One night a couple of years ago, Jess and I were in the Rite Aid across the street from our home, buying shampoo or toilet paper. Somewhere along the way, I lost Jess. She wasn’t with me at the register, so I retraced my steps, back into the bowels of the store, where I found her, transfixed, staring at a row of giant dolls on the top shelf. Each was nearly three feet tall, and totally terrifying.

Which is how we bought Whitney Houston. She came wearing a mini-skirt and halter, though Jess, worried about the moral implications of that outfit, quickly added tights and an old children’s sweater. We tried to style Whitney’s hair, too, though it remained largely matted to her perforated scalp. Her head was oddly shaped, and her sleep eyes permanently lolled half-closed.

We took her with us, once, on a weekend trip to Jess’ parents’ house, as we didn’t want to leave her alone. On the way back home, I dropped off Jess at our apartment, and headed to return the car, before remembering that, while I’d dropped off our bags with Jess, Whitney remained seated in the back.

So I tucked Whitney sideways under my arm, and started walking home. A few blocks in, a van full of cops flagged me down from across the street. From a distance, I suspect it looked like I was kidnapping a small – though oddly stiff and imobile – child.

“What’s that under your arm?”, one of the cops asked me.

“Oh this? It’s a doll.” Then, by way of explanation, “it’s my girlfriend’s.”

“That thing is your girlfriend?”, he asked, incredulously.

“No,” I laughed. “It belongs to my girlfriend.”

He eyed Whitney suspiciously.

“Scares the fuck out of me.”

I agreed. She scared the fuck out of me too.

Whitney was doubly scary at night. Parked on our couch, I’d pass her when I headed to the bathroom. Each time, I’d jump at the sight of her – sitting, watching.

We thought about getting rid of Whitney. But Jess and I were certain she’d come back and kill us in our sleep. So we put her at the top of our hall closet, tucked behind an array of bags and boxes.

We came across her again just recently, while packing up some of our summer clothing, preparing to swap it with the winter wear we’d been keeping in storage.

And it occurred to us that a year or two of confinement might similarly have raised Whitney’s wrath. So we took her down. We laid her comfortably on a bench in our bedroom, which made a perfectly-sized bed. And we tucked her in carefully with a small spare blanket.

Fortunately, she’s mostly out of my line of sight. But every so often, I see her there, and I freeze. She’s as terrifying as ever. Which is the main reason we’re keeping her comfortable. And keeping her close by.

After we had been dating for a couple of months, Jess turned to me one morning and said out of the blue, “it’s nice to have a friend.”

It is. A year ago, I said yes and she said yes and we got married, and it was the best thing I’ve ever done.

So today is our one year anniversary. Though, to be frank, the whole anniversary thing always seems a bit odd to me, because our first date was on a June 20th a few years before we got hitched, and shouldn’t that time count for something, too?

Anyway, I think we love each other even more now than we did a year ago. Or, at least, we’re better at loving each other, having faced together another year’s happinesses and disasters, big and small, knowing that much more of each other’s heart and mind. We’re an even stronger team. And, to a possibly sickening degree, we still just like to be with each other all the time.

As is apparently traditional, we froze the top of our wedding cake a year ago. I put it in the refrigerator on Saturday, to thaw out in time for our having a few anniversary bites today. Jess has pointed out that this is basically the scene from Mother where Debbie Reynolds serves Albert Brooks three-year-old frozen cheese. And also that, by now, the cake has doubtless taken on the flavors of the spinach and gelato and chicken nuggets stored adjacent for the past year. All of which likely makes it totally inedible.

But, still, we’ll have a few bites, and it will be terrible, and we’ll laugh and have a wonderful time. It’s nice to have friend.

Today is the three-year anniversary of my first date with Jess, the best thing that ever happened to me.

To celebrate, we had wanted to go away somewhere fun for the weekend. But it’s raining torrentially here in New York. And, at least according to forecasts earlier in the week, it should also be pouring in the Hamptons, Miami, New Orleans, Connecticut, and nearly every other fun, two-night destination we could come up with.

In this weather, our living room seems like a comparatively excellent idea.

Jess hates being photographed.

But when one of her clients, Brooklyn-based designer Hayden-Harnett, asked her to pose for an advertising series they were doing, she couldn’t say no.

Her main complaint about the result: the dress, shoes, and jacket were all just a bit too large. Apparently ‘small’ is a relative measure.

Nicknames Jess regularly calls me:

• Jorshie
• Joshula
• Yoshington

Things Jess has woken me up to say at 4:00 in the morning, before falling back to sleep:

• “Time to make the donuts!”
• “You smell like a ferret.”
• “Let’s do drinks.”

just said I always write about productivity and that it’s boring. So, while I had started a different blog entry about momentum and how what I do in the first five minutes of my work-day determines what happens for the entire day, I’m scrapping that and posting this instead.

This weekend, Jess and I headed out to the Brooklyn Flea, a large and quirky crafts fair and flea market in Fort Greene.

Jess is in her element at such places – she has strong taste, obsessively tracks style trends, and can somehow spot the single gem buried in a table of piled crap. She’ll pick up a necklace for $20 one week, and the next we’ll be in Henri Bendel, seeing the same thing on sale for $2000.

My own flea market duties, on the other hand, don’t really involve item selection. Instead, I’m left with bargaining down the prices of purchases, vetoing anything ill-fitting or overly terrifying, and – most importantly – navigating.

The layout of the Brooklyn Flea, much like nearly every other flea market (and perhaps the minds of most of the vendors), is a convoluted mess. So it’s my job to make sure our wandering path nonetheless takes us past all of the stalls.

This weekend, however, I slacked off on that navigation duty, following Jess rather than directing her at each turn.

Jess stopped, for example, at a large booth full of earrings, and exclaimed that this guy actually had really great stuff.

To which I replied that I knew he did. Mainly because Jess had purchased a pair of earrings from him about ten minutes earlier.

And it occurred to me then that perhaps my directing us was robbing Jess of a large percentage of the fun. Left to her own devices, any flea market would seem several times as large; given even a few minutes in between, she could apparently return to the same stalls again and again, each time excited to rifle through them as though for the first time.