Velveteen Mind

A Wedding for Everyone {Part One}

Seven year ago today, we were married. 

Although neither of us had ever called it home, New Orleans called to us, so it was there that we chose to plant the roots of a life which we would forever call home.

Laced with the strength of chicory, echoing with the sounds of friends and family, bruised by adversity, warmed by tradition, spiced with variety, worn threadbare by the lives that dug their heels in deep to the rich swamp soil...  New Orleans was the perfect place to swear our souls to one another. 

And no, we didn't keep it simple.  But we certainly kept it real.

Real joy  ...hope  ...celebration  ...tradition  ...flair  ...fun  ...love  ... Real us.

 

Surrounded by love.  Friends and family and well-wishes wrapped in smiles.

A bride wrapped in the wedding gown worn by her mother.  Made by her great-aunt.  Hand-painted and fussed over and preserved with hope and anticipation.

The end of something solitary and the beginning of everything whole.

Everyone should have a beginning such as this.

 

An early afternoon ceremony in St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square in the French Quarter.  We arrived in carriages and hushed tourists' whispers of "who are they again?"

Strangers taking our pictures and generously offering to send us copies of our own. 

Everyone should have paparazzi on their wedding day. 

 

We are you.  You can have this, too, you know!  Just ask.  You don't have to be fancy, you just need to want to have more fun than a couple of dreamers should be allowed to have...  and then have it.

St. Louis Cathedral would be the only serious moment in a party to stretch eight hours

long.  It would be the last hushed or still anything.  A beautiful foundation to a spectacular day...  to spectacular hopes for our whole lives long. 

I smiled so much as I walked down the aisle, I thought my face would ache for years.  The beginning of laugh lines that would be nurtured by baby's giggles and toddlers' antics.  Laugh lines deepened by new lives to enter our own, to erase the melancholy of the father walking his baby girl down the

aisle only to be rewarded by hilarious miniature versions of himself. 

But first...

Can you hear the beads rolling into the square, bunches and bunches headed to eager hands?  Can you hear the crowd gathering?  Can you hear the Second Line Band assembling?

I do.

Everyone should have a parade through the streets after they say "I do."

 

We left in our wake screams of celebration, cries of surprise, and not fewer than a few bums with pearl-like beads around their necks, dangling medallions announcing our union.  This was a wedding celebration for everyone. 

 

And everyone should have the blessings of the street people on their wedding day.

~~~

...this is only the beginning, so be sure to stick around for Part Two...

~~~

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Anticipation

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What's the Password for Sleep?

Post script but one for you to read before this craziness...  I saved this post as a draft last night in case I woke up this morning and realized I had actually just gone insane.  Although this is completely unintelligible, it makes me laugh so I'm going to post it.  Plus cheat and date it from yesterday because GoBloMeMoFo!

~~~

Sweet tea + Claritin-D + moonlight = Trucker pills. Apparently.

I say "+ moonlight" because:

Sweet tea + Claritin-D + sunlight = Sleeping Pills.  Absolutely.

It's 3 a.m. and I am still awake.  Goose received a couple of free kids' meal coupons at a local restaurant from school today and we also happened to receive some much appreciated anniversary cash in the mail, so we spent dinner out as a family this evening. 

By the time that surf-n-turf extravaganza was over, I was exhausted and ready to sleep the sleep of the dead.

That was six hours ago.

I'm one of those periodic insomniacs that insist on toughing it out, tossing and turning and refusing to get out of bed because surely I will pass out any minute now.

Instead, my mind starts this bizarre What's the Password for Sleep? game.

This usually happens when I've started a new job or project that requires learning a new coding system.  For instance, I used to work in an inpatient mental health ward and would track the patients' activities on a coded chart every 15 minutes.  Codes were recorded for what room they were in and their activity, e.g. "common room" and "claiming that fairies are eating her hair" would be coded as "CR" and "FH". 

We may not have had a code for the fairy hair bit, but you follow me.

After particularly difficult days... let's say days when a schizophrenic would threaten to lick my kneecaps off if I didn't give them an extra hour outside for smokes...  insomnia would hit.  I would find myself lying in bed for hours and just as I was about to fall asleep I would think, "What's the code for sleeping?"

But it was never so simple as just remembering the code, because most of the time it was something randomly infuriatingly dream-like, such as "What's the code for fuchsia fish?"   

Right.

Tonight?  Tonight's code quest has been the result of spending the day working on HTML code for a few website projects.

Every time I am just about to fall asleep, I think, "What's the align code for entrance to the jamba cave?" 

I don't even know what a "jamba cave" is.

Good grief, this is turning out to be a long night.

By the way, does anyone know the code for bolding carrots?

 

 

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In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...

   

   

   

   

 

 

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Facebook is Giving Me an Identity Crisis

Have you ever felt an unexpected shift in the core of who you are?  You are trucking right along and suddenly realize that something has changed?

Imperceptible shifts in your course, happening over time, until you abruptly find yourself in a different place than you planned.  You find yourself a different person than you expected.

Perhaps this is simply growth.  Perhaps this is simply growing up.  Perhaps I'm simply losing my mind.

That last one was a joke.  But I bet you smiled, because I bet you've been there.

I posted a quote from Patton Oswalt on Twitter a while back, taken from Lewis Black's The Root of All Evil on Comedy Central, in which Oswalt said regarding blogging: 

"Bloggers are the root of all evil because they have reduced us to a first draft culture."

I thought that was actually funny (come on, it is!), but let me warn you, this is a first draft and one I plan to hit publish on as soon as I finish typing.  It's one of those things that we might all feel, but rarely take the time to explore, so before I shake it off, I'm going to put it out there. 

I blame this identity crisis on Facebook. 

 

 

Yes, I say that tongue-in-cheek, but on some level it is true.  Facebook has put me back in touch with high school and college friends I haven't heard about in years, laying all of their lives out in an orderly fashion, ripe for comparison.

Half of them have families and jobs and most of the same responsibilities that keep me from going out to a club every other night.  The other half seem to be living virtually the same lives we lived in school, only with legal ID's and fewer grades.

It brings up so many personal questions that I don't generally allow myself to consider.  Questions like, "Um, was it an option to keep partying?"

That is a simplification, but still.

For now, I'm just putting this feeling in front of you.  I'll write more about it later.  Later, being after I finish the relaunch of Blog Nosh Magazine, which is certainly artificially inflating my stress level and causing me to rub my own nerves raw.

But maybe it's also an opportunity to rattle those nerves a bit and see what shakes out.  What sparks to the surface. 

Want to frazzle some nerves with me?  Ask some questions like, "Do I still want to drop it like it's hot?" or "Is it still an option to shake it like a Polaroid picture?"

Hell, let's just listen to some music:

 

(feed readers, if you can't see the music player, you are so missing out!)

...........................

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