Spontaneous Special Day
On the night of Wednesday June 29th, at around 9pm, I sent out a message via Twitter and identi.ca asking if I knew anyone in Ann Arbor who could officiate a wedding. About 9 people I knew could do it, one being a colleague of mine at the University of Michigan Library Copyright Office, Bobby Glushko. Wait, let me back up a little.
At the beginning of this year, Carrie and I have been putting a plan into place that will enable us to create the type of family that we want to have and be a part of. Parts of the plan include things like having a child, moving to the Bay Area, and welcoming new members to our family. The institution of marriage is not an inherent requirement of our family, but it is also not antithetical.
Carrie and I believe that a family is more than just a couple and their offspring. A family is everyone who we love, independent of our legal relationship to them. To be more explicit, we believe that our love is not limited to each other. We see love as the basis of all that we do. It should be apparent to my Free/Open Source Software friends, my colleagues in the Open Science/Scholarship/Education world, and my new friends in the Wikipedia community that love has a tremendously positive effect on how well we work and live together. This is especially true given the nature of our communities. Online communities of practice (and of recreation) have special qualities which encourage, if sometimes necessitate, a level of openness and kindness that is above what is the norm in our respective location-based cultures. Assuming good faith, being respectful, or just being good to each other are all another way of saying that you should have an open mind and see the good in each other and truly appreciate that part of them that is good, without resorting to impulsive reactions that could incite unneeded fissions between people. Those fissions only harm our ability to reach our shared goal whether that is a universal operating system, knowledge and education for all, or any other world betterment project.
Is that sounding too lofty? It shouldn’t because this is a post about a marriage which is, at its core, about love. And love is the most spectacular emotion we experience. It permeates almost everything we do in varying intensities and effectiveness.
Which brings me back to Carrie’s and my family. We started the community building phase of that project when we decided to get pregnant. Zuzu (the fetal name of our child) will be one of the first new members of our family. We hope to increase the size (and origins) of our family when we move out to San Francisco at the end of this summer.
Until then, we had some things we needed to do, like getting married.
We’re Married!
We have been planning on getting married for a while now but we weren’t exactly sure how it would happen. The option that routinely floated to the top was a ceremony somewhere in the Rockies next year with a justice of the peace thing to get Carrie on my health insurance this summer. Well, we went to the county and applied for our marriage license and then set out to line up a judge to do the officiating. Unfortunately, given my busy travel schedule and the fact that judges only do these on certain days, it was looking like we wouldn’t be able to get in before our marriage license expired.
So, I sent out that tweet around 9pm on Wednesday June 29th. The next day Bobby came in, we confirmed he can actually do it, and I sent out a Google+ notice* that later that day, at 4:10pm, we were going to have a ceremony in front of the Shapiro Library. about 35 people showed up to join in the celebration of our wedding.
John Weise, one of my amazing coworkers at the University of Michigan Library, luckily had his nice camera with him and took a wealth of photos. You can check out the slideshow Carrie made of the best ones below.
Thanks to everyone who came out to make Carrie’s and my spontaneous special day such a wonderful experience!
* I and others think that Carrie’s and my wedding was the first to be announced, and live-blogged, via Google+. I think we should get Guinness involved!
