Tom And Mel's Wedding

Thumbnail: Boardroom

Thumbnail: Glass of guiness

Thumbnail: Dinner table

Even before the wed­ding began, I had already unfair­ly decid­ed that I was­n’t going to have a good time. Thank god I was wrong. My ini­tial feel­ing was based on the knowl­edge that cer­tain agi­tat­ing peo­ple were going to be there — a very tan­gi­ble reminder of why we moved under cov­er of dark­ness for the last Bancroft farm excur­sion — but there were enough nor­mal peo­ple to dilute any creepi­ness.

The cer­e­mo­ny was short and sweet. The food was the best I’ve had in weeks, although my grad­ual recov­ery from viral gas­troen­teri­tis meant that I could only have half of the por­tions served. The com­pa­ny at the din­ner table was friend­ly and open enough to address every­one sit­ting (Tolstoy wrote well about such a dif­fi­cul­ty in Anna Karenina when he describes “a small table with per­sons present, like the stew­ard and the archi­tect, belong­ing to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent world, strug­gling not to be over­awed by an ele­gance to which they were unac­cus­tomed, and unable to sus­tain a large share in the gen­er­al con­ver­sa­tion”). Aside from an idi­ot­ic anal­o­gy about aspara­gus, the speech­es were gen­er­al­ly well-writ­ten; not too trite, and all the more poignant from the emo­tion with which they were spo­ken.

Aaron was there as my wing­man, ensur­ing a good time. Jenn was there as my date, mak­ing the guys jeal­ous. I even saw Christine, although we nev­er had a chance to talk. Apparently, I missed every time she waved at us, so she may have thought that I was ignor­ing or avoid­ing her, which may be why she flicked my ear as she was walk­ing by my table. I still feel bad enough about miss­ing her last birth­day par­ty.

Until din­ner there was an open bar, with Corona and even Guinness on tap, as well as a straw­ber­ry mar­gari­ta machine that could make them like smooth­ies. After din­ner was the danc­ing, and by the time the we were through a dozen or so songs, it was already late, so we head­ed home.

5 comments

  1. I just can’t stand wed­dings I hat­ed then from the time I worked in a cater­ing busi­ness, and saw how wed­dings aren’t real­ly about love and union, but about Solomon filets and mak­ing your mom hap­py cause she can brag to rel­a­tive you don’t even know about how well you were doing.

    Being sin­gle now, wed­dings seem like an insult, like I’m get­ting a bunch of girls going “I got some­thing you don’t have…” I already went to 2 this year and I’ve got anoth­er 2 to go to this year.

    The res­cue comes in my attempt to do some­thing crazy, sex­u­al and wild at all of them while man­ag­ing to still keep those peo­ple talk­ing to me the next day.

    The first one this year, I went in a short dress with no under­wear, the sec­ond I got drunk enough to give the bride­groom’s best friend a blowjob in the bush­es…

    Next one’s September 12, I’ll have to think of some­thing crazy but dis­crete, it’s a work event.

  2. Apparently, I’ve been going to the wrong wed­dings.

  3. hey you dumb fuck…i like aspara­gus!

  4. Nothing wrong with analo­gies about veg­eta­bles. What’s wrong is when peo­ple make judge­ments and com­ments that aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly fair. We’re all allowed to have opin­ions, of course, but what ever hap­pened to being nice. Especially in pub­lic dis­play.

  5. There’s noth­ing wrong with analo­gies about veg­eta­bles when they’re rel­e­vant and well-writ­ten. There’s some­thing wrong with analo­gies about veg­eta­bles that are sup­posed to be one of the defin­ing moments of a wed­ding, that should be unique accord­ing to the sit­u­a­tion, but end up com­plete­ly gener­ic and applic­a­ble to any­thing.

    If what I say isn’t fair, then every sin­gle edi­to­r­i­al ever writ­ten isn’t fair. Every crit­i­cal review, good or bad, isn’t fair. Fair does­n’t enter into it because life itself isn’t fair, or as some­one once said, “If the world were so orga­nized that every­thing has to be fair, no liv­ing crea­ture could sur­vive for a day. The birds would be for­bid­den to eat worms, and every­one’s self-inter­est would have to be served.”

    And this may be pub­lic, but it’s still my domain. Not using names, and not men­tion­ing many oth­er things, was being nice. Trust me.

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