[Siggy_lxvi]

Oh, God. This isn't a wedding story, yet, but more the trainwreck that is my current housemate's life.

At the beginning of April, I moved into my current house with some people I had met in a hurry because life had happened all over my shoes and moving fast was a necessity (in the middle of a semester, mind). As I'm moving in, the girl who's around most often makes some comments about wedding plans. It seems that about two months before I met her, she'd met a soldier at the bar who was imminent for being shipped to Afghanistan. He'd spent the night calling her his "wife" and saying they'd gotten married in Vegas by Elvis.

Fast-forward to April, and they're planning to fly to Vegas (with friends) and have Elvis marry them. Soldier-boy is, at this point, mere weeks from going to Afghanistan. Apparently, however, last minute flights to Vegas aren't really all that cheap, and finals week is fast approaching for my housemate and all her college-age friends. Not to mention that Solider-boy isn't acting all that keen on actually getting married. (My armchair psychiatric opinion: he's Catholic and a soldier being faced with his own mortality, combined with being an only son and wants a knocked-up wife before he goes off to war.) I swear the two of them break up and get re-engaged (if you can truly call it engaged without a ring or any real cooperation from the man involved) three times in the first two weeks I know her.

Soon enough, Soldier-boy ships out, and I think I've seen the end of it. NOT SO! Housemate girl is now looking into "getting married over the internet." When she finds out that that's just some website that makes fake little marriages for Junior-High-Schoolers who want to proclaim their undying love, she hears about "marriage through the mail." Which is apparently possible (as marriage-by-proxy), and has become all the rage as we're near a large military base and there's a war on and the soldiers are a bit worried that us smart, handsome Navy-men-turned-Jody at the University are going to steal their girlfriends if they don't marry them fast....

Eventually she becomes convinced that this isn't the best option, however, as it's difficult and requires more paperwork than a simple marriage license, and might actually require her to do something. Then Soldier-boy has a friend die and gets permission to travel back to the States with the body and visit his family. Don't ask me how that works, because I honestly don't know. His family is in Louisiana. He tells the girl not to bother coming to see him as he'll only be there a couple of days.

She doesn't listen and goes to see him, but in the meantime, she's decided she wants a baby, and has gone off her birth control. She comes home from her ill-planned adventure in Louisiana all aglow thinking that she's pregnant. Those of you who know much of anything about reproductive physiology will already know the outcome when I tell you that this girl is 22 and has been on the pill since she was sixteen, and had gone off the pill only long enough to have one period. Of course she's not pregnant. Her body hasn't caught up with the fact that she's stopped taking the pills. It might not do for YEARS yet. But little miss sunshine is prancing around the house for weeks thinking she's got a bun in the oven. She buys home testing kits and uses them daily until she finally goes to a doctor for a full-on test and her fantasy world comes crashing down around her with the news that, no, she's really not pregnant.

That's where things stand right now, though she seems to be planning a wedding for Soldier-boy's mid-deployment leave sometime in December. Thankfully, she's decided to get her own apartment, and will be moving out, so I won't have to see the end of this little fiasco.