Seems I can only consider the former when the latter is at hand.
Welcome to my night: It's raining; I'm fighting off depression and my brain needs to focus on something none-too complicated. I'm thinking back on last year a bit and several things I wanted to ponder/talk about but never quite got around to.
In December my far-too-young-to-get-married nephew got married, a "necessary" wedding, I'll note with a wink and a shrug; the kind that in my parents' day would have been called a shot gun wedding. By my day such a thing was thought obsolete (at least by me and mine -- there's a diary on that topic, too), but we're in a new era of the personal politics of procreation, and an 18 year old and a 19 year old tied the knot in a small but, "family-oriented", ceremony.
Now, I hate weddings, all weddings. I'm not overly keen on marriage, but recognize that my own particular viewpoint on the institution does not define the whole. Weddings on the other hand, leave me cold and they always have. I have in my life deeply offended close friends and relatives by refusing to attend their weddings. It has taken 20 years for one of my college friends to forgive me, but my consistent position of disdain over time has helped heal that wound.
Still, I only have two nephews. So I packed up the offspring and we headed to Florida for a quick weekend trip. Did I mention that I hate weddings? Or that I also hate my ex-brother-in-law? I'm sure that I've included the fact that the groom's mother--my closest sibling in age--hates me? My nephew, though, he loves me. And he asked, specifically, that we come. And so we did, since in the end, that's the only detail that really matters.
This was only the third marriage ceremony I had attended in the last 21 years, the fourth in the last 24, if I include my own in the tally. So you can imagine, perhaps, that it does linger in my consciousness a bit, and understand, possibly, why weddings are on my mind tonight.
My last four weddings aren't the four I'm thinking of tonight however, at least not all of them. The last two are ones I'd like to consider in more depth, along with two other, very high profile ones from the past year.
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