Weddings & Procrastinations

I have a lot of work to do. I need to interview some people for this profile that my classmate and I are writing for a trade magazine, but more importantly, I need to find someone who's gotten a tattoo removed via laser surgery so I can finish my feature story on tattoo removals/cover-ups by Tuesday. This is a huge problem b/c I have yet to find someone to interview, and the deadline's creeping up kind of quickly.

So naturally, I decided that now would be a good time to update ye olde blog instead of actively calling tattoo parlors in desperation (some parlors are very nice; some are very, very, VERY mean).

I went to a wedding with Tyler on Saturday in Indiana (3rd wedding that I've gone to with him in 3 months...hopefully this is not one of those "8 times a wedding attendee, 0 times having own wedding" kind of things). His cousin, Jilliene, planned a beautiful outdoor wedding on a terrace overlooking a lush lawn and trees. She had one of those trellis things all adorned with purple flowers and roses, and all the rows were bookended on the aisle side with lovely flower arrangements.

Of course, it rained. It began to sprinkle mid-ceremony, so there was really no point in stopping the wedding after the bride had already processed down the aisle. It wasn't really raining in earnest, but it was just enough that everyone's programs got soaked and people were shivering from the cold, damp, grey Midwest summer day.

At one point in the ceremony, Jilliene and Eric performed a "Unity Sand Ceremony," where they took tall glasses filled with purple and grey sand and mixed it together in a bowl to signify their unity. I don't know if it was because I was cold/wet, or because I'm somewhat cynical about marriage in general, but this little ceremony struck me as, well, kind of hokey. I was feeling a little bit bad for thinking those thoughts during a wedding until Tyler leaned over and said, "At my wedding, I'm going to have a Unity Kitten Ceremony. It's where we'll each take a kitten out of separate baskets and put them together in one basket, to signify that we're now united, in kittens." We decided later than a heavy blanket should be thrown on the unity basket so that the kittens won't be able to escape.

Yes. Best symbol of unity, ever.