You Can't Make Mistakes.

Okay.

I guess my last post was a little more rancorous in tone than I had thought. I don’t really hate weddings that much. And I failed to mention that once engaged in a wedding, I always find myself enjoying myself. I think that what I dislike the most is the amount of time/energy that goes into fighting with family members/caterers/clergy over the preparations. You can see it often on the faces of brides and families that they are not enjoying themselves and are rather just panicking and freaking out.

That said, I had a great time at the wedding yesterday, unsurprisingly, as I have so often done in the past. It also helped that the bride was the sister of one of my best friends, who was the maid of honor for this particular festival of freakouts. However, she delivered the following toast, which had me on the floor. Sometimes all it takes is a few well chosen words and I melt like butter.

Now that you’ve found happiness and love with each other, there remains one question: how will you make love stay?

Here are some ideas [with some help from Tom Robbins]:

1) Tell love you are going to Hinkle’s Bakery in Otsego to pick up a cheesecake. If love stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2) Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin-yang symbols on 3 sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell them you are someone new. It will stay.

3) Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything will be alright. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

And with that I’d like us to raise our glasses in a toast to making love stay…

So, after that, I woke up this morning hung over, but smiling. I just need to read this the next time I get a wedding invitation to remind me of why we do these things.

I’m dyin’ here

I have another wedding to go to today and I’m not overly enthused about it.

I am not attending any more weddings this year, possibly ever.

So, if you’re getting married, don’t send me an invitation. I won’t come. It’s not because I don’t like you. It is because I want my life back.

I may or may not send you a card, or postcard, but I will not show up to sit through an hour-and-a-half ceremony or to drink the booze that your parents paid for.

It’s not that I have anything against marriage—though I do believe it to be an arcane and now purposeless social contract which we hang on to in order to make having sex seem legitimate, which shouldn’t be a problem in the first place—it is that I have a problem with the wedding part of the marriage. There are so many ways to go about it that don’t inconvenience your family and friends and yet so many people choose the way of significant inconvenience.

Plus weddings have become boring and tedious.

Why can’t everyone just go to the courthouse and have the quickie elopement that works so well. I know what you are going to say; “But John, it is a way of affirming our commitment and making our marriage stronger by involving our family and loved ones,” or “You have to have a ceremony with your friends or your marriage will not be as good as other marriages.”

Bull. Shit.

My parents, and many others, went to the courthouse, got married in ten minutes, and are still happily married today. I’m sure that you can still convince your friends and family to send you gifts and cash. Maybe some moron will even send you a silver knife and spatula to cut the wedding cake that you will never have. I would recommend using these as gardening implements.

“Lovely silver garden shovel…”

“Oh, why, thank you.”

I know, I know. I sound like a mean, curmudgeonly bastard. Well, that’s because I am a mean, curmudgeonly bastard. Big surprise that I sound like one.

There are so many more interesting and important things that we could do with the money that we spend on weddings. Is it really necessary to go through all that hassle so that you can claim your tax benefits and file jointly? This mean, curmudgeonly bastard certainly doesn’t think so.

Whatever. If you are reading this and have just gotten married or are thinking about getting married and it made you feel bad or pissed you off: good. That is your right. Good on your for exercising it. However, if you agree—or if you don’t, I don’t care—then watch the video below.

Now with more firearms

I was listening to NPR’s report about the Supreme Court ruling to overturn the handgun ban in Washington, DC which indicated that the mentally handicapped and felons would still not be allowed to purchase handguns.

“But,” I thought, “how will they defend themselves from the now-gun-toting, law-abiding citizens?”

Everyone should be required by law to carry a gun and have a license for it. The problem would take care of itself.

I’m going to take a nap now.

Where do they go?

I am putting out an APB on my Bag-Hole (Bean Bag Toss, for you non-Kalamazoans) game.

We went looking for it in the basement this morning and it wasn’t there. Which likely means that someone borrowed it, and then never returned it.

So, if you know where it is e-mail me and let me know. We really need this for the upcoming Fruity Rum-Drink Party. it is a very important component.

And since I am already on a role. The rest of this post will outline my new and continuing borrowing policy:

Absolutely not.

No more. I have lost about 20 DVDs in the past year to other people’s collections, not to mention books—which I have always been more careful about anyway.

What is it? It used to be the case that when you borrowed something you gave it back. No longer. Now when you borrow something, you keep it forever. I’m not talking about family either. We sort of have a policy in my family that it is alright as long as you know where it is. Not with my friends apparently.

No more borrowing.

Not as bad as it looks

So, the wedding was fine, and it didn’t rain at all. At least not after we arrived there.

Late.

Oh yeah, remember how I was officiating the wedding. Yeah.

We left Kalamazoo in plenty of time to arrive at our wedding destination several hours in advance. Moments after leaving the house, there was a wall of traffic—outside Kalamazoo! So, we stopped, moved 3 meters, stopped, rinse, repeat.

Then the car started to overheat.

There was steam billowing out of the hood one side. We pulled off onto the shoulder. I opened the hood and noticed that the fans weren’t running. This was a problem that I have had with the car before. The fan relays went out in the past and then the fans wouldn’t run and the coolant doesn’t get cooled. This is not a problem as long as the car is moving continuously, streaming air through the radiator.

So I pulled the fuse panel open and sure enough, there was corrosion on the contacts for the relays.

Then it started pouring rain.

So I was frantically searching for something so that I could just fuse the connections across the relay contact and let the fans run continuously, but I had no wire in the car anywhere.

Then, in a MacGyvery moment of brilliance, I spotted the top of what appeared to be a broken dry-cell battery with spring contacts. I tore it apart with a pair of pliers and fashioned jumpers, jammed them in the fuse panel, and we were off.

We still had to wait another hour and a half before we were able to leave the highway to take the back-roads the rest of the way, but at least the car wasn’t blowing piping hot coolant all over the place. It worked until later when the car wouldn’t start, but a little wiggling of fuses solved that eventually.

Now I just have to sort this all out so that the car will live until the end of the summer when we move out of the country. At that time, I am giving her to some friends who refurb cars just enough so that they can have impromptu demolition derby races on a dirt-track in Holly, MI. It is a really good time apparently.

Don’t worry, I’ll post some pictures of that.

Tedious

I have to officiate wedding today. It’s for a friend and I agreed to it so I can’t really complain, can I?
But now it’s raining, so I can complain.

How tedious.

If you haven’t been using the beta of Firefox 3, then now is your chance to download the full release. As an additional incentive, Firefox is going for the world record in single-day downloads today. Give them a hand and download an installer today.

“Why should I?” you ask.

Well, for starters, it’s free. And I know that Internet Explorer is free, but it’s really not. See, Internet Explorer is closed-source, which means that it is difficult for developers to work with, and we can’t see the source code to fix things if there is a problem. It is also not very extensible.

Firefox, on the other hand, can be made to do almost anything. Don’t like those annoying ads that infiltrate your web content? Firefox has a plugin that removes them. Want to use Firefox to ftp content to a server somewhere? Yep. How about backing your bookmarks up to a secure remote location so that you can use them from anywhere? Already there.

Firefox also gives you complete control over the cookies that it saves, how much data it keeps in the cache when you turn it off (like cookies, login and password info, and download info), and it is the best browser out there for blocking malicious content. Tabbed browsing was first used in Firefox as well.

Plus the logo is cool, isn’t it?

So, download it today and try it out, won’t you? You won’t be disappointed.

PS – This site looks fantastic in Firefox 3. If for no other reason, check it out.

[Update: the official "Download Day" will begin at 1pm EDT today]

Break 2 in progress

I am currently taking coffee-break number two from writing and revising Chapter 2 of the Thesis. I’ve been working on this for about two weeks and will be glad to be done this weekend. Nothing really big left to be done. I have e-reams and reams of notes that I am consulting and compiling into what will be the finished project by the end of the summer.

This afternoon I need to look again at a couple of interviews with former heads of the order that I am studying and see if there is any more historical-background-type data that I can glean from them. I haven’t watched or listened to these particular interviews in a few months and I can’t remember right now which is which, but I know that there is something in there.

Anyway, as I was taking this break, which I think might morph into walk-around-the-block break in a minute, I was thinking about the snowballing effects which occur during procrastination. For instance: I decided to take a break 10 minutes ago and poured myself coffee. Then I sat back down in front of the computer, and decided that taking a break meant at least doing something other than what I was doing before. Then, being afraid to get out of the writing mood, I decided that I would write a blog entry. It should keep me in that mood while also getting another task done.

Now, I feel like I should really get up and walk around a bit because my ass hurts from sitting here all morning typing. This is very dangerous and could lead to vacuuming if I walk through the house, or watering the plants if I go into the garden, or almost any other thing. If I walked into the right environment, I might cure a disease.

What I am saying is that I think that procrastination periods can be very productive and helpful, but not necessarily for what you are intending to do. I am sure that the Segway was invented in a period of procrastination. Also: penicillin.

Regardless, I am going for a walk now. I cannot be held responsible for the creative brilliance which will occur in the next ten minutes.

What was your last creative procrastinating moment?

Here we come…

I just got word from the American University in Cairo that I was admitted to their graduate school today. So, it’s back to Cairo in a few months to do an MA in Arabic with a specialization in Islamic Studies.

Now I am just trying to revel in congratulating myself before beginning to panic about how much this is about to cost.

Then again, money isn’t everything. Not to mention the logistics of completely uprooting myself. This will be a little different than last time: I still had a sort-of home-base in the States last year. Now my home base will be my backpack.

Exploring the world, one taxi-ride at a time, I guess. Wish me luck.

That was a nice nap…

Wow. I feel so refreshed and I was only asleep for a few hours, wait… weeks?! Holy shit.

I knew there was something fishy going on when that craggy old woman in the woods offered me a beer (never say no to a party, right). It tasted funny and I had a pretty strong urge to go upstairs and lie down, but passing out for several weeks. Wait until I find that lady. I am going to give her a piece of my mind. Maybe I’ll send my friends Hansel and Gretel out with some bread crumbs to find her for me. They’re out of school right now. What could go wrong?

Okay, so I wasn’t drugged to sleep by a witch in the forest. Would you believe, however, that I was kidnapped by aliens a few weeks ago while visiting a friend in New York. This is apparently a very big problem these days. I am just the most recent victim of this phenomenon.