Weddings

So I got totes distracted with the whole Death thing. I was PMSing like no other time. Lots of people get irate when they have PMS. I get depressed out of my gourd and cry non-stop. Or read books about dying. Or think everyone I love will die soon. Or have absolutely no control over my emotions. Or all of the above. However, onto happy things:

Last weekend my best friend MK got married to the lovely RB in upstate New York. As I am writing this, I realized I never asked if she was changing her name. Not that it really matters, but it was brought to my attention by another friend who got married the same weekend (and whose wedding, sadly, I was not able to attend) that if you don’t change your name legally on the marriage license (when it’s free), it gets really complicated. Anyway, we were waay, waay upstate, not like Westchester upstate. The ceremony was at a vineyard on the shore of Cayuga Lake. Did you know they make wine in upstate New York? Neither did I, and being used to California wines, I had my doubts. It’s good wine though. I tried the merlot, and hated it, but the Riesling was perfect.

This is the view from where the ceremony took place. That’s the bride and groom having artistic photos taken. It was the most perfect weather you could ask for. The winery apparently does upwards of 50 weddings/ceremonies/celebrations per season. It’s a party factory.

This buddy was part of the ceremony, as you can tell by his collar. His name is Flash, and after the wedding he got a little sister named Sophie, which he is not too happy about (a canine sister, weirdos.) Isn’t she cute?

In fact, the running joke at the wedding was “No, we are NOT pregnant.” What is it about family pressure on people in their late 20s-early 30s? MK and I talked about how when our parents got married, it was all about a legal and societal permission to have sex. (I know, not a super deep thought, but bear with me.) Since in our lives, nobody gives a damn if people have sex outside of marriage (unless you are deeply religious, of course, and I am not discriminating among the major religions that frown on premarital, recreational sex. Don’t even get me started on religion and gays…) marriage is more a symbolic gesture of commitment, and an excuse to get lots of gifts and have a party. But EVERYONE expects you to get pregnant right away, as if marriage was only a front for procreating, and nothing else. I am sort-of totally anti-marriage as a concept, when it comes to my own life, and everyone I know keeps saying “you’ll change your mind when you have kids” and maybe I will, but I don’t really feel the need to be sanctioned by the state to love LK. This does not make me anti-gay marriage. That would be dumb. Just anti-Ani marriage.

But this is about someone else’s choices, no? So I was in the ceremony, as MK’s Best Lady (I think that’s the term we ended up with) together with his sister (to balance out the party, the bride had her brother as an attendant on her side…so we were all “boy-girl” on the wrong side…) but to match the bridesmaids, I had this lovely bouquet. Which promptly died from heat throughout the day, which was sad.

What wasn’t sad were the favours. Both bride and groom are potters. So they made 200 of these lovely vases, 8 different designs, slipcast and glazed with the groom’s specially invented glaze, with the wedding details inscribed on decals. It took months to make these. I now have two lovely ones at home to add to my collection of MK pottery.

And the cake rocked. Both beautiful and tasty. And the design whore that I am, here’s my gifts collaged with the cake. I picked paper to match the wedding, totes unaware. I knew the wedding colours (red and chartreuse) but I didn’t know about the cake.

The next day another groomsman and I went on a hike at Taughannock Falls State Park, which apparently houses the tallest single drop waterfall in the NorthEast (215 feet, taller than Niagara Falls by 33 feet.) Unfortunately, there wasn’t much water flowing through the gorge at the time, so the waterfall was not impressive. Apparently one could swim in the basin and walk under the waterfall into the 1980s. But then probably some idiot drowned while drunk, and the Park Services prohibited any such foolish activity. Truth be told, it is still really easy to get under the falls, if you walk on the creek bed, but you would probably get arrested. Oh yeah, and I learned a cool trick. If you stare at the water falling for 30 seconds, and then shift your gaze to the rock wall next to the water, the rocks move up the wall in this slow morphing motion, like a special effect. The longer you stare at the water, the longer the rocks morph. It’s like hallucinating without any drugs.