabama. No worries. I still have a new hope again for writing, thanks to the new laptop!
Yes, it was difficult to surrender my old Toshiba that I liked to refer to as “Ol Unreliable.” The strange grinding noise it had made for the past two years had somehow lost its appeal. The additional RAM that had supposedly been installed by techie friends never did seem to solve the struggles the machine constantly faced.
Now, no more will I lose a document due to the gasping-for-life battery. No more will I have to deal with strange error messages or random screen blackouts. No more will I have to worry if Starbucks will have an outlet for me to plug my computer into.

It’s like new life, a new me. I guess this is one of the perks of husbands - or spouses or significant others in general - is they can convince us simpletons to finally take the leap and update our prehistoric technology. After all, it seems that half of every pair tends to lag behind in technology. It’s as if we sniff out our opposites in some survival instinct so that we always have someone to hook up our TVs and DVD players for us in every move.

While it is hard to think about blazing new tech territory, or actually having something nice to worry about — I generally abide by a minimalist strategy in having subpar possessions so I don’t have to worry about losing them, marring them, or having them stolen. (Me and John Lennon would’ve gotten along well, had Yoko not stolen him away before I was even born) — But sometimes it is necessary to give in to the items that you know you will use a lot and will enhance your quality of life.

So for now, it is a new, Sarah Jessica Parker-furrowed-brow me (minus the lingerie-wearing, smoking part.) Here I sit, behind the Apple logo, trying to look thoughtful. Are men and women really equal nowadays? Have New Yorkers become so independent that we’ve evolved beyond relationships? I probably will go back to working on articles for the newspaper and leave these questions to her in the upcoming “Sex and the City” sequel, while I tackle simpler topics - such as how to use the software on this computer.

My friend made me do it.
Sure, reading “The Time Travelers’ Wife,” may not seem too crazy to some, but I’m somewhat embarrassed to be reading it. It’s one of those books that’s proudly displayed in Target and other mass retailers as a sort of “everybook” that you can tell the marketing department hopes everyone from the housewife in Kansas City to the urbanite in Chicago can relish, and maybe even to such a degree that they’ll start a book club about it.
One of my best friends told me I HAD to read this bestseller and since she put the book in my hands, I felt like I might be betraying her if I didn’t read it.
The novel, which is written in short blocks of time that flash back and forth between time periods from when they first meet to when they’re old, is sort of like that weird dream you can’t wake up from but that when you finally do, leaves you with a weird aura for the rest of the morning.

The book centers on a married couple who experience marital problems for much of the book. I guess I can’t help but take it to heart since they’re newly married like my husband and I. Hearing about marital problems and thinking about time going by and getting old with my husband makes me sad, though I know the “old and gray together” part is supposed to be sweet. Time is complicated, and when I think of it laid out like a long ribbon, it saddens me. Whether that ribbon ends, or whether it coils in some strange way only God understands, scares me and haunts me.

But I feel a little better when I think of it in the way Neale Donald Walsch wrote about it the his “Conversations with God” series - and probably plenty of scientists have also theorized – that maybe time is more like a filing cabinet, in which each moment in time is existing separately, yet concurrently. Theoretically every moment in time is all being played out at once and if we could only figure it out, we really could time travel. For example, our 16-year-old self at prom may be just a few file folders back, and our 5-year-old self is also within reach, making mud pies. Or, even when my husband and I are old with grandchildren, not far away from us is our young selves, hanging our wedding photos on the walls and congratulating ourselves on our 6-month anniversary.
That idea is one I can handle. And hopefully the novel won’t mess up the peace I have made with that notion.

Danielle Komis Palmer

Recently, staring at my left hand became all encompassing. The new sight of my glittering diamond stacked atop my wedding band spawns daydreams in which I assert my newfound power as an official “Mrs.”
In one daydream, I am at my bank and have just discovered an unfair fee on my account.
“Well, I will have to speak with my HUSBAND about this, but if this matter does not get remedied soon, I believe we will have to take our assets elsewhere,” I imagine myself telling the bank teller coldly.
Immediately the bank employees look threatened and try to calm me, but myself – and my glittering left ring finger – are already out the door, my heels clicking angrily on the sidewalk outside.
It’s a lovely, completely non-PC daydream, but I wonder…is it sad that at age 24, so far marriage seems more like one grand game of dress up than it is a real life change?
Perhaps. But apparently I’m not alone in thinking that way.
My friends all call me on the phone and are overly eager to say “Well, hello, Mrs. Palmer….” With an emphasis, of course, on the Mrs. Palmer, in the same way the teacher once emphasized your name when you weren’t paying attention in class. They, too, live in this fairy tale with me in whom my new role as a married woman doesn’t quite seem real, as if I am playing a part rather than living my real life.
Should I constantly wear an apron and start spouting off tips from Heloise on how to get those pesky water spots out of my Corning ware just to prove some sort of point? Somehow I don’t think that’s really what anyone wants.
Instead, I continue to routinely prepare cereal or my trademark yogurt and granola combination for dinner, and do my best to subscribe to the “chore chart” my husband and I came up with to try to make us each do our fair share of the household chores.
When I go online, I spend more time checking my Myspace page than I do our bank statements or CNN.com. Changing my profile photo and messaging friends who I haven’t seen in forever somehow just seems more important.
So maybe I am just a little girl in a grown up’s high heels, pretending. But that doesn’t mean the people at the bank have to know.