Wedthing Vs Caucus

Bearing in mind that you will be affecting the haute couture of Cian, Shane, Alex and myself…

Suggestions are welcome, as I am making vital decisions that will affect the future of being awesome!

Wedthing Resurrection

The weirdly appropriate My Year in Lists is rattling through my head like a meme on the meta-amphetamines.

Trying to assemble a guest list is an interesting cliff face to mount. You have people you want there and will be there, people you want there but you don’t know if they want to be there, people you haven’t seen in years and would love to see now but you don’t know if that’s placing undue pressure on them because you’re kind of embarrassing to know, people you don’t want that desperately wish to come out of a misplaced sense of a affection, people who have kids that you don’t know have kids and said kids don’t get invited so that when they see other kids you knew about present begin to seethe in That Way, people you have to invite because if you don’t will kick up such a fuss with Our Maureen that you will invite simply to spare poor Our Maureen because frankly who deserves that kind of abuse, people you want to invite but don’t because you don’t think they would want to come, even though they do…

Of course, I have been known to over-think these things. I have already been advised by people who have survived the war before me and know better to just do what I like and screw the white noise. But when have I ever listened to good advice? That’s just what they want me to do! Right now, I’m a weird mixture of a self-doubting coffee fiend and Lt George.

I think the safest way to move forward is play the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and plow through the current list before I hit bat country.

Wedthing 3

We’ve just purchased the rings. Holy crap, this is really happening, isn’t it? How many panics, freak-outs and general male sillinesses am I allowed between now and December?

(P.S. I can assure you that I am in truth quite alright.)

Wedthings

What no one really tells you before anything weddingish occurs is that you will be walking a twine-like tightrope over a pit of social jags and spikes that will admonish and glower you to death if you are not very especially and dedicatedly careful with every inch moved forward. They won’t tell you this during or afterwards, mind you, you’ll just discover it for yourself and wonder how girly it would be to weep into an open bottle of vodka. Russian vodka. Russian vodka that has wrestled with the deadliest of vicious bears in the coldest heart of winter and bested said bears in those pankratic arts. GRRRR.

This is very likely just me, however. I have a tendency to read too much into everything and then generate a moral crisis which will drive me into a berserker frenzy. So how much previous to this then is just a standard Brianist nonsense?

Olivia for the most part has a better sense of how to plough on than me. While I meander on trying to contextualise the pinball bouncing that is my approach to everything (in part due to not really having a clue how much anyone wants to know about any of this), she has been busy assembling information, preferences and ideas at her shiny new blog, Lif Laugh. Terrifyingly, the few days work there is a fraction of what she has put together.

There are some things that ladyfolk really are just inherently better at than their Y-chromosome genetic randomisers.

As I vaguely intimated in the previous post, as much as we try to define and create our own event as distinct from the ‘mainstream’ edition, we find ourselves being repeatedly drawn back to at least the structural elements of the very same. Social evolution has optimised the beast that is a wedding, to the point that we have relented in a lot of ways by even calling our plans a wedding, if only as a shorthand. Having tried and failed to apply a number of different names to it (each time getting shot down because they were confusing people or taking too long to explain), it was that or lose a lot of patience very quickly. Our only working alternative was in calling it a commitment ceremony, since it’s a more accurate expression, but I was loathe to do that not due to having issue of association with gay culture but rather because I didn’t like the idea of appropriating anything from a population that is already pretty heavily shafted by law, policy and religion. It’s also very likely that I’m being too sensitive, but screw it. Better over than under. There is a certain resonance, even if the motivation is completely different, and just a little bit selfish as regards myself.

This isn’t the vertiginous issue I was referring to at the start, by the by, just where we have ended up by the glorious vagaries of stream of consciousness.

The weird thing is that I started writing about this long before even the blog existed, but in a weird narrative diary where I was almost looking from the outside in at the event. Aside from the weird (il)logic that brought me to that point (quickly abandoned as when you make yourself an external observer of your own life yo will by default create some strange issues for yourself), I have found myself looking back on the first few months in a similar sort of way, and the relationship as a whole betwixt that. The last few months have been crazed with business, only recently calming and about to go nuts again in very short order, but I’m finally getting a grasp on all of it and a part of me wants to resume what I started.

Which, dang it, would add a third personal written project to my schedule, along with artwork owed and undrawn, an educational avenue to follow, a third party script to format dot dot dot et cetera. I clearly take some grand issue with myself and am determined to bring it to an end by drowning under a literal sea of paperwork. Oh well, I’ll live. I’m functionally immortal anyway, having not aged since college.

What, dear reader, would you care to see me discuss, as I dwell further on this Thing that Weds? Answers on a postcard or in the comments section are e’er welcome!

Wedthing

Whirly whirl whirl. Trying to focus on writing this morning is going even more poorly than normal, so I’m split between trying to incubate what I should be doing while looking at (or for) inspiration in everything else on the ticket at the moment. Which, truth be told, is a great many things.

I should state for the record that I had written at this point a Gilbert & Sullivan pastiche which common sense and a return to sanity have spared you from. It was weird, even for me.

One truth I will offer in its place is that no matter how up on the matter any fellow may be, when it comes to a wedding, commitment ceremonies, civil partnerships or whatever it is being planned, their significant other will proceed to amaze, shock and leave them in general awe of their determination in same. Mean as well as you want or can, you will never keep up.

What’s scarier is that when mentioned to any woman I vaguely know, the response was a uniformed glance, lowered head and raised eyebrow, all psychically communicating one thought: “Well, of course!” (which, in gentlemanly terms translates roughly as “Duh”).

I get that I am generally pretty slow on the uptake to grasping the politics of the fairer sex, but I did not think I was this far down the curve. A part of me wonders how much is social programming (on either side) versus the co-opting of the masculine mind towards the goal of absorbing the pointless minutiae of their preferred trivial pursuit (typically football, the history of Spider-man and the X-Men in my case).

Please don’t misunderstand, I’m into the whole event, kit and kaboodle. I have no small amount of emotional investment in it. The key is context, I suppose. By contrast to my understanding and body of knowledge before the plunge was taken, I now have a very acute grasp of why the standard wedding as a social construct is in place. Its capacity for social signifiers is immense on a scale you don’t quite grasp until you look at it in close detail or try to tweak it some. In trying to follow a path even slightly alternate, you run into difficulty not because people don’t understand but because the ‘standard’ model is just so efficient.

It is a very cold was of looking at it on some levels, but nonetheless I find it fascinating. This may just be because I’ve never put much thought into it, but then I have never had occasion to. Hells, I may just be very slow, enjoying as I do the confines of my own head (more than I should, but I digress).

That said, a part of me is also feeling that twinge of guilt, because I am not doing nearly so much in terms of working on this as my partner in crime is. While the ladies aforementioned and their male counterparts have all assured me that this is Perfectly Natural, and my workload somewhat presupposes that I won’t have the same amount of time to work on it, the pangs still ping in the quiet moments. Then again, this may also be my subconscious chafing at the evocation of the gender stereotypes and my inherent laziness at work.

On the other hand, I have been able to justify looking at a lot of artyfarty(tm) and or attractive-lady infested websites as Genuine Research for a change, rather than just being a Standard Male Pervert.

To be continued…

Our House

Just shy of seven years, I’m finally leaving Dublin.

Brian and Olivia are not getting married

The big (and tiring) question I keep getting asked is thus:

“Hey Brian, when are you and Olivia getting married?”

There are many permutations of this – “When are you going to pop the question?” “When’s the big day?” “So what’s happening with you two…?” and so forth. I would love to say that the variation of verbiage is endless, but that would be silly and implausible. Unlike my weariness in answering the question, which is near-infinite…

A-ha, did you see what I did there?