The Seversons

I hope everyone noticed that today is February 29.  Leap Day only comes along every so often, but every time it does it tends to stir the same memories for me.  Specifically the Leap Day 12 years ago (1996, but who’s counting?) when I was a junior in high school and we celebrated Frederic’s birthday.  This may be normal except that Frederic was not a real person.  He’s a character from Pirates of Penzance, and a major plot point is that his birthday happens to fall on Leap Day.

Many of you who have met me more recently (law school on) probably wouldn’t know too much about my past on the stage.  I keep it this way largely on purpose.  It’s not that I don’t like singing, I like it quite a lot.  But inevitably it ends up being rather embarrassing when you have to conduct an adult life.  One of the last times I sang in front of a crowd of several hundred, I wore both a dress and a mustache.  Do you really need any further explanation?

In high school, Pirates of Penzance was my big entry into the drama scene.  I had been nothing more than a bit part before it and I hadn’t even considered going for something big until a day or two before my audition.  Scoring the main role was a little bit of a coup, and it’s always been a time I’ve looked back at quite fondly.  But it doesn’t mean I’ll advertise.  I reprised my big role  again in law school, but most of you probably don’t know that.  Especially if you were my classmate.  Although I couldn’t hide the truth from Professor Long (of all the faculty to find out!) who mentioned it every time I saw him for the next two years.  (He only knew because he came to the show, and he only came because one of his wife’s relatives was in it.  He was one of the two big sweaty married guys I had to kiss onstage.  Blech.)

In my professional life, I’ve kept this mostly under wraps.  Though I did do a pretty killer karaoke version of Son of a Preacher Man during a Public Defender training a couple years ago.  I managed to make it without ever performing in the Law School Talent Show.  BYU was perhaps the only law school in the country that takes such an event quite seriously.  I remember ditching out on the Talent Show one year with Wes (odds are Tony and JCar were also present) and I remember mentioning to Wes that talent shows always weird me out.  They make me feel like I’m 13 again, singing Almost Paradise at the church youth talent show with my neighbor, Erika.  I still remember Wes saying, “Almost Paradise?” with this incredulous look.  Yes.  We, two adolescent girls, sang the love ballad from 80’s classic Footloose with complete seriousness for an audience.   Perhaps now you understand why I keep this so quiet.

Fortunately few pictures survive.  And even more fortunately, we didn’t have digital cameras then, so beauties like this can only be recaptured by taking a picture of a picture (sorry, no scanner here) and you get stuck with an out-of-focus version.  Be grateful.  I promise.

I’m the one on the right in the hideous green dress.  (I called it The Green Atrocity.)  Out of focus I look much cuter, since you can’t see the braces and the stage makeup.  On the left is none other than Erika (did I mention it was her idea to sing Almost Paradise?).  Fortunately for the world, we are both SO much cooler now.

Obviously.  (Don’t mock us.  I’m a lawyer.  She’s a Top Gun.  We are a force to be reckoned with.)

I admit, I don’t really miss having trials every week.  As a Public Defender, I only had one case go to trial, but when I switched to Juvenile Court, I had trials every week.  Wednesday was just trial day, and it wasn’t just one.  It was usually three or four.  Juvenile trials went pretty quickly.  The police didn’t exactly spend a lot of time gathering evidence, and most of the crimes involved friends, family members, or school officials.  And most were completely unnecessary, but had to go forward because we hadn’t gotten anything like a good deal.

My longest trial was 2 days.  It was a crazily long debacle where a few boys decided to pull a prank on another boy, but the DA decided their stupid act was best charged as a litany of felonies.  It was really frustrating, especially when I was 95% confident we’d end up only with the charges we would have pled to anyway, and when the only eyewitness was a girl who was about 8 and who couldn’t endure any questioning without bursting into tears.   But that trial worked out well.  And I’m pretty pleased even with my most serious and violent felonies.  (Two stabbings, count ‘em.)

One of those stabbings gave me one of my sweetest Not Guilty’s.  It was a crazy case where there were five boys all together when it took place and each one gave a completely different version of events.  And my only adult trial also ended up with a wonderful victory.  Two separate sets of charges, and evidence was presented of two previous similar incidents.  I knew we’d eat one of those charges–the misdemeanor–but I was shocked when the jury came back (in 45 minutes, usually a kiss of death for the defense) and acquitted on the felony. (One juror, a woman who looked in her 50’s, patted me on the shoulder as they filed out and said, “Good job.”  That was a little surreal.)

Since leaving the PD’s office, my trial caseload has shrunk severely.  I’m pretty okay with that.  As much as I enjoy the rush, I also enjoy avoiding it.  Because even though I was trying cases on a weekly basis, my hands always shook and I always got a little nervous.  Yesterday I had a trial, albeit a minor one.  Once you work in an office where you have regular clients, you end up handling all sorts of smaller issues.  This one was for a county code noise violation and I was covering for a co-worker.  But boy was I ready to go.  We had a big motion but weren’t allowed to argue it.  Still, I shrugged it off.  I literally wanted to look over at the prosecutor, and say, “Bring it.”

Our trial was done in about 5 minutes.  Possibly a new record.  And yes, it was a big fat not guilty.  All I had to do was object a couple times and it was over.  Not quite the same as my glory days, but I’ll take it.  And I must have looked tough up there, because my client–who’s a huge guy with dreds in a hiphop/metal band–said I was “badass.”

We have updated the layout. We liked our old setup, but it had problems loading. So now we’ve got an all new one. Tell us if you think it’s hideous.

Update: We’ve changed it again.  Better??

Final Update 2/28: I think we’ve finally settled on one.  Any objections?

Because I am a girl I have license to do certain things.  Like write a whole blog post about my hair.  I apologize in advance, but it is really the only thing I’ve been able to concentrate on lately.  Once in a while, a girl just feels the need to take drastic measures.  But if you have previously taken drastic measures and realized that it probably wasn’t the best idea, then you have to take the time to think about whether this is really the right thing.

I used to have hardly any hair.  Then it turned into a massive rather bushy thing with a mind of its own.  Twice I’ve cut it very short and not liked it.  (Lucky for you, I don’t seem to have any pictures of me with virtually no hair.  I wonder why.)  But for most of my adult life it’s been long.  Not that anyone would know.  I wear my hair back 99% of the time.  Once, my second year of law school, I actually wore my hair down and some people didn’t recognize me.  When I pull it back I don’t even put it in a ponytail that much because of the bushiness.

Early in our relationship, Eric told me he thought I should wear my hair down more.  I didn’t.  Now he can’t imagine me doing it, which means my evil plan has worked.  Once when I was actually blow-drying it, in all its immensity, when I flipped my hair back up, Eric called me Aslan.  And it wasn’t a bad comparison.  Seriously, my hair is more like a crazy lion’s mane than hair.

Yesterday I wore it half up and half down because I’m considering cutting it and wanted to look at a few different lengths.  Eric came down hard.  He doesn’t like my hair like that.  Although it would be better if I cut it.  I agree.  I’m thinking a little above shoulder-length.  Because what’s the use of having long hair if you don’t like it long.  I can do a lot more to it when I pull it up, but it’s turned into a heavy mass on the back of my head.   And really, it served its purpose.  When I had my hair done for the wedding, the awesome girl who did my hair just kept going on and on about how my hair is perfect for a big up-do, and a lot of times she has girls with hardly any hair coming in insisting on these massive styles that they can’t possibly have.  In fact, the only thing I feel kind of sad about with the wedding is that my veil is covering my hair in all the pictures.  Granted, it had pretty much fallen completely halfway through, but it was so pretty.  Now that that’s done, I guess there’s no longer a need.

So I’m already cutting my hair, I never wear makeup if I don’t have to, and I’ve put on a few pounds.  Can you tell I’m newly married?

(By the way, Eric has finally started posting.  You can click through the link.  He is getting comment-envy, so show him some love.)

The biggest adjustment to married life for Eric and I has been deciding how to divide our housework.  We have a tiny apartment, but there always seems to be more to do to keep it up to snuff.  We’ve already had to make changes and I’m sure we’ll keep fine-tuning until we get something that works.  I have to admit, it makes me want to stay home half the day just so I can get things done before it’s dark outside. 

But there is one chore that never gets done.  Our bed doesn’t get made.  This is not because one of us is lazy.  Rather it’s a necessity, at least it is when you’re sharing a bed with Eric.  He is also known as The Biggest Covers Thief Ever In the World.  I believe you will find a WANTED poster with his picture on it in the Post Office.  The consistency of his covers-stealing shows absolutely no remorse for his crimes and a brazen sense of entitlement.  Eric seems to believe that covers are there to be wrapped around your legs or kicked to the bottom of the bed.  I’m a light sleeper and rather fanatical about my covers, I even have the ability to turn in my sleep without disturbing them much.  And if they come off, I will wake up and have to fix them.  As you can see, this creates a paradox of sorts.

I’ve learned to cope.  And my method of coping is that Eric has his own bed and I have mine.  Not separate beds, really, we’re in the same bed with the same mattress.  But on his side there one set of bedding and on my side there’s another.  He gets a blanket, and I get my sheet and covers which stay on my side of the bed.  So our bed looks rather schizophrenic.  Especially because we don’t have the funds to go out and get coordinated bedding for the two sides.  And with this kind of system in place, making the bed becomes meaningless.  Not just because you’re going to get back into bed in a few hours, but because it undoes the whole thing and will require you to make the bed again before you get in it. 

And it is very possible that the same system will be in place for the rest of our lives.  Maybe when we’re old we can get those beds you see on tv where the separate halves move independently.  For us it would actually be a very practical option. 

So the other day I was finally convinced to tell Eric the names I have secretly given to all our as-yet unborn children.  I don’t think he quite understood that this was a big deal.  I wasn’t ever one of those girls who imagined her wedding when she was a little kid.  But when I was little I got a Cabbage Patch Kid, just like every single girl on the face of the earth.

Every Cabbage Patch Kid has a birth certificate with a name on it.  Mine was named Phoebe.  And you can imagine how a 4-year-old would look at the name Phoebe, think it should actually be spelled Feebee, and that it was the stupidest name ever.  So I renamed my Cabbage Patch Kid.  And since then the subject of naming my future children has been one I take quite seriously.

Eric convinced me to tell him because he insisted, rightly I think, that if he didn’t like any of the names I needed plenty of time to dissociate myself from them and find new ones.  I didn’t really want to, because I didn’t want to dissociate myself from my little group of names.  They change every few years, often my new favorites are names I previously hated, and when I was single I would put the last name of any boy I was dating with all my names to see if any of them fit well.

I had a feeling Eric wouldn’t like my names, because he is a picky person in general.  And because most of my picks don’t really go well with our last name.  It has been a source of frustration to me.  And sure enough, Eric threw out all my choices except for one.  So we have one child with a name and the others are all nameless.  This cannot be.

I tried to explain to Eric my sensibilities when it comes to naming.  The conversation went something like this:

“I don’t want anything that’s too cute–”

“Like Button?”

And then we both collapsed in hysterics.  (Did I mention we had this conversation at dinner at a very fancy restaurant on Valentine’s Day?  Surrounded by lots of other people at other tables behaving very appropriately while we acted like we’re 12?)  But it really was funny.  He just spit it out so quickly he caught me immediately off guard.  And he did the same thing a second later.

“And I don’t want it to be really long, because Severson is a long name.  And of course, it can’t start with an S–”

“Like Slytherin?”

Again, fits of giggles.  Something about having a child named Slytherin Severson is both hilarious and a rather admirable combination.  It kind of has a ring to it, you know?  Mostly, I was impressed that Eric was so quick on his feet.

But now I have to go back to re-picking the names of our children.

When Eric and I met it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. It was more like love at third date. Our first two dates were friendly. So friendly that I felt it was very possible we may have ended up just as friends instead of ever dating. If you talk to Eric about this now, he will insist we never would have been friends. This doesn’t show anything about our compatibility, just at the different places we were in our lives. I was just out of a long and bad relationship, I was happy to jump into the single life. In fact, Eric was my first date post-breakup and it was intended to be one of many to come. Whereas Eric had been single for 6 months (an eternity to a guy who always has a girlfriend) and was looking for someone he would be more than just friends with.

Even though we were in different places then, we are not one of those opposites-attract couples. We are much more likely to have exactly the same response to something than to have differing opinions. One of Eric’s most common phrases is, “Get out of my head!” which he yells when I’ve just said exactly what he was about to say. I never wanted an opposite. I wanted someone who would know what to give me as a gift instead of having to ask. Eric’s first present to me was a book. He knows me well.

I used to worry a lot about finding that right guy. I was a late bloomer, I went through all of high school without a single date. Without even being asked on a date. I was at BYU for 7 years, ripe and ready for picking, and still managed to leave single. It is an impressive feat, believe me. And for a few years I floated around not really sure it would ever work out for me. Eric had quite a different journey. He has always always been wanted by girls. He is what they call “a catch.” He has never had to go for long without a girlfriend, and pretty much every girl who’s ever seen him has wanted to marry him. So you may imagine that it didn’t carry a lot of weight when I revealed to him that he was the one for me back when we barely knew each other.

I can’t explain what it is about him that told me he was “the one,” but I knew it. It was a strange but sudden realization and once I knew it, I had no doubt in my mind. It became more like a story than reality, like something in a movie. But it was the complete honest truth. I never expected that to happen to me. It didn’t really happen the same way for Eric. He was more hesitant, more questioning, more deliberate. This is typical of a scientist, I see now, and I’m pleased to know that after all that time he spent making sure, that I was able to fit the bill. It is one of the ways that we were different, but we’re the same in that we both had that turning point where we really just knew.

Since today is Valentine’s Day I wanted to write a little bit about my valentine. I tried to think of a lot of short little mushy statements that may express how I feel, but it just didn’t seem quite right. It feels silly to try and identify a few little quirks to define our relationship. And if I actually try and set down the things that make it so special, it ends up sounding rather maudlin and boring. The truth of the matter is that Eric is, very simply, everything. I want to go back to my younger self and sit myself down and say, “Don’t worry about anything. Because you are going to find the best guy. And that’ll be that.”

Tuesday was my very first Super Tuesday.  (It wasn’t Eric’s, but he’s been in Georgia longer than I have.)  Much to the disappointment of my Republican predecessors, I remain a Democrat.  The last time my parents and I talked about this they tried to convince me that this was just a phase that young people go through and that one day when I actually had money I would see the error of my ways and become a conservative.  I still find this unlikely.  I went to what is arguably the most conservative law school in the country and somehow in those three years I decided I was a Democrat.  Not an easy thing to do.  (There were probably about 5 of us in my class.  It took guts.)  Then I went on to be a Public Defender, so it’s not like I’m getting any better.

As for our political choices, well, it’s not something I normally bring up in public.  You never know who’s in which party and which candidate they prefer so I generally keep quiet.  The problem is that both Eric and I are completely predictable.  We are young.  We are idealistic.  We live in Georgia (and we all know how that turned out).  So yes, we voted for Obama.  It was completely beyond our control.  We had to follow our demographic.

We did have a lovely time voting, though.  In Georgia, the “I Voted” sticker is perhaps the coolest ever.  It has a big peach on it.  And everyone wears them.   All over town on Tuesday I saw people with peach stickers on their shirts.

Here we are with our voter stickers.  Note that while Eric did a better job of taking the picture of us this time than he did on our honeymoon (where only half my face is visible) that we still have some work to do.   There was another we took where we looked more normal but only took up half the frame, so this one wins.

And no, I didn’t wear a t-shirt to work.  I loved my sticker so much I transferred it from my fancy work clothes to my grungy home clothes.

I would write about Eric’s new laptop, except that would make it seem like our blog is devoted to gadgets the way other blogs are devoted to toddlers. So no picture of the laptop.

Instead, I am going to do my best to convert my readers to lolcats. Lolcats is one of those weird internet phenomena that shouldn’t be popular but is. I used to look at it secretly because I thought Eric would make fun of me. Until he found out and then started looking at it himself. Now his whole lab looks at it and so I feel cool instead of humiliated.

One of our lolcats traditions is to put our favorite lolcat as our computer wallpaper. For example, this one was up for weeks:

If you are unfamiliar, this one will show you what it is a lolcat is: a picture of a cat with a funny caption. Spelling and grammar must be messed up. Inside jokes are key. Here is a regular lolcat joke:

Note, those are not cats. Other animals are welcome. And the ongoing “nom nom” reference makes more sense if you imagine the sound Cookie Monster makes when he eats. It may be dorky, but I’m a sucker for nom nom lolcats.

It is not really clear why all the cats want cheeseburgers so badly, but I can’t really blame them. But I promise you that you may think you can fight the lolcats, but you cannot. They will convert you. And you will be just as dorky as I am. kthxbai.

Sorry we haven’t posted in a while.  It’s been a long week and a rough one for both of us.  We’d be happy it’s the weekend except I suspect we’ll both be working for at least some of it.  Hopefully this weekend we’ll finally get back into our weekend routine which we’ve been thrown out of.  Some cleaning, some errands, and lots of Sunday cooking.  Maybe if we’re really lucky we’ll manage a library trip on Saturday.  Ever since they closed our local branch for construction it’s been difficult getting out there.