I love this shit: or why I decided to stop twittering and start a blog

For me, the New York Times wedding announcements have long been a Sunday tradition. When I was in high school, my mother, bless her, made a it a weekly ritual to bring back bagels and the New York Times. In middle school, I yanked out the Parade Magazine and the Comic Strip from the Albany paper. In high school, I went straight for the Styles. It was a marriage that would last.

In high school, the wedding announcements were like romantic comedies but with real people - and they provided a weekly exhibit of the happy endings that a dreamy teenager craved. As I neared the end of college, and my mother's loving packages that included hard copies of the Sunday Styles, I perused them for career options, figuring if these people made it in the New York Times wedding announcements, they must be doing quite well for themselves. And when I was feeling cynical, they were social commentary or, quite simply, an information source. But through it all, and the tragedies and triumphs of adult life, they have served as a Sunday pick me up - even when I'm now old enough to know that while there is reliability in the happiness on the pages of the New York Times every week, real life happy endings are bit trickier.

The point is: the wedding announcements aren't just about love, they are about social class in America, about the recession, about old and new society, about the future of relationships, and about the future of this country. But at their best, and most pure, they are about two people, well-connected though they may be, who decided to make a go of it in an imperfect world where happiness takes work, but is worth it every time.

And I think there's a place for all of that in our Sunday reading. I'm starting this blog because I can't stop posting links to announcements or sending them to friends. But the point here is to show you some of what's great, fascinating, thought-provoking, and downright rude about the wedding announcements (ok, so I know wedding season is pretty much over, but so is my summer, and I'm looking ahead to a winter indoors). I know I'm not alone in my fascination with this weekly ray of hope in the gloomy weekend's end, so I'm hoping that I'll post some of the best, interesting, and, sometimes, annoying announcements of each week to make your Sunday dread a little less dreadful.

My first Sunday attempt begins tonight.