When planning a wedding, conflict will arise. It is inevitable. What is no good about this conflict is that it generally involves family members and you, family members and your spouse, or you and your spouse. I don’t like conflict over real issues. I’ll debate to the grave over subjects of little importance (for example: Indiana Jones 4 is a terrible terrible movie. It is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. People who say, “Yeah, but it’s Indiana Jones,” are the same type of people who claim Bush’s presidency is a success because since That Day we haven’t been attacked. Any movie that features Cate Blanchett’s face melting for no God Damned reason, a spaceship hidden within the lost city of gold, the alcoholic kid from Transformers swinging through the trees with monkeys, and inconsistent magnetism is bad. The fact, “it’s Indiana Jones,” makes it worse. Got that? Good.) See how that works? If you were to come up to me with a differing opinion, I would not let you leave until you either conceded in argument or hated me, whatever came first--of which I have no preference. I don’t like arguing about is real issues. (for example: “Jay, you know that girl you really like, and I am constantly asking you for updates on your feelings about? Well, I made out with her even though I had no feelings for her. I just couldn’t believe someone who put so little effort into looking good could get a girl I couldn’t. I’m glad I proved you wrong,” Theo said. “I forgive you Theo,” I said.)
The thing about inevitable conflicts is that they are generally laughed about a few years later but never seem funny at the time. Theo agreed to help us send out the rehearsal dinner invitations. This was a great help to us, but when they arrived, my lovely bride’s first name was spelled wrong and the name of the restaurant the event was to be held at was wrong. Let the record show Kelsey (according to the invite: Kuelsey), did not bat an eye at the misspelling. She laughed and thought it was amusing. Me? It ticked me off. I wanted them reprinted. I hate it when people misspell my first name. Partly because if you misspell my first name you clearly have a lot of issues and should probably give up on life and partly because I think it’s disrespectful. For whatever reason, we humans take great pride in the arbitrary set of letters assigned to us at birth, even if the arbitrary set of letters combines to form gibberish, like Xanataka.
I called Theo to see if we could get the invitations replaced thinking to myself, “Theo will obviously say yes. Theo will see right away that this needs to be fixed.” What I failed to realize is that Theo and I are a lot alike. Instead of seeing the problem as something needing to be fixed, Theo saw it as a personal failure, felt incredibly guilty, and started to convince Theo’s self that the current invite would be fine. That’s what I would have done. That’s what Theo did.
With my obsessive-compulsive nature and weakened psychological state, I started to worry that the rest of the details about the rehearsal would also be sloppy. Luckily for me, I was wrong. I won’t bore you with details of the rehearsal itself. We all met at the site of the wedding and walked through the wedding. Really, that was it. The only real notable issue was that I wore makeup. I did not wear makeup to cover up the black eye Hampton gave me two weeks ago. Luckily for Hampton, that was gone. I used makeup to cover up the two giant symmetrical zits the stress and the stressful overeating had created on my chin.
There I stood. A man who spent the prior three weeks in a tanning bed and used Crest White Strips now stood outside wearing makeup. In case you’re curious, my dog is small and has a pink collar; I moved out of my apartment to move into a house Kelsey owns and rebuilt with her father; and I like Gene Kelly movies. Gender roles be damned!
After the rehearsal, everyone ended up at the correct restaurant for the rehearsal dinner instead of the fictional one listed on the invitation. This was good. I didn’t want to have to fish any of my friends out of some bizarre fantasy land the night before I got married. I won’t go at length explaining each and every person there. We ate, we drank, we told stories about the time growing up when Ian lied about the theater being closed because he was too lazy to go see the movie Congo and thus didn’t want anyone else to go either. I told the groomsmen to behave and not to drink too much that night. They looked at me as if I told them, “Then I rolled over and stabbed your sister in the eye.”
At some point, Kelsey and I decided it would be a good idea to leave. People kept buying me drinks and according to American custom I didn’t turn any of them down. We then realized I didn’t know where I was staying that night. For weeks we wondered where I was to sleep the night before the wedding. We didn’t want to see each other wedding morning, but we didn’t want to waste money on a hotel room either. I could have slept on one of the many visitors’ hotel room floors, but then that would just be stupid. We decided I’d sleep in the basement. My Man Room My repaired sanctuary.
When we got home Kelsey went to bed, and I went downstairs. I attempted to write a bit. I don’t know what I attempted to write. At first I tried writing obscure, random letters to marketing campaigns I disagree with, but none of those worked out. I tried to write brief snippets of what eventually became this blog in the form of letters to friends. I tried to put down what about the wedding made me so nervous, but I’m not a good writer and have no idea how to deal with emotion. I eventually fell asleep on my laptop with an unfinished story titled, “Two Weddings and a Flood,” that had two and a half poorly written sentences: Tomorrow is my wedding day. I’m getting married tomorrow. I can’t believe….That’s it. That’s the entire story. I had trouble sleeping that night, which most people would. It’s like the night before Christmas only better because the gifts I’d get the next day would be a financial burden on several families instead of just one. Thus there would be more. At some point my phone rang, I saw it was my friend Brad. I couldn’t think of a reason he would be calling me, so I silenced the call, shut the computer, and dreamt of a ninja on a cloud skateboard, sent here by a Chinese cop to save the future baby. Let the record show, my last dream as a “free man” involved ninjas. Ten points to me.
The next day I told the groomsmen to be ready at 9:00am. I would pick them up. We would head to Blackhawk Lodge (the site of the wedding) and set up chairs and tables, etc. I woke up at 8:50. Yes, I overslept for my wedding day. If only the stupid behavior ended there. I texted the guys and told them to go ahead and sleep in—I’d be there at 9:45. Justin called me and said they were already awake and to get my ass over here. I then texted everyone back except for Joe and said I’d just meet them all out there. We head out to the Lodge to start setting up decorations at around 9:20. At 10:00, Joe called and asked, “Um. Did you guys leave without me?” Yes Joe, sorry. Times I forgot Joe that day: 1.
Ian is a man of many talents. He can help you get a balanced, future-oriented high risk stock portfolio. He can chase tornadoes. He can explain every little nook and cranny of San Antonio to people. Another talent he has is he knows how to set up events. He walked into the room, surveyed the tables, and knew exactly where every piece of furniture should be set to give people optimal room. It cut our set up time in half. This was good, because while everyone was working up a sweat moving tables and chairs I tried to get the slideshow movies I created to work on the projector.
For the two weeks leading up to the wedding, my responsibility was to create the wedding slideshow videos. They were your standard pictures set to music motifs, but it took quite some time because I not only wanted to sync the pictures with the beats of songs, but because I’m incredibly arrogant and wanted a lot of pictures of me looking awesome. I made two false assumptions while making the video: The first, I would be able to transfer the videos to my work computer, hook it up to the projector I borrowed from work, and play the video. The second, if that didn’t work, I would be able to connect my Mac to the projector. Because neither of these assumptions was true, I had the privilege of a Sitcom Wedding Day!
A combination of the fact our chairs for the ceremony did not arrive and the vendor who was supposed to deliver them was closed, the fact Kelsey and the girls were due to show up any minute, and the fact I desperately needed to find a way to connect my Mac to the projector allowed for Dallas, Jeff, Matt, John, and Joe to hop in a car and go look for an adapter of some sort.
Meet John. He has yet to be discussed because his biggest pre-marital role took place in Des Moines during the trip I magically erased. In addition to Justin, he was an usher for the wedding. He was the best friend I had in college that I did not already know from my hometown. Our friendship started oddly enough—we both took an impossibly difficult Monday/Wednesday night econ course. On the first day of the semester the class dismissed, and we both walked off in the same direction. It became very clear that we both were going across campus in the same direction, so we started to make awkward small talk with each other. It turned out both of us had girlfriends two years younger then us that started at Iowa State that year. We continued to make small talk throughout the semester and both assumed we’d never see each other after the class was over. Then we started to have every single class together. At some point we figured out that our Friday schedules ended at 1:00, and we both went home to play videogames after class. We decided it would make way more sense if we played videogames and drank Long Island iced-teas together. Thus, Long-Island Fridays were born. Jon, his wife Jess, Kelsey, and I have remained close and rarely see each other without someone feeling like death the next day.
Back to my Sitcom Wedding Day…you’ve all seen Full House. Some of you actually pretend to like Full House for some reason. Remember the episode with Uncle Jesse’s and Aunt Becky’s wedding? Chaos! Jesse ended up parachuting into an apple cart and got sent to jail. Becky freaked out, but all ended well. Or what about Chandler running away and smoking cigarettes the day of he and Monica’s wedding? Turk forgetting to get the day off for Carla’s wedding? Marshall getting his hair cut off before walking down the aisle with Lily? Sitcoms…where a wedding is never a wedding without some added drama. Mine? I had to find an adapter to connect a Mac computer to a business PC. If you know anything about Macs, they sometimes have a stubborn refusal to work with any sort of business product. If they did, they wouldn’t be cool and artsy and materialistic people like me wouldn’t buy them.
We started our search at the Best Buy in Moline. Because of the quantity of people in the car, Joe had to sit in the back “SUV” section with no seat. He did so without saying a word. Because of this, we initially forgot him in the back of the car at Best Buy. Times I forgot Joe that day: 2. They of course did not sell Apple products like some Best Buy stores. This is because people in the Illinois Quad Cities buy computers with names like Delf and Catway at Costco. They called over to the Davenport store to see if they carried the adapter and sure enough, they did.
Let me now explain something about the Quad Cities. There are four of them. I’ve mentioned that. There are two cities on the Illinois side and two cities on the Iowa side. For those unfamiliar with geography, a big scary river named the Mississippi divides the two states. Thus to cross from the Iowa QC to the Illinois QC, one needs to cross a bridge. While the bridge takes no more than one minute to cross, many people, myself included, have created a strange mental block that makes it seem like going across the river will take a lot more time than it does.
Evidently the River Effect hits strangers too, because no one wanted to cross the river to go to the Best Buy in Davenport that we knew for a fact had the needed adapter to save my wedding, my marriage, and my life. Matt made the suggestion to go to Radio Shack, even though no one has ever found anything they need at any Radio Shack anywhere in the country. We drove there anyway. I diagonally parked across two parking spots to indicate panic and hurry. We walked in, several of us not showered, and walked around the store. Joe enjoyed looking at the hard-bodied Latin girl who worked there. Dallas enjoyed shopping for VHS rewinders and giant calculators whose selling point was, “It’s the size of a notebook! Never lose your calculator again!” About three minutes into our Radio Shack experience, we started to question why the chain still existed. They sold nothing of value and their staff, aside from exciting my brother in law, added nothing.
Upon leaving Radio Shack, I demoted Matt from the front seat to the back for his absolutely stupid idea. We then went to Staples. We almost forgot Joe in the car again (Times I forgot Joe that day: 3) Would they sell a Mac adapter at a store aimed at attracting small businesses? Of course not. We did get to see my Nebraskan relatives leaving the store however. They wore awesome knee high socks with their sandals. My one cousin, Logan, is a rather portly young lad who acts forty years older than his age (17). He enjoys antiquing and singing in a barbershop quartet. All solid hobbies for sure, but not something you’d expect from a seventeen year old. To his credit, he looked thrilled to be at Staples.
Exactly forty-five minutes after being told the piece we needed was in Davenport, we resigned ourselves to having to cross the river. Forty-seven minutes after being told the piece we needed was in Davenport, we were at the Davenport Best Buy. Joe started to feel nauseous at some point during the drive, so to help him out I started to drive like Dale Earnhardt Jr, pre hilariously ironic death (Times I remembered Joe that day: 1). We picked up the adapter and then received a call from one of the bridesmaids or mothers or something that told us to pick up three bags of ice for the wedding. Unfortunately the only place in the car to hold ice was where Joe sat. On the way back to the Lodge, poor forgotten and queasy Joe had to now sit on bags of ice. Just to make him feel more comfortable, I started to tell him of the many ways I planned to sex his sister. Joe couldn’t have been happier that in three hours I’d be his brother in law. I knew this because he started to giggle.
At the Lodge, we immediately got yelled at by Justin and Ian who in our absence set up the “missing” chairs that finally arrived. I ignored them because I was the damned groom and could do whatever the hell I wanted to as long as the bride allowed it. Four hours to go, I set up the slideshow. If this didn’t work, I would have killed someone. Probably Justin. He deserved it anyways for stealing all my god-damned spoons. I had to eat chicken noodle soup with a fork all through high school. I plugged the projector into the Mac and wah-la, beautiful pictures appeared on the screen. The wedding (at least my portion of it) were saved. I then realized I hadn’t had anything to eat, the sandwiches we ordered were gone, and I needed to cross the river, shower, and re-cross the river in the course of one hour.
Jeff and I left the Lodge and stopped at the worst Fazoli’s on the planet. Appropriately, my last meal as a free man was spaghetti. That’s appropriate because spaghetti is my favorite food. Do you see how that works? I dropped Jeff off at The Hotel, got home, confused the hell out of my poor dog by essentially pouring spaghetti down my throat, jumped in the shower (which was cold because I didn’t want to get heated up wink wink nudge nudge), and put on my suit. Already having slept in that day, I didn’t want to miss my 3:00 time to be at The Hotel for pictures…I looked at the clock to see it was 2:57. Great. I hopped in the car and headed for hotel. Halfway across the river I realized I forgot my tie. Double great. For what seemed like the 80th time that day I crossed the river again, went home, and grabbed the tie. Even though I took a cold shower and had the air conditioning on full blast, I could not stop sweating. All the nervous energy, all the tension, all the what-ifs came to a head right then and there. Once I walked into the hotel (at 3:12), it was done. Momentum would carry me through. Was I ready? Did it matter?
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