The Story Continues (Part Two)
Friday 6th July:
We get up, and we see what needs doing in preparation for the wedding. We're assigned the task of sweeping the front porch for sand. I keep Joss sane (I think), by reminding her - as she starts to whine - that (a) she had asked if she could help, and that (b) she is now 22-years-old, a petulant teenager no longer.
On paper, this doesn't sound too inspirational or sane-keeping. My personality loses a great deal in translation, I suspect.
It did the trick, anyway.
And Joss did some more high-tech decoration duties while I sunk my teeth into Puzzle Quest - an RPG-puzzle hybrid that my mum got me for my birthday, and turns out to be pretty darn fun. I also read more of The Paradox Of Choice (which I have since finished: some very interesting studies and ideas, but suffers hugely from repetition and redundancy... for a book subtitled Why Less Is More it waffles on a surprising amount).
Then we escaped the family madness to the MALL, a word I'm not sure I'm actually allowed to say, as an English person. I found a nice shirt for the wedding (which made me look like a party animal, I suspect), ate a nice meatball sandwich from subway, and made some killer purchases (Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero only $10, the Clerks animated DVD somewhere around the $25 mark).
There was a birthday party of some kind on the night. So we sang happy birthday and I watched two people I barely knew blow out some candles. Spirits were high, fun was crazy, crazy extended family shenanigans left he dazed and disoriented. I'm pretty sure I had a good time, but I'm drawing a blank on specifics.
I may have had too many drinks and taken too many photos of Joss and her most attractive cousin posing for me in the wind. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Oh -- at the mall (a word which springs more and more readily from the proverbial tongue, worryingly enough) I also found a t-shirt that screamed my name. CHRISTOPHER, it screamed, YOU MUST BUY ME.
It reads:
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON.
I think it was a good purchase.
Saturday 7th July:
Or: The Freaking Wedding Day.
The wedding took place at the grandparent's beautiful lake-side place, the same place we were staying. So we had the bizarre experience of the groom seeing us in our regular scruffy clothes early in the morning, before we later got changed into our snappier outfits for the actual ceremony. Crazy.
We stumbled upon Gayla (one of my favourite Jossie-aunts, though I'm not sure if that's how you spell it) single-handedly wrapping all the days' cutlery into napkins. Naturally, our hearts went out to her, and we spent a fair portion of the morning (through lunch-time, and beyond!) helping her with that. If I recall correctly, she actually left while we were doing that (she probably returned a bit later, actually), and for a bit I felt kind of like Jack or Locke in the second season of Lost when they discover The Button That Must Be Pressed and the guy ran away.
We did a damn fine job of napkin-ing up the cutlery, anyway.
The wedding was absolutely picture-perfect gorgeous, I could have cried if I wasn't so manly. The speeches were very sweet and very funny. Joss and I got name-dropped in one by Bill's Mexican band-mate (two nights previous Joss's grandmother told us he was onto his third wife, and she has plenty of money; "I already told you not to say that", her husband told her - in a way that somehow thoroughly endeared me to both of them).
Only days later would I get to hear the bits left out of the speeches - like the fact the groom once hung his little brother (Clarke, husband of Gayla) from the rafters in a sleeping bag, and then threw a cat in with him. Fun!
During the dinner-and-dancing portion of the wedding, with just the right of alcohol in my system, it suddenly seemed like a good - if belated - idea to ask the Grants if I had their blessings to be marrying wee Jocelyn.
Why I started with her brother, I'm not sure. But I don't think it was the meaningless gesture I kind of hope her parents interpreted the order as. He's pretty close to our age, so in a way his blessing kind of felt the most important, almost.
Or something. Or gah. I really don't know. I asked, anyway. And he granted. He said that, "for selfish reasons" he would obviously prefer if we lived down the street, but that he felt that Jossie was happier now than before me, so it's all good. More-or-less. And that moved me very much, as I'm sure you can imagine.
Then there was some dancing. And Joss 'offended' me by mocking my dancing so I went back to where we were sitting, and sat by myself for a minute or two.
A word of explanation: I don't know if it's some kind of defence mechanism or something, but sometimes I act quite offended when I'm really not, at all. It always feel like it should be really obvious when I'm just 'pretending', but Joss assures me it's really quite inscrutable, sort of thing. I should really probably try... not to do it.
Though I had actually - on some level - been going over in the pursuit of a chat with Alex. As I 'stormed off' I said: "well fine, I'm gonna go sit with your dad and the most boring guy at this shindig!" (by which I meant no genuine offence to whoever he had been talking to when last we saw him).
So I was pleased when he came and sat back down where he had been, not five minutes later. And then came the tough part.
"I probably should have asked you this all ready..."
"Yes! You probably should have!"
Yikes! But the tone was warm, friendly - jovial, even. Whether that was all Jedi mind-tricks or not, I'm not sure, but he made it possible to continue.
I asked if I could have his blessing to marry his daughter. And he said that yes, I could. That I obviously made her happy.
And that moved me very deeply, as you can imagine.
I explained that I had really wanted to ask before the proposal, but the closest I had to The Right Time would have been when Joss nipped to the bathroom one day, in Paris.
The discussion pretty much wrapped up, blessing-granted, with Alex the Jedi telling me, with a smile:
"Of course, if you ever hurt her, I'll have to kill you".
"Oh, naturally. I'd expect nothing less," comes my reply. "If you broke both my legs I'd consider that getting off lightly".
I like to speak from the heart.
Some time earlier in the evening, I had asked him how he long he and Lou had been together (if I'm not mistaken, the answer was just shy of 30 years, all told). I asked if they had a good 'meeting story', and he said "not really" and then explained why, and gave me some interesting personal history trivia to boot. Fun, bonding times.
And then as time rolled by we got back to dancing, and silly hats were handed out to some of the more fantastic dancers (so I got one, naturally). And after some dancing I asked Lou if I could "borrow" her, and we ventured off the dancefloor together.
Then we discussed the nature of my having her blessing to marry her daughter. While both wearing huge, silly hats.
She told me 'yes', and this moved me very deeply, as you can imagine. And she gave me the best reason of the three of them - she commended me for making Joss laugh, and for not letting her "take herself too seriously", which I took as such a huge compliment. Hugging, with the big stupid hats, was hard work. But we managed.
At one point, someone gave me a cigarette down on the beach, and that made me just ecstatic. Note to self: never give up! Har har.
Regrettably, the evening took a bit of a darker turn, and after I wussed out of an awkward social faux-pas (herm, taking as many as three puffs on a spliff before thinking to pass it on - a rate that would generally be considered speedy in my circles back home) and went to hide under the covers, I ended up having a stupid fight with Joss (in private, thankfully).
I don't really remember the details, to be honest - and see no real value in straining to do so. Enough said that I'd had a fair bit to drink, and was confused and disgruntled - but that I at least had the good sense to admit, as sense dawned, that I was being a stupid drunk-idiot and that I was very, very sorry.
Joss forgave me shortly thereafter, putting forth that we were "both just drunk and stupid" (bless her heart), and we got back to the party just as it was fading into non-existence.
Finally, we flopped into bed and I had a bad dream about comitting a weed-related social faux pas.
As a side-note: I've been having very literal-minded dreams lately. On the night when we watched the first half of The Last King Of Scotland, I had my sexual advances rebuffed on the grounds of being too tired (not surprising in retrospect, when our exhaustion was the reason we weren't finishing the film that night). That night, I had two dreams:
1) That I was having sex with Joss,
2) That I was trying to remember how The Last King Of Scotland ended, and for neither love nor money could I!
TO BE CONTINUED...
We get up, and we see what needs doing in preparation for the wedding. We're assigned the task of sweeping the front porch for sand. I keep Joss sane (I think), by reminding her - as she starts to whine - that (a) she had asked if she could help, and that (b) she is now 22-years-old, a petulant teenager no longer.
On paper, this doesn't sound too inspirational or sane-keeping. My personality loses a great deal in translation, I suspect.
It did the trick, anyway.
And Joss did some more high-tech decoration duties while I sunk my teeth into Puzzle Quest - an RPG-puzzle hybrid that my mum got me for my birthday, and turns out to be pretty darn fun. I also read more of The Paradox Of Choice (which I have since finished: some very interesting studies and ideas, but suffers hugely from repetition and redundancy... for a book subtitled Why Less Is More it waffles on a surprising amount).
Then we escaped the family madness to the MALL, a word I'm not sure I'm actually allowed to say, as an English person. I found a nice shirt for the wedding (which made me look like a party animal, I suspect), ate a nice meatball sandwich from subway, and made some killer purchases (Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero only $10, the Clerks animated DVD somewhere around the $25 mark).
There was a birthday party of some kind on the night. So we sang happy birthday and I watched two people I barely knew blow out some candles. Spirits were high, fun was crazy, crazy extended family shenanigans left he dazed and disoriented. I'm pretty sure I had a good time, but I'm drawing a blank on specifics.
I may have had too many drinks and taken too many photos of Joss and her most attractive cousin posing for me in the wind. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Oh -- at the mall (a word which springs more and more readily from the proverbial tongue, worryingly enough) I also found a t-shirt that screamed my name. CHRISTOPHER, it screamed, YOU MUST BUY ME.
It reads:
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON.
I think it was a good purchase.
Saturday 7th July:
Or: The Freaking Wedding Day.
The wedding took place at the grandparent's beautiful lake-side place, the same place we were staying. So we had the bizarre experience of the groom seeing us in our regular scruffy clothes early in the morning, before we later got changed into our snappier outfits for the actual ceremony. Crazy.
We stumbled upon Gayla (one of my favourite Jossie-aunts, though I'm not sure if that's how you spell it) single-handedly wrapping all the days' cutlery into napkins. Naturally, our hearts went out to her, and we spent a fair portion of the morning (through lunch-time, and beyond!) helping her with that. If I recall correctly, she actually left while we were doing that (she probably returned a bit later, actually), and for a bit I felt kind of like Jack or Locke in the second season of Lost when they discover The Button That Must Be Pressed and the guy ran away.
We did a damn fine job of napkin-ing up the cutlery, anyway.
The wedding was absolutely picture-perfect gorgeous, I could have cried if I wasn't so manly. The speeches were very sweet and very funny. Joss and I got name-dropped in one by Bill's Mexican band-mate (two nights previous Joss's grandmother told us he was onto his third wife, and she has plenty of money; "I already told you not to say that", her husband told her - in a way that somehow thoroughly endeared me to both of them).
Only days later would I get to hear the bits left out of the speeches - like the fact the groom once hung his little brother (Clarke, husband of Gayla) from the rafters in a sleeping bag, and then threw a cat in with him. Fun!
During the dinner-and-dancing portion of the wedding, with just the right of alcohol in my system, it suddenly seemed like a good - if belated - idea to ask the Grants if I had their blessings to be marrying wee Jocelyn.
Why I started with her brother, I'm not sure. But I don't think it was the meaningless gesture I kind of hope her parents interpreted the order as. He's pretty close to our age, so in a way his blessing kind of felt the most important, almost.
Or something. Or gah. I really don't know. I asked, anyway. And he granted. He said that, "for selfish reasons" he would obviously prefer if we lived down the street, but that he felt that Jossie was happier now than before me, so it's all good. More-or-less. And that moved me very much, as I'm sure you can imagine.
Then there was some dancing. And Joss 'offended' me by mocking my dancing so I went back to where we were sitting, and sat by myself for a minute or two.
A word of explanation: I don't know if it's some kind of defence mechanism or something, but sometimes I act quite offended when I'm really not, at all. It always feel like it should be really obvious when I'm just 'pretending', but Joss assures me it's really quite inscrutable, sort of thing. I should really probably try... not to do it.
Though I had actually - on some level - been going over in the pursuit of a chat with Alex. As I 'stormed off' I said: "well fine, I'm gonna go sit with your dad and the most boring guy at this shindig!" (by which I meant no genuine offence to whoever he had been talking to when last we saw him).
So I was pleased when he came and sat back down where he had been, not five minutes later. And then came the tough part.
"I probably should have asked you this all ready..."
"Yes! You probably should have!"
Yikes! But the tone was warm, friendly - jovial, even. Whether that was all Jedi mind-tricks or not, I'm not sure, but he made it possible to continue.
I asked if I could have his blessing to marry his daughter. And he said that yes, I could. That I obviously made her happy.
And that moved me very deeply, as you can imagine.
I explained that I had really wanted to ask before the proposal, but the closest I had to The Right Time would have been when Joss nipped to the bathroom one day, in Paris.
The discussion pretty much wrapped up, blessing-granted, with Alex the Jedi telling me, with a smile:
"Of course, if you ever hurt her, I'll have to kill you".
"Oh, naturally. I'd expect nothing less," comes my reply. "If you broke both my legs I'd consider that getting off lightly".
I like to speak from the heart.
Some time earlier in the evening, I had asked him how he long he and Lou had been together (if I'm not mistaken, the answer was just shy of 30 years, all told). I asked if they had a good 'meeting story', and he said "not really" and then explained why, and gave me some interesting personal history trivia to boot. Fun, bonding times.
And then as time rolled by we got back to dancing, and silly hats were handed out to some of the more fantastic dancers (so I got one, naturally). And after some dancing I asked Lou if I could "borrow" her, and we ventured off the dancefloor together.
Then we discussed the nature of my having her blessing to marry her daughter. While both wearing huge, silly hats.
She told me 'yes', and this moved me very deeply, as you can imagine. And she gave me the best reason of the three of them - she commended me for making Joss laugh, and for not letting her "take herself too seriously", which I took as such a huge compliment. Hugging, with the big stupid hats, was hard work. But we managed.
At one point, someone gave me a cigarette down on the beach, and that made me just ecstatic. Note to self: never give up! Har har.
Regrettably, the evening took a bit of a darker turn, and after I wussed out of an awkward social faux-pas (herm, taking as many as three puffs on a spliff before thinking to pass it on - a rate that would generally be considered speedy in my circles back home) and went to hide under the covers, I ended up having a stupid fight with Joss (in private, thankfully).
I don't really remember the details, to be honest - and see no real value in straining to do so. Enough said that I'd had a fair bit to drink, and was confused and disgruntled - but that I at least had the good sense to admit, as sense dawned, that I was being a stupid drunk-idiot and that I was very, very sorry.
Joss forgave me shortly thereafter, putting forth that we were "both just drunk and stupid" (bless her heart), and we got back to the party just as it was fading into non-existence.
Finally, we flopped into bed and I had a bad dream about comitting a weed-related social faux pas.
As a side-note: I've been having very literal-minded dreams lately. On the night when we watched the first half of The Last King Of Scotland, I had my sexual advances rebuffed on the grounds of being too tired (not surprising in retrospect, when our exhaustion was the reason we weren't finishing the film that night). That night, I had two dreams:
1) That I was having sex with Joss,
2) That I was trying to remember how The Last King Of Scotland ended, and for neither love nor money could I!
TO BE CONTINUED...