Someone Tries to Make a Respectable Woman of Your Aunt Slugger

Dear Aunt Slugger,

Are you married? If not, I think I would like to propose. Please let me know via a notarized affidavit if you are interested.

Sincerely,
Inmate #58791, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary

I will grant you, Inmate #58791, that your offer is appealing. You have stable housing and possibly access to cable television, which are two qualities I find attractive in a potential life mate. However, your window of opportunity has closed, because just this weekend, your Aunt Slugger received another marriage proposal, and she accepted it.

Yes, readers, you read that correctly. Your Aunt Slugger is engaged to be married. Your Aunt Slugger is very excited about this proposal, because being a married woman will lend some credibility to my advice columns about how to keep your husband happy, since we all know this is a topic your Aunt Slugger blogs about frequently.*

Your Aunt Slugger's paramour proposed to her with the caveat that your Aunt Slugger be responsible for selecting the ring. "I do not want to be held responsible," he said, "for making that decision." After shooting down my suggestion that we buy an Angry Birds ring from one of those grocery store vending machines, he took your Aunt Slugger ring shopping.

Now might be a good time to share with my readers a story from my youth so that you may have some context. When your Aunt Slugger was in the fourth grade, she entered a contest at a local mall to guess the number of Legos it took to build a giant Lego astronaut that was featured in this mall. A few weeks later, I received a letter saying I had won the contest and that the prize was $500 in gift certificates to this mall.

Bear in mind that I would be thrilled with such a prize NOW, let alone when I was roughly nine years old. It was like winning the lottery.

So my mother took me to this mall so that I might spend some of my winnings. Our first stop was the now-defunct L.S. Ayres department store, where I decided I wanted some jewels to complement my fashionable wardrobe of dog sweatshirts. My mother wisely steered me toward the costume jewelry section because I did not know the difference. I proceeded to select about five hideously tacky rings before my mother finally told me to call it quits on the jewels. But I did get my rings, and they were delightful. My mother winced uncomfortably when I would wear them.

Fast forward to today. Little has changed, except that I now have a job and am not constrained by my mother's jewelry store interventions. I buy 98% of my jewelry from established jewel dealers like Forever 21 and Claire's Boutique. I am always the oldest person in either of these stores.

So it goes without saying here that your Aunt Slugger does not belong in a regular jewelry store. And I certainly do not belong in the engagement ring section of a jewelry store. Yesterday, your Aunt Slugger and this poor dude who proposed to her went to a nice jewelry store, where the guy behind the counter looked as though he was fighting off an aneurysm the whole time we were in the store.

"I think I don't like this rectangle here," I said.

"The emerald cut," he said.

Well EXCUSE THE FUCK OUT OF ME. I took geometry in high school, and I know a rectangle when I see one. And that was a rectangle. If it were a dodecahedron, fine. That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Call it something else. But your basic jewelry shapes are circle, rectangle, square, flat square, and square with rounded edges.

So it goes without saying that your Aunt Slugger has not yet found a ring, or even a jeweler who does not have one hand on the panic button the whole time she is in the store.

But that does not mean that she is not still very excited. I am busily working on my next column, "How to Keep Dinner Warm While Your Husband Is Working Late."**

Very sincerely yours,
Aunt Slugger


*Never.
**Tell him to put it in the microwave; this isn't rocket science.