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Letter to the President #46 | Subject: Getting Engaged, The New Year, Disney Movies, etc.

Dear President Obama,

Well, I’ve got some news to share at the start of the New Year—I got engaged! Yep, my girlfriend and I went to the Foshay Tower, the first skyscraper built in Minneapolis, which is now a hotel, and we stayed the night and went to Murray’s, one of the finer dining establishments in town.

That wasn’t my original proposal idea; I’d contacted the folks at the Como Zoo in St. Paul and asked if I could propose amid the penguins, but no dice. Apparently the penguins are as aristocratic as I thought. They have all these unspoken rules about dress codes and social order, and the zookeepers tell me that the penguins likely would have scoffed at anything but Tiffany and Company jewels. In short, they’re kind of like Victorian British people.

And really, the whole marriage proposal/engagement process seems somewhat aristocratic to me. First, there is the term “proposal” itself. That’s not a word most people use very often; when I think of proposals, I usually think of business—building townhomes with a highway for a front yard or draining a bunch of wetlands for a strip mall. (Well, that or Jonathan Swift and eating babies.)

And once a proposal has been accepted, it’s declared an engagement. It’s strange we generally use the word engagement in one of two different ways— either one can either expect cake or artillery shells. (If it’s a military wedding, perhaps both.)

Anyway, as I’m now officially part of my fiancee’s family (Mr. President, do you also associate the word family with the mob? I do.), I attended their Christmas celebration, which as tradition dictates, involves a movie and a steak and crab dinner. Now I’m going to state the obvious here, but crabs have a lot of legs. As I was disassembling my meal, digit by digit, it struck me that perhaps we’re using crabs for the wrong purpose. Yes, they certainly are tasty, but they have a lot of legs. I bet king crabs could type really fast if we gave them typewriters. Of course, keyboards would be problematic, as we’d have to protect the electronics from the water, and that’d probably involve scuba suits. And then the copiers and all the other office equipment would feel left out and want one and pretty soon we’d have a whole menagerie of office equipment under the sea. First off, that’d look really weird, and there’s a pretty good chance that they’d turn that into a Disney musical like The Little Mermaid.

(I don’t know if I could handle another one of those movies; sometimes I buy king crab at the grocery store hoping that it’s one Sebastian’s relatives.) If that seems farfetched, remember that movie The Brave Little Toaster?

I’m pretty sure that movie was created in similar fashion. The writer had a deadline and was desperate. He looked in his living room and saw a blanket, a lamp, a vacuum cleaner, and in the kitchen—a toaster on the counter. The toaster was sitting all alone next to the blender, which nearly made the writer’s girlfriend an amputee, so the writer decided it was brave.

Really? Even as a kid, I knew there wasn’t much to associate with in that show. I mean, blankets aren’t that tough, lamps wear lampshades (apparently they haven’t heard of hats?), vacuums suck, and toasters are ridiculously vulnerable to forks and/or knives, as my mother always warned/informed me.

Anyway, thankfully we didn’t see a Disney movie or anything like that. We saw Sherlock Holmes; it was fun, but I was unaware that Sherlock was an expert in Muay Thai boxing and was not very tall and didn’t carry a magnifying glass everywhere he went. (It was also a surprise to find out that he was Robert Downey, Jr.)

With that said, it was a lot of fun, and I’m certainly excited for the New Year.

Take care,

Brett




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