Tuckered Out

I am all tuckered out from this past weekend, and it’s already Tuesday. I skipped knitting class last night (I know!) because my yarn was in the bag that the baggage claim people lost and because I had an urgent date with Life of Pi which is our next Book Group book, yay. I really liked it, and fully expect to be the only one of the group who did. But I don’t know why traveling made me so tired. Could it be consumption? Is that why I keep coughing up all this blood into my cambric hanky?

I was in Colorado for my friends’ John and Treasa’s wedding this weekend, you see. I think maybe I should have taken an extra day off work and made more of a trip of it, but Burning Man has pretty much put an end to frivolous days-off-taking for the time being. My flight took off from Seattle at 7:00 in the AM and so I was blissfully asleep and probably drooling all over who was so unfortunate as to sit next to me during that leg of the trip…which was only a faint harbinger of the overarching tiredness I would experience all weekend. And I wasn’t even in the bridal party or anything…all I had to do was show up wearing lipstick and watch people at the front of the church and then go to the reception and eat food and dance around. Cough!

So, I got into Denver and finally got to see Carl for the first time in several weeks…sitting at the terminal doing some work on his laptop. Lovely Dawn was there to meet me and Matt (one of John and Treasa’s housemates who was on the same flight) and Abi had made it in on time too so we were all ready to go stand in line for an hour and a half at the car rental place. Will you think me ridiculous if I tell you I ran over to Carl and kissed him right in the middle of the airport? It was so good to see him. I have pictures of him all over the place and I could tell you exactly what he looks like, down to the scars and freckles and the exact color of his hair, but nevertheless a few weeks is all it takes to be completely shocked at how beautiful my boyfriend is. Everyone else in the airport looked like they were made out of gray cement, and he was this gorgeous stained glass window. A stained glass window that was hunched over his laptop and then looked up and saw me and threw it to the floor and ran over to hug me. Absence really is making my heart grow fonder this summer, but it’s nothing compared to his presence. It was hard to concentrate on saying hello to everyone else and to finding the rental car place and standing in line. He gave me a letter and a fancy tin of gummy bears (uh, okay) from Dean and Deluca, of all places. I gave him a kiss in the car line, as if I was at Disneyworld or something with my sixteen year old boyfriend.

My ardor was quickly cooled, though, by the hassle of renting the car. We upgraded to a full size, perceiving that five people were perhaps too many to fit into a Geo Metro, and then after waiting on the hot tarmac watching other people merrily grabbing cars we wanted upgraded to a minivan. A minivan with many exciting features, like two sliding doors and a thing that told you in which direction you were going (uh, yeah, that would be a compass, right?) but somehow would not let you out when you unlocked the doors. Very frustrating, but we managed to get to Fort Collins all right, with a stop in the lovely hippie town of Boulder. We even managed to exit the van in a timely manner, after pushing every button in that damn car. And then it was time to see all sorts of people who were in town, and then go to the rehearsal dinner, and laugh at the sight of 6’3” Rob escorting a tiny eight year old junior bridesmaid down the aisle, and then go back to the hotel and eat tons of candy and play this weird game that looked to me like Simon but was really Taboo. It’s called Catchphrase, I think. You’re supposed to play in teams, but we just passed around this little machine that told you a word or a phrase and you have to do the Taboo thing where people have to guess it without your saying the actual words. My Friend Anna got the phrase “Cloud of Dust.” Cloud of dust? Uh, yeah. No one got that. Her face while she was trying to describe a cloud of dust was really funny; an expression that clearly said “Cloud of dust?” This was supposed to be some sort of bachelor/bachelorette party for John and Treasa but sadly they couldn’t make it for family and Kinko’s reasons. Well, we all had a good time. I had such a good time that I became, briefly, psychic. Someone had the catchphrase thingy and said something like, “This is a guy who…” and I yelled “Zookeeper!” with all the force in my lungs and I was totally right. Be careful what you think about around me, my friends, because I can totally read your mind. That’s right.

The next day Dawn, Abi, and Kat and I hopped into the minivan after only a half and hour or so of struggling with the keyless entry thing, and went early to the church to help set up a little. We got there right around the time the bridesmaids and Treasa were getting back from their hair appointments, and the two junior bridesmaids (who would later become my best friends at the reception) were very excited about their hair and their dresses. Anna (who was the maid of honor and wore a beautiful dress she made herself for the occasion) told me that the older one was so enchanted with her hair that she vowed she was going to wear it that way to her prom. When asked why, exactly, she was thinking about prom at this early stage in the game, she said “Well, I am in middle school.” While they were getting their dressed on, Abi and Kat and Dawn and I did some decorating and program folding and sitting around talking about the acoustics of the church and delighting everyone with our church-camp song stylings. The groomsmed showed up and John had to get ready for his own wedding in the middle of the church courtyard. He’d been to get his hair done as well and looked very nice. I happened to have a little product with me and so right before the ceremony we touched him up a little. Anna needed help lacing the corset (that she made, of course) and I remembered being her maid of honor four years ago and lacing up her wedding dress (which no one will be surprised to learn she made herself, I am sure), with all its thousands of grommets. Thankfully Treasa’s dress had a zipper on it, and she looked so gorgeous in it. I’d never even really seen her dressed up before, let alone in something like a wedding dress. It was wonderful and magical and she was a beautiful bride.

Everyone was, actually. The whole wedding party was just so good to look at. Not just because they were freshly showered and dressed up, I don’t think, but also because everyone was happy to be there and excited for John and Treasa, who were, of course, the best looking of the bunch. Big smiles all around, lovely vows, happy eyes. I didn’t know either of their families very well, but all their (and, you know, my) friends were just as pleased as the blood relatives, I think. It feels like a triumph somehow when two good friends get married, especially if you’ve watched them get together and seen their relationship grow. I’ve known them for a while (especially Treasa) but have only got to know them since they moved to Seattle last year, when they were already engaged, but I was still happy to watch them make this big commitment. I have never yet been able to put my finger on why getting married feels like such a big thing, if you’ve been together for a while and even bought a house together, as Treasa and John have. Isn’t owning property enough of a bond? For a lot of people, I know, it is, but there still is something really satisfying about watching people make this big declaration in front of their families and friends and God and everyone about their intentions to stay together, come hell or high water. So we did that, and then we went back to the hotel for a while for naps (cough! cough!) and lunch and showers, since it was really hot in the church, and then it was time for the reception, where we sat with many very cool and intelligent friends and ate and toasted and danced and ate some more and danced some more, and then when we got tired of that, danced and ate for a bit. And also we all must have sweated five hundred gallons apiece, to which I was reconciled by telling myself that all this exercise must surely be aerobic and would negate the effect of the full throttle junk food eating I had been doing since Friday morning.

For a reason which escapes me know, the little bridesmaids (as we soon all started calling them) decided at some point during the day that I was their best friend and were all talking to Anna up at the head table about whether they thought I would dance with them and if they should go up and ask me. They did, and I did, for dance after dance after dance. Lots of stamina, these girls. One of them had even just got stitches after walking through a glass door (totally off topic shout out to Manya!) and she still kicked my ass. Not like it’s that hard to kick my ass in anything that requires stamina. And I know I’m a horrible dancer, and that I’m the worst kind of horrible dancer: the kind that only has about three moves and who looooooooves eighties’ songs. It’s just the way I am. I even did that thing where you slow-dance with your boyfriend that you haven’t seen for a long time, even though in the grand scheme of life two weeks isn’t that long, and you dance to In Your Eyes which is the best boyfriend song ever even though it’s totally clich餠to think that, and I even did the thing where I sang the words to him while looking deeply into his eyes. It was cheesy in the greatest sense of the word.

After the reception, which was conveniently located in the hotel in which we were all staying, we went up to John and Treasa’s honeymoon suite (I know!) and hung out with them for a while and listened to them call each other “husband” and “wife” which was very cute. When they began to hint that they wanted us to take off, we repaired to yet another room and I gossiped with Abi and Anna and then with other people about the merits of LiveJournal vs. a plain old diary-x journal like, oh, say, this one. We talked and talked and talked until three in the morning and I was feeling like a rock star because usually I am in bed by ten, when I looked around and noticed that people had literally fallen asleep while I was talking and that I was, in fact, talking to myself. How embarrassing.

Sunday was sad because it meant I was going to have to get in the minivan again and drive to the airport and then have to get on a plane that was going in the exact opposite direction from the one that Carl was getting on. That’s the worst. Before that though a bunch of us went out to breakfast and then to a very nice park that had a beautiful willow tree just the right size for seven or eight friends to gather around and play in and talk some more. We saw some very interesting bugs…I did, at least. People stopped coming over after the first few times I yelled something like “Look! An ant carrying a dead beetle! Can you believe it?” And it was very windy and there was even some thunder and lightning far away, which was exciting to the West Coasters in the crowd. And then it was time to say goodbye and to get in the van and to drive and drive in the surprisingly flat Colorado landscape, and then to be sad about saying goodbye to Carl for a while and then to almost miss my flight and to switch planes and to read a book and to get my luggage lost and then to lose my car in the car park place and to call Carl and leave voice messages going “I am STUCK in a PARKING LOT in TUKWILA and I’m never going to be at home AGAIN!” and to feel like a real idiot when the owner of the car park had to drive me around in her car to help me find mine, and to finally come home and get into bed and think about my good weekend with my good friends seeing them celebrate a good relationship with a good wedding.

I mean, no wonder I’m exhausted.