Happy Friday everyone! Hope you're all surviving out there with this heat and whatever flavor of natural disaster surrounds you. Over here in the upper left region, the wildfire smoke has been pretty pretty bad the past few weeks. The perpetual white noise of air purifiers doing the best they can is going to make the dead silence of winter unnerving when it finally gets here. While I'm stuck here tending animals and plants for the foreseeable future, my wife is leaving our bowl of toxic sky soup to go to a wedding with the heir apparent. Which is good because that kid is about to vibrate through the fabric of spacetime if he's stuck inside another day.
It's always nice having a good excuse to get out of here and go visit home, but boy if there's anything that revs up my "what are we even doing here" engines, it's a wedding. Add it to my long list of weird cultural things we all got dragged into because someone in the early 1900's figured how to make money off boring pragmatic rich people traditions and now we all suffer for it.
Are some weddings fun and jovial celebrations of people you love(and maybe even like)? Of course they are. But this isn't about those. This is about the bloated, expensive, self important, indulgent affairs that we all begrudgingly drag ourselves to out of familial guilt because getting it over with is the path of least resistance. You use your vacation time, find special uncomfortable clothes you don't really like and will only wear once, pay for all the travel, then sit around as guest #236 awkwardly talking with other barely remembered contacts like an in person Facebook friends list.
And that's just the mild inconveniences of an attendee. When it's your wedding then it's supposed to be "your day", but there's a mile long list of things you have to do regardless of what you want. No, you can't have a small wedding because your parents say you have to invite your aunts and uncles which means you have to invite your cousins too. Oh also if your great aunt doesn't get invited she'll raise a stink to your grandma and if she's invited then you know the other side of the family is going to be in a huff if nana's bridge partner doesn't also get an invite. Now you're bankrupting yourself at hundreds of dollars a head for people you don't know and probably won't even talk to because....why again?
These are the grumblings of an obviously disgruntled old man who doesn't have any real connections to his broader family, but this curmudgeon believes marriage is supposed to be about the commitment to each other and everything else is superfluous peacocking. I'd go so far as to say there's only a few reasons to have a "proper" wedding. The first and best kind is the one where you ignore every single social pressure and convention, do exactly what you want to do, and have a big party with people you love. The second is if religion is an essential part of your life. And lastly if you're trying to publicly confirm a treaty and solidify socioeconomic relations with a neighboring tribe.
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