Daffnee

How awesome is this:



http://www.matthewbarr.co.uk/superhero/

 

The more fun part of weddings.

 It's wedding season.

We flew down to Austin this weekend to attend the boy's best friend's wedding, and I couldn't help but think -- the whole 3 days -- about how impersonal this ceremony celebrating love could be. There are personal moments, like when a bride is fussing with her best friends over a dress or hairdo, or when the grooms give their very dude tributes to the couple. But overwhelmingly, the entire affair is as regulated as a Mass.

It's not surprising, I guess -- weddings started out as Masses, and we do like our symbols of love and eternity and whatnot. The bridal magazines, however, are terrifying. I got to look through quite a few while the boy was getting fitted for his tux. They're the kind of publications that elevate the choice of fruit filling in your vanilla wedding cake to be on par with who you're going to marry. (Brief aside: no one likes the vanilla cake. Ever. Everyone likes the chocolate.) Furthermore, did you know that there are custom printers that specialize in designing maps for directions to the event? Or that the average budget for a wedding is $20000, resulting in a $40 to 70 billion dollar-a-year industry?

I can understand why brides and grooms repeat the same words at the altar -- that's ritual. I can understand the bouquet-throwing and cake-cutting too. It's just everything else. I just don't understand why every processional uses Canon in D. I don't understand why tributes so often sound the same, and seem to stubbornly ignore that the bride and groom have lived together for several years already and are no longer in the early flush of love, but have moved on to a steadier and (I would argue) more admirable place. I don't understand what bridesmaids and grooms actually DO (and this is me having been in a wedding party before). And I really don't understand why strapless bridal gowns are so in vogue. (But maybe I'm just jealous -- no strapless gowns for me, with my linebacker shoulders.)

Maybe all I really want is to go to a wedding like this one:

As a failed musician, I find this rather sweet.

I'm rather annoyed that the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners expects me to know a rather lot about the law. What, did they think I spent the last three years learning useful things? Ha! I'd much rather draw up unnecessarily detailed diagrams of my front yard for sprinkler planning purposes.

There's an Ihop down the hill from my house in Canada, close to my dad's office and where my friends and I would get breakfast before early-morning field trips in elementary school or (once) a "science experiment" excursion onto a ship carrying a new sonar system on a submersible. I love Ihop because they have 4 kinds of sauces and make crepes that aren't really crepe-like, but are folded and look enough like crepes to be a suitable equivalent at 6 AM...

And the only reason I bring this up is because I went to Ihop again this morning, and had crepes again. It was awfully comforting. It's like if the coffee is unlimited in BC, and unlimited in Virginia, both can be home.

 
My pineapple doormat. The Alexandria tourism brochure tells me that in British colonial times, sea captains would return from voyages with pineapples and spear them on their front gate to indicate that they were home and ready to receive visitors. I'm not a sea captain, so I'm settling for a doormat. Besides, pineapples get expensive.

I got my first parking ticket! (Followed by my second parking ticket 3 days later). Who knew that car ownership could be so much fun, especially when coupled with a deep respect and knowledge of due process? I am taking the DC parking adjudicators on a fun ride this week, my friends.

A second first: my first firefly. Not the show, the bug. Their bums light up a really pretty yellow, and apparently they eat slugs so they can be my garden friends. And oh, their lights grow back if you pull 'em off.

It's raining, the grass is growing and I am learning the law.

Road signage in Northern Virginia is retarded. I had been obeying the "no right turn on red" signs for two weeks before the boy noticed the teensy sign underneath that said "when pedestrians are in crosswalk."

Isn't that ALWAYS the rule? Or does this mean that for those unmarked intersections I can run over pedestrians when I want to?