Dressed in full wedding regalia, we hailed a taxi in Harlem, at the corner of Broadway and 125th Street. “I bet you can guess where we’re going,” I told the driver. “Congratulations,” he said, and sped us downtown to Manhattan City Hall. As we emerged from the cab on Chambers Street, we found ourselves surrounded by strangers snapping our picture.

That area of downtown is typically dense with tourists, and a couple stepping out of a taxi in elaborate wedding apparel must have seemed an interesting slice of life in New York, distinctive enough to merit a photo. So in addition to our own photos on Flickr, you may find other photos of us around the web.

Back in April, Flickr introduced video uploads, with a time limit of 90 seconds per video. Conveniently, our wedding ceremony clocked in at one minute and 29 seconds, just short enough to post, so you can watch it here.

The city clerk who married us certainly wasted no time, but despite the brisk, businesslike nature of the ceremony, it was a very happy and emotional occasion. I found it touching that Jen’s father managed to become teary-eyed, an impressive feat to accomplish in under 90 seconds. Maybe the sentiment gets diluted during long ceremonies, and our condensed vows sounded all the more powerful.

Afterwards, Andy pulled out some Cuban cigars. I have to admit I’m not much of a cigar fan — this was probably the second or third cigar of my life — but it seemed appropriate, so I did my best to appreciate it.

All in all it was a wonderful morning, and naturally Jen looked absolutely gorgeous. After the ceremony, it was back to the airport — we were returning to California for a weekend celebration with our families.

In mid June I flew to California for Dan’s graduation on June 15th and Ph.D. dissertation defense a few days later on the 19th. Yeah, it is odd to graduate before you defend but this was the best timing for the committee and do you honestly think anyone was at all worried? Nope. Maybe Dan but I think he was the only one. Unfortunately this meant that the graduation ceremony itself wasn’t as big of a celebration. We decided to skip the full Stanford graduation (we missed Oprah’s speech) and headed for the Computer Science graduation. When you graduate with a Ph.D., your advisor places a funny velvet hood around your neck to signify your academic achievement. You can check out all the graduation photos here. Dan wore his robes like a champ! After the ceremony we had made plans to go out to the Spanish Tapas restaurant where Dan proposed but we ended up with take-out Chinese instead. It turns out that graduating before you are really finished tends to make you want to finish for real.

In true “Monzy” style, Dan made his defense presentation pretty funny and very accessible. Dim sum was served along with customized fortune cookies aimed to get the committee members’ attention. His advisor, Terry opened one that said, “A good thesis committee is rigorous but also compassionate.” Others opened cookies with fortunes that read, “A wise decision today will bring smiles and good fortune”, “A friend or colleague will complete a significant milestone today” and “Strive for perfection but be accepting of minor flaws.” Dan decided not to go with some other fortune suggestions like my favorite from his Dad, “Make the pimp decision, Go Monzy!” Some were disappointed that Dan didn’t rap but in good form, he stuck to his theme and provided a few well-placed fortune cookie jokes.

After the public session of the defense there is generally an hour-long closed session with the candidate and the committee. Dan’s parents and I readied the champagne and Dan popped out of the closed session after about half an hour and his committee followed shortly after. We popped the bubbly and I think it is fair to say that Dan’s committee gushed about his work. Dan would never share that part but I was there and I was very proud. Also I was pretty inspired. I would love to have my future Ph.D. committee that happy with my work. We went to an amazing meal with Dan’s parents to really celebrate afterwards. Now Dan is a Doctor of Philosophy.

We celebrated the defense and the upcoming nuptials a couple days later at our first party on June 21st. Unfortunately the big heat wave and no AC meant it was a little uncomfortable in the apartment. Popsicles and ice packs helped. Thanks to all that came. Let me know if you have a photo of one of the ice pack necklace cup holders that Dan created. It’s pretty hard to describe, we need a photo.

In the next couple days we raced to pack up the apartment and finish selling our furniture. We moved everything into a storage pod that was dropped off in the driveway. When you finish packing the pod, a truck comes and takes it away to storage. In our case the storage is for 4 months. You can only imagine finally finishing your Ph.D. and then realizing you have to decide what, of all your possessions, goes in the 2 suitcases that will stay with you and not go into storage for 4 months.

Somehow, we finished, we even finished early and were treated to an outstanding meal at Range in the Mission in San Francisco with our friends Ethan and Emily. It was the perfect way to spend our last night in the Bay Area. As a surprise, they had a miniature two-tiered fondant wedding cake made for us. Thank you so much you guys!! You really took our website title seriously!

The next morning we flew to NYC. I’ll let Dan take over from here.

Hyphenation might appear to be a nice compromise, but the problem is that, speaking from my perspective as a computer scientist, the hyphenation approach is not scalable. Were the pattern to continue, name length would grow exponentially by generation, and things would quickly spiral out of control.

I can understand my parents’ rationale. “We’re not sure what to do right now,” they were probably thinking, “so we’ll give him a hyphenated name and let him deal with it when he grows up and gets married.” This ingenious strategy of saving complex problems for the future generation is also the basis of the Bush administration’s environmental policies.

Jen liked the idea of having the same name as me, but she didn’t want a last name that wouldn’t fit on customs forms and constantly confused airline reservations systems. “I’ll take one of your names,” she suggested, “but not both.”

This seemed a simple enough arrangement. Since I was never given a middle name, I would change my name to “Dan Maynes Aminzade,” essentially just dropping the hyphen. Jen would change her name to “Jen Aminzade.” We would have the same last name, and the madness of ever-lengthening last names would be nipped in the bud. Problem solved… or so we thought.

It turns out that the state of California has very archaic laws about name changes during marriage. Sure, anyone can legally change their name at any time, but it’s much easier to do when you are getting married. If you try to change your name outside of the context of a wedding ceremony, it’s a complicated legal procedure, requiring a court order, publishing an ad in a newspaper for several months, and various other rigmarole that ends up costing hundreds of dollars. Meanwhile, changing your name when you get married is as simple as checking a box on your marriage license application. Except that under current California law, only the bride is entitled to change her last name, and even then she is only allowed to change it to the exact last name of the groom.

It’s strange that a state as progressive as California would have marriage laws mired in the 17th century. Fortunately, this sexist policy will soon change: in a recent ACLU lawsuit, a Los Angeles man won the right to use his wife’s last name, after the court ruled that the state’s current name change imbalance is discriminatory. The California Assembly has since passed AB102, the Name Equality Act of 2007, which guarantees the rights of married couples to choose whichever last name they prefer on their marriage and driving licenses. Sadly (for our purposes), the new law will not take effect until January of 2009.

After a bit of deliberation and a lot of Internet research, we decided to have our ceremony in New York State, where the name change laws are far more open-minded. According to the information we found online, couples getting married in New York could change their last names to whatever they pleased. We figured we would jet to New York, have a quick ceremony, and fly back to California the next day to celebrate. So a few weeks ago, when I was last in New York, we went to City Hall to obtain a marriage license.

You may wonder why we were trying to get our marriage license so far in advance. It turns out that marriage licenses in New York have a waiting period: after obtaining a license, you cannot actually use it to get married for 24 hours. I suppose the logic for this is similar to the laws about handgun purchases: waiting periods prevent hasty decisions from being made in the heat of passion. Since we would be arriving in New York less than 24 hours before our ceremony, we needed to acquire our marriage license in advance.

Should you attempt a drunken, spur-of-the-moment wedding, New York does not make it easy. Not only is there the aforementioned waiting period, but there is also a $35 marriage license fee payable only by money order. The nearest place to obtain a money order is not particularly close to City Hall, so the whole thing is a bit of an ordeal. If I were really drunk and attempting to get married in New York City, I would probably get to City Hall, hear the thing about needing a money order and say, “Forget it! Let’s just get pizza instead! We’ll get married another time.”

But on this particular morning Jen and I were quite sober, and we had purchased our money order in advance. After making our way through the queue, we filled out our application. Everything seemed to be going according to plan: there were spaces on the application form where both of us could specify our new last names. But when we handed our completed form the the clerk, she took one look at it and said, “Nope, you can’t do that.”

She then referred us to the fine print on the back of the form. It turned out that the laws in New York were not quite as lenient as our Internet research had led us to believe. Specifically, the rules stated that you could choose one of the following options: (a) bride takes groom’s last name; (b) groom takes bride’s last name; or (c) both bride and groom take a new last name formed from a combination of their original last names.

I was going from Maynes-Aminzade to Aminzade. Jen was going from Alltop to Aminzade. Technically, the clerk was correct: this change did not fall into any of the three categories. But this seemed to us a rather inconsequential quibble. We argued with the clerk for a while, and soon she called in another clerk, who agreed with her: our desired name changes were not allowed under New York law. We continued debating, and soon a supervisor was summoned. “Nope,” he said, “Aminzade isn’t either of your names, and it isn’t a combination, it’s a part. Not allowed.”

Our frustration was running high at this point (Jen whispered something to me about how she was going to throttle my parents) but we managed to keep our cool. We advanced a revolutionary new theory: perhaps “Aminzade” was a combination.

“You see,” Jen explained, with barely concealed sarcasm, “you take the ‘A’ from my last name, Alltop, and you add the ‘minzade’ from his last name, to make a new ‘combination’ name, ‘Aminzade.’”

The supervisor mulled this over for a minute. “Yeah”, he finally decided, “that’s allowed.” And a few minutes later we walked out with our marriage license in hand, last names specified just as we had wanted.

Afterwards we were able to laugh about how ridiculous the whole experience was, but at the time it wasn’t particularly funny. It’s a good thing that we possess a talent for working within the confines of bureaucratic rules. And on the positive side, Jen can now claim that the “A” in our new last name is legally hers.