So much finality in this weekend. The Politician is married, I'm leaving Appleton for good, and I probably won't see many of the Lawrentians from the wedding for months or years or ever again.
And yet it doesn't feel serious. Not anymore, now that I'm a hundred miles away from the Gesu chapel and its heaping helpings of Catholic-style solemnity. No, right now I'm just in Trever, never mind that the Deathtrap is full of luggage and furniture, and I'm hanging out with Jubb. Same-old…
In case you didn't know, dear reader, I was a groomsman at the Politician's wedding. It won't be the last time (I've got brothers) but it was the first, and it was weird to be involved in some of the behind-the-scenes stuff. Wedding rehearsal. Then there's a dinner after the rehearsal, with speeches and gifts for the people in the wedding party
The rehearsal dinner deserves some special mention. We had drinks on the patio beforehand, where Jubb and I got to know two of the other wedding party members, the Subcontinental, a groomsman, and Yonderboy, an usher. Both withstood the best efforts of my famed evil eye, though I did have to publicly fault Yonderboy for using "yonder" incorrectly (as a substitute for "here") back at the engagement party last summer.
Those guys had fancy stuff, bloody marys and gimlets, but for some reason I kept ordering Italian beers. The "darkest beer in the house" was a red (read: I'm a beer snob), but at least the labels were nice. Each bottle was a cunning, or perhaps unintentional, parody of a German bottle. Ugly rat-faced men in green outfits. Some sort of vague mayoral powers were used to grant me booze, as I had forgotten my ID at the hotel.
Inside there was good food and oration. The Politician gave books to almost everyone in the wedding party; my sources tell me it had taken him all of 15 minutes to find the appropriate gifts, which he introduced with brief speeches. Jubb, an ardent paleoconservative and a menacing usher, got a copy of Liberwocky for being the Politician's only conservative friend; I was placed Under The Grammar Hammer.
Then there was a party that night in the hospitality room, apparently Jubb and Yonderboy, who by cosmic coincidence is also clearly Jubb's soulmate, finished all of the beer.
Lawrentians started coming out of the woodwork right about then. Ben and Zack drove separately from the Cities, presumably because they hate each other, and my excitement to see them was only partially attributable to the fact that Ben had brought me a CD with the only episode of Firefly that I haven't seen.
Breaking who-knows-how-many unspoken rules, the bride's little sister and I spent a while trading secrets from the bachelor and bachelorette parties. A poor bargain, as I can't remember what I learned anymore. A few words is all... On the plus side, apparently many of my supposed secrets couldn't withstand a rigorous bridal fact-check.
I learned the next day that I had grossly misinterpreted a conversation about the Politician's stomach. Whoops.
After a bit of mingling I left early and went back to the room to read myself to sleep. Ben, who had to drive to Chicago the next morning for reasons too complicated to describe, was trying to read but I thought he was trying to sleep and I was keeping him up with my own reading.
And raving. I read Henry Adam's "A Law of Acceleration" in my essay book and was bored. Bored to a blind rage at the dead man and his crummy writing. And suddenly I stopped talking and decided to turn off the lights and go to sleep.
The next day we did not go Frisbee golfing as anticipated. The Hilton in Milwaukee is the worst fancy hotel I've ever been to — no continental breakfast, a shortage of toilettries, fees to use the waterpark — but someone anticipated this particular lack and there was breakfast. And later, lunch at the mall.
And then the Politician got married. I was pretty nervous, and when the time came, if it came at all, the words of wisdom I'd imagined I might say weren't there. Someone told, reminded, him that he was getting married and that seemed prettymuch the long and short of it. My bridesmaid and I expertly walked up to the priest, who whispered something I thought was hilarious. A little snatch of compliment, I can't remember how it went.
That priest. The whole weekend I seemed to be saying inappropriate things in earshot of the priest. I'd be talking about something and then the Subcontinental would whisper "priest" as if I'd broken the last taboo — I have neither the inclination nor the vocabulary to say anything legitimately scandalous, mind you — and I'd get all flustered. Flabbergasted. I'm lapsed Catholic, after all, and know where the line is.
I swam through the whole church service, remembering every little detail from those years and years of masses. I don't believe in any of it now, so I had to make some choices about what level of observance was respectful and what was lying, and I opted not to sign St. Peter's cross (yes, I first heard of it on "The X-Files," so I lose some points there already) after some consideration.
I'm told I laughed a lot. I remember suppressing yawns, a bad habit from my altar boy days, and looking over the altar at the Politician, who was an endless source of amusement during his wedding. When the time came for us to witness the marriage vows the groomsmen were several paces away from our mark; I'm counting that as the "one mistake" every wedding is supposed to have.
We went right to the reception, the Politician's ultimate theme party. The big table was tall, I felt like a pharmacist. More speeches and some other traditions with which I was unfamiliar. My bridesmaid and I rocked the house for the Grand March.
Dinner was served buffet style ("Look at your friends!" tittered the Politician's wife when the Lawrence table raced for the food), the mashed potatoes in martini glasses were a hit. Talked to the Politician's brother, who I think has grown on everyone over the past year, and made a lot of trips to the very back, where Jinx had no doubt foredoomed the Lawrentians to sitting after her behavior at Carry-Out's wedding, to talk to the group there.
There was free beer and wine, but my "Open bar, dude!" reference had none of the resonance of that time in Hawaii when Kittel and I rocked the refreshments.
Oh, and there was dancing. The Politician's dance of seduction (did you know they throw the garter to the men?) was awesome. Best dancing ever, but it's one of my worst pictures of the night.
Besides all the one's with Nora, of course. Her eyes always turn red.
I ended up dancing not so often. I guess I don't like it as much as others. I danced the most with my landlady, who knew maybe three people at the reception, but had difficulty explaining to the Lawrentians that I was not hitting on my landlady.
I sang along to Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places," which I think used to be my favorite song. I didn't hear anyone being snobby about the country music, that was refreshing. But probably I just wasn't listening hard enough.
At the end of the night the couple drove away in a carriage, another nice touch. I had to get a ride home after both Jinx and I were declared unfit to drive Jubb's car, and after scooping up Yonderboy, who I had maybe encouraged to drink several drinks more than he could handle but let's hope he doesn't remember that, some helpful bridesmaids whisked us back to our hotel.
Finding Jubb's car the next day was not easy; he'd walked home and left it in the parking garage, but no one knew quite where. Eventually we managed, and after a brief detour to the present-opening I drove us home and rushed to unpack before the Politician returned to what is, except for a temporary grace period while they're on their honeymoon, no longer my swinging bachelor pad.
Back from the Politician's bachelor party, i.e. twelve hours of sustained inebriation at his family's northwoods retreat. While tradition dictates that I not repeat anything I learned — except perhaps in a drunken wedding speech — there was an excess of PG-rated fun as well.
We went tubing, or tried anyways, played King's Cup as well as "Flippy Cup" (a less thought-intensive drinking game), and ended the night talking around the campfire in a very ungentlemanly-like fashion. Jubb passed out first, but because he was sitting with his arms crossed we almost didn't notice.
I spent more time outside than most, opting to watch the fire rather than play poker. I hated nearly every game of Texas Hold 'em at Lawrence, yes really, and I've never regretted my decision never again to join in one of those games.
Fritzellian ironies notwithstanding, for those of you with your hands raised.
Besides, the fire was mystifying. When I wasn't listening for the bear I suspected was stalking me, I got lost in the fire and just thought. I love campfires.
Hard to believe that the Politician is going to be married this Friday. Both our lives are going to be different once I move out (I finally got a place in Chicago, btw: very exciting) and that girl of his moves in.
This weekend, of course, was Carry-Out's wedding in the Cities. I drove to Minnesota on Friday with Will, Sockless Pete, and Tall Claire (not my invention, Lawrentians use the moniker to distinguish her from the "Pregnant" and "No-Personality" Claires) and actually ended up turning on the air conditioner because it was freakin' 90 all weekend. I miss you, fuel efficiency.
On both car rides I had a few arguments with Sockless Pete, one of those rare people who's not afraid to stand up for his beliefs no matter how little basis in fact they actually have. Some stubbornness on both sides notwithstanding, as the arguments went on we tended to get flabbergasted with each other rather than frustrated, so there was no harm done.
Sample argument: The lyrics to The Kinks' "Lola"
When "Lola" started playing on my iPod I immediately skipped it. It's an OK song, just not to my taste. The only reason I have "Lola" on there at all, in fact, is because Jubb and I had an argument about the lyrics, and their ramifications, and I had to download the song to prove my point.
Sockless Pete was not convinced by my story of how we listened to the last line over and over and over at all sorts of volume settings, and while I maintained that the lyrics are "I know what I am and I'm glad a man and so's Lola," no one in the Deathtrap agreed with me. Sockless Pete couldn't hear the "glad," an omission which would turn an ambiguous lyric into a pretty direct statement.
According to "The Kinks," by Neville Martin, the "definitive biography" of the band: The upshot of the story is that the young man -- sung in the first person by Ray -- consummates his relationship with the worldy-wise Lola and the song ends with the gloriously ambiguous line, "I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man and so's Lola." now the question is, is Lola glad he's a man or is he glad Lola's really a man? (pg. 106)
Our Bold Hero: 1, Sockless Pete 0
But of course I'd also claimed that it wasn't about a transvestite, when in fact Davies refuses to clear up the ambiguity, at least as far as authorial intent is concerned. So even though Pete thought it definitely was about a transvestite, I'll give him a point for being potentially right.
OBH: 1, SP: 1.
It would be beyond tedious to go through everything we said during the more than eight hours we spent in the car together this weekend. I really only wanted to come out against the BBC anyways.
At one point Sockless Pete praised the BBC for what I thought was a rather craven editorial policy: its decision to cut back on the use of the word "terrorist." It didn't bother me much at the time, but when I saw it again in this article at Hit & Run, I was too annoyed not to blog something.
As a (now former) copy editor I'm all for using descriptions when they're more accurate, and some of the suggested terms would certainly by useful for variety's sake, but it's strange that the news service decided to eschew "terrorist" rather than provide an official definition of when the term would be acceptable.
(And while we're on the subject I'd say the same thing about "genocide," a term that actually does get overused.)
Surely they aren't denying that terrorism exists? It can often be a matter of perspective, it's true, but I'd like to believe that there's a point -- like, say, holding a school full of children and their families at gunpoint and making demands -- where an act could objectively be considered terrorism and anyone who disagrees is clearly wrong.
I can understand that the BBC doesn't want to be seen as taking sides, but I think that terrorists, regardless of what disadvantaged group they claim to represent, have earned a label that might prejudice us against them. Rather than refuse to call a spade a spade (and no, Sockless Pete, that's NOT a racist saying), the BBC should figure out what a spade is and work from there.
Went frisbee golfing yesterday for, what, only the second time this summer? We played the course at Kaukauna (north on 41, right on 55 until you hit the park), which smelled like a carbon paper factory and was tangled with foliage.
I'm usually a defender of Kaukauna — a frisbee golf course needn't be just a smaller golf course, like Plaumen and Brainerd's course essentially are, and the front nine at Kaukauna is just that argument pushed to the extreme — but we spent quite a while looking around in the woods for disks. We lost a disk, even, though I'm partial to the theory that it was stolen.
I was never really in the running for anything other than last, and at tournament par +30 was prettymuch what I expected. But so many holes (revel in that natural, thoroughly illogical term!) seemed to come down to who had best courted the favor of the wood nymphs. I'm glad I have a bright yellow driver.
Afterwards the six of us (i.e. Will and Jubb, Lawrence alumni Sockless Pete, Colin, and Ace, and Our Bold Hero himself) had a nice stir fry dinner in Will's dormroom, possibly the first meal with more than three ingredients I've had this summer.
Ace — I resisted the urge to ask him his thoughts on the "Ace effect," the theory (mentioned here) that people with intrinsically morale-boosting names live longer and happier lives — bought 30 beers and we spent the rest of the night talking and drinking until the supply was depleted.
There was beer frisbee. I've heard "beer friz" a hundred times but they never seem to clip the word anywhere else.
Colin seems to have given in to the libertarian temptations of Penn and Teller, much as I did, and we reiterated various claims from the show. Jubb and I had a low-key running argument (by analogy with "running gag," see also: "rock vs. magnet") about who had made the most effort to contact the other this summer.
I inevitably brought up how impressed I was by the quality of this year's Simpsons episodes, the best in recent memory, and tried to convince people that Family Guy was getting slightly better as the season went on. For his part, Jubb's inevitable sexual harassment made me feel nostalgic for my Lawrence days.
And completely awkward. That goes without saying.
The rest of the month promises more excitement. All my weekends are booked (Carry-Out's wedding, the Politician's "engagement party," and the Politician's wedding to finish out the month) and I've resolved to make more of an effort to see Jubb before I leave for Chicago. And there's still books books books from the library to read.
With the more exciting GTA: San Andreas tasks out of the way, I've been weaning myself off of the Xbox and back onto what a old-fashioned format-snob might call "high art."
I saw The Interpreter with Sockless Pete and another Lawrentian yesterday night; that was a surprisingly good movie. Especially for language geeks. Tonight's feature, a downloaded copy of Elektra, was not as impressive.
It makes sense that I should read, after all, since I still have all this free time. If all goes according to plan I'll have almost a month in Chicago before school starts, so this is practice, time to cultivate good habits. Though here's hoping I'll be able to find a job there... I feel foolish enough lazing about in Appleton when I could have stayed home and worked at Giovanni's Pizza for the umpteenth "last time."
On Ben's suggestion I read Dan Simmons' Hyperion and its sequel, The Fall of Hyperion. They're both exciting reads, but the first is cleverly structured in a manner reminiscent of the "Canterbury Tales" (the author tips his hand a little too much at one point and makes the parallel obvious, but I guess he wanted to make sure people got it) and it was done so well that the second book was bound to feel like a disappointment.
There's a creature in there called "the Shrike," and one of the next books I read was Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts, which isn't good, so don't read it. (The Day of the Locust, by the way, isn't that great either, which is a shame because one of the main characters in that book is a dullard named Homer Simpson.) Despite it's thunderous mediocrity, however, Miss Lonelyhearts by some amazing coincidence also has a character named Shrike. That blew my mind, but apparently the Shrike is a kind of bird, and the name fits in both cases.
So my rambling point is that not only am I reading, I'm reading with this massive dictionary on hand. Under my knees, to be exact. I tried opening it up in my lap and reading the smaller book inside it, so to speak, but the background words... it was like trying to carry on a conversation on a crowded bus.
Right now I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which I got from Ann of Stillwater as part of our foredoomed attempt at a book club. I bought her Joseph Heller's God Knows because I was interested in reading about something he wrote besides Catch-22, but I don't think either of us ever finished our first assignment.
There are a lot of reasons I could never get past the first twenty or so pages. The first was probably the fact that this is known as Waugh's "God's Grace" novel and I didn't need a 350-page book on how great antevaticantwovian Catholicism was. And I didn't know Waugh; I've read three of his satires since then. Also, the books starts slow.
I'm only a third of the way through, but it's satisfying to see Waugh working with more developed characters. The writing is easily some of his best.
The biggest stumbling block for me right now is that there are so many major characters of, let's say, questionable sexuality, including and especially the narrator. Maybe that's what John Hutchens of the New York Times was referring to in the back-cover blurb: "by indirection it summarizes and comments upon a time and a society."
I don't know what to make of my reading, I could be contaminating the text with a 21st-century viewpoint. In some modernist works homosexuality is just a signal for decadence, like Venice or attendant gossip columnists. This is an old book, written in Britain in the 1940s, and I don't know anything about British cultural norms during that period.
Though my guess would be that straight guys then, as now, were not constantly holding hands with each other. Like a certain protagonist and his good friend. (Cough).
One of the other characters certainly thinks the pair is gay, and the typically magnificent Back Bay Books edition cover, with one guy just perhaps touching another guy's leg with his foot (or perhaps not, there's no perspective) only adds to the mystery.
I'm just worried that this is just the 1940s version of a "mancrush" — a rather uncouth Lawrence term for a non-sexual infatuation with a male friend — and I'm missing the point entirely. Another character in the book chose this interpretation.
At this point I'm going to trust my knowledge of Waugh and my B.A. degree in English and say that there's definitely an undercurrent of something. I'm just surprised to find it in this book, with these characters, of all places. We'll see what else he does with it; even if it's there it could still be largely symbolic.
Excited to be reading again. I've got a whole list for my next visit to the library.
Another Alan post. Still waiting for his list of things he hates about China, but already the differences between his posts and Graham's amuse me:
Graham: What does America have to offer that China doesn't? Why would someone want to move to one of the most pathological cultures on earth?
Alan: We tried to keep it as polite as possible but she had believed China to be as democratic as the US and there was no polite way to express the degree of my dissention.
Maybe it was how I spent the Fourth, up North at a cabin with my relatives and their macrobrewed beers and fast boats and dangerous fireworks, but though I'm alternately embarrassed and bored by certain aspects of red American culture, and frustrated by prettymuch all of the major Supreme Court decisions this term, I think we've got a great country here. Good to see a bluish fellow like Alan standing up for it.
I shouldn't do that to Alan. I'm sick of people implying I'm ignorant (or, what amounts to the same thing for many: Republican) when I disagree with them, and I'm somewhat glad that, with college done, I'm partially free of Lawrence's lopsided but unavoidable dichotomy.
As colors go, I lived in Smurf village for the past four years and met a lot of partisans there who were not knowledgeable so much as "informed," but I distrust gut-feelings on right just as much as knee-jerk reactions on the left, possibly more so. I'd say I'm dark purple, but everyone ("these days") wants to claim he's near the center, or better yet, that the center used to be where he was until everything went downhill.
I do love classifying people. Our Bold Hero brings order to the universe.
Enough navel-gazing. I'm going home tomorrow, but I'm expecting to have the Internet there as well. Finally. So that's exciting. I've also got this vague desire to improve myself, which really all goes back to a muttered comment I overheard in a hobbyshop and the fact that I'm unemployed and likely to stay that way. I could... I dunno, learn a craft. Sell things... out of yarn. It's all very vague.
