All the Things I've Learned After a Year of Marriage

So I've been married for, like, a year. Impressed? You should be.

But there are things you learn about marriage after you get married. You can't learn everything beforehand. Not even with Marriage Counseling. So here are some of the things I've learned.

You Have to Make Sacrifices

I did know this beforehand, and I even knew that the squirrel I ritually slaughtered on the stone table was not going to be ENOUGH of a sacrifice. What I didn't realize was that I would have to give up my quest for immortality and immeasurable wealth. Maybe I should have. What wife wants to live in an apartment filled with beakers, boiling test tubes, the smell of sulphurous fumes, inhuman wailing, and occasional tesseracts and portals to other dimensions? Not my wife, it turns out.

It's okay, though. Watching Netflix of an evening is nearly as fulfilling as discovering the mysteries of the universe.

I DON'T mean "Netflix and chill," though, because...

When You Get Married You Stop Having Sex

If you're an old-fashioned, out-of-date, religious fuddy-duddy, you don't have sex BEFORE marriage, either. Basically nobody religious ever has sex.

You need that purification though, because...

The Beings of Light are Jerks

Everyone knows that a large part of Marriage Counseling involves preparation to meet the non-physical entities that only married people are able to meet. But did you know that they are gigantic jerks? They don't clean, the drink all your beer, they leave giant clots of pulsing hair in the drain of your shower. They ate our dog. We don't really talk to them at all, anymore.

It's okay though, because of the last thing I've learned about being married...

Married People are Better Than All Other People

When you're married, your DNA actually changes at a substructural level, and it becomes BETTER DNA. So, like, I'm not even bragging when I say, married people are just inherently better than the rest of you. Sorry. But it's true.

Book List 2015

1. The Skeptic's Guide to Conspiracies, by Monte Cook
2. Revival, by Stephen King
3. Arkham Asylum, by Grant Morrison
4. The Fingerprints of the Gods, by Graham Hancock
5. The Dark Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersh
6. A Short History of Scotland, by Andrew Lang
7. Twelfth Night, by Bill Shakespeare
8. The Shaving of Shagpat, by George Meredith
9. Fugitives of Chaos, by John C. Wright
10. Trigger Warning, by Neil Gaiman
11. Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett
12. Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon
13. The Wonderful Edison Time Machine, by Malcolm Willits
14. The Screenwriter's Workbook, by Syd Field
15. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by JK Rowling
16. Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon
17. Titans of Chaos, by John C. Wright
18. Home Fires, by Gene Wolfe
19. Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, by Martin Luther
20. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
21. Old Peninsula Days, by HR Holand
22. The Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith
23. The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens
24. The War Lovers, by Evan Thomas
25. Only Yesterday, by Frederick Allen
26. The Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling
27. A Celtic Miscellany, ed./translated by Kenneth Jackson
28. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
29. Isis and Osiris, by Jonathan Cott
30. Griftopia, by Matt Taibi
31. The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
32. The Truth, by Terry Pratchett
33. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by JK Rowling
34. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
35. Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollet
36. Housekeeping, by Marilynn Robinson
37. The Flash, Vol. 1 by Brian Buccelleto et al.
38. Kingdom Come, by Mark Waid and Alex Ross
39. The Writer's Journey, by Christopher Vogler
40. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner
41. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee
42. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by JK Rowling
43. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, by Martin McDonagh
44. A Skull in Connemara, by Martin McDonagh
45. The Lonesome West, by Martin McDonagh
46. The Playboy of the Western World, by John Synge
47. The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell
48. The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers
49. Soldier of Sidon, by Gene Wolfe
50. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
51. The Death of Socrates (Euthyphro/Apology/Crito/Phaedo), by Plato
52. Gargantua and Pantagruel (vol.s 1-5), by Francois Rabelais
53. Sandman: Overture, by Neil Gaiman et al.
54. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling
55. A Betrayal in Summer, by Daniel Abraham
56. Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card
57. A City in Winter, by Mark Helprin
58. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
59. Religion on Trial, by Craig Parton
60. All Men of Genius, by Lev AC Rosen [partial]
61. Antony and Cleopatra, by Bill Shakespeare
62. Ha'penny, by Jo Walton
63. The Merry Wives of Windsor, by Bill Shakespeare
64. Shakespeare's Imagery, by Caroline Spurgeon
65. Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage, by Thomas Greene
66. Domnei, by James Branch Cabell
67. Northlanders, Volume 1: Sven the Returned, by Brian Wood et. al.
68. Northlanders, Volume 2: The Cross and the Hammer, by Brian Wood et. al.
69. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
70. The Land Across, by Gene Wolfe
71. I Am A Cat, by Natsume Soseki
72. The Flash: Vol. 2,  by Brian Buccelleto et al.
73. At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald
74. The Art of Asking, by Amanda Palmer
75. The Cream of the Jest, by James Branch Cabell
76. The Golem's Eye, by Jonathan Stroud
77. A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett
78. The Hermetic Millenia, by John C. Wright
79. Multireal, by David Louis Edelman
80. Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin
81. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
82. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
83. Finch, by Jeff VanderMeer
84. Bad Machinery, Volume 1: The Case of the Team Spirit