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So my aunt Deborah is an attorney. Mom emailed her and told her about my little set-to with my company, and asked if she and my uncle Hughie had had to submit proof of marriage to the state so Deborah could get on Hughie’s benefits, because they had different last names, too. (As Image said: Of course my spouse and I have different last names. We have different parents.”) This was Deborah’s response:

Well, I think that’s bullshit. As a matter of law, you can take any name you want to, so long as there is no intent to deceive. So, an unmarried couple might — for very otherworldly reasons — want to take the same name. I do think Catie has a point; you can have the same name and not be married; you can have different names and be married. All or none. To answer the first

question, yes, we did have to provide a marriage certificate [. . .] But I think this is a requirement whether the name is the same or not.

Not that I *intend* to sue, but it’s nice to know an actual attorney agrees that they’re full of shit.

The covers were *very* heavy this morning, and there were many dreams, some of which were just plain bizarre and others of which were quite nightmarish. ‘Peter Wingfield is about 30, bleached blonde, working in a Walgreens in San Jose and pregnant’ fell under ‘bizarre’ and ‘I am driving a car which has a steering wheel at a 90 degree right angle from the windshield and which is going faster and faster no matter how hard I press the brakes’ falls under ‘nightmarish’.