This’ll be brief, for two reasons. One: I am heading to Japan and South Korea for two weeks on a honeymoon. Two: We’re on a honeymoon because we got married.
You are warned about this by friends, movies, and great works of literature, but weddings are exhausting. Doubly so if you inherited a reluctance to ask people to do stuff for you. (It’s not a crippling problem, more like you get 90% of things done yourself then panic and ask a friend for a favor at the last minute.) One experience I hadn’t portrayed in the Wedding Canon, for example, is waking up at 7 am to help loud out the candles, glassware, flowers, and decor you personally brought with you. This was appreciated; it was also the errand that pushed me over from happy-tired to the sort of fatigue where “Did you grab the passport?” comes out as “Passport, grab you? Did you, uh?” And the nice thing about marrying the right woman is that she can translate this as you drive to the airport.
This affliction hasn’t traveled to my fingers yet, so I am typing until I turn into Howard in “The End of the Whole Mess.”
Assorted thoughts and advice:
A music venue is perfect for a wedding. No disrespect to the beach wedding people, barn wedding people, cosplay wedding people. (Maybe some disrespect to cosplay wedding people.) But a place that not only hosts constant events (there are lots of those) but is built for events with clear live audio improves everything.
Invite more people than it would be reasonable to pack into the room. In the final run-up to Saturday, I felt a bit like Monty Burns watching his ringers succumb to eight misfortunes. Death in the family, unexpected (but wanted, don’t worry) pregnancy, canceled flight, a guest’s sibling planning a short-notice wedding that takes up the same day on the calendar, very far away.
Bite your lip and invite some of the people you didn’t invite originally to take advantage of the cancellations. This solves the problem and nobody truly feels bad about it. Parties; they’re enjoyable.
Splurge on the food. People will remember if you cut corners and served pasta with no sauce or bread rolls that battle back if you try to cut them. (We splurged, don’t worry.) They’ll still be your friends, and if they’re related to you they’ll probably stay related to you, but they will remember.
Think of other people, in general. Sounds easy, but I made (then unmade) some weird decisions because I know what I like at a wedding, and I feel awkward asking people to spend a bunch of money to celebrate me, but not everybody has my hang-ups. Again: Parties are enjoyable.
Write some vows. I dreaded this, wrote some on the officiant’s deadline (48 hours before the wedding), then took a walk to grab some last-minute supplies and wrote entirely new ones on a reporter’s notebook, maybe 90 minutes before going onstage. That worked for me, maybe a different schedule would work for you, but I learned that your loved ones do appreciate hearing something deep about your feelings written on one of life’s most panic-inducing deadlines.
I just spelled “panic” with a K, before fixing it, so let’s wrap this up.
The Best Thing I Read: No damn way was I able to concentrate on a novel this week. But the Erin Griffith and David Yaffe-Bellany story on Tom Brady’s suicidal tango with crypto had something to love in every graf. One favorite: “The firm has also removed some crypto language from its marketing, downplaying terms like NFT, another person with knowledge of the company said.”
The Best Thing I Watched: Let the wife (previously fiancé) do the programming this week while I flop-sweated, and the most interesting discovery I saw on my own was, well, technically made by YouTube. Covering the 2024 campaign has meant watching incredibly long podcast interviews with candidates, mostly RFK Jr, and this has trained the algorithm to spit out more very long interviews. I started getting recommended lots of videos where people ask questions of passersby on college campuses, prompting either conversation or confrontation — the ones where someone yells “fuck you!” and hurls a bike at the guy wearing a sandwich board trend the highest. This led me to the work of Peter Boghossian, part of the “Sokal Squared” squad, who’s also the most direct connection between the “new atheist” movement and the current gender-critical movement. He developed the see-if-strangers-can-defend-their-takes format into “street epistemology,” first to free people from their religious hang-ups, now to get people to analyze whether they really believe ideas like “girls and boys shouldn’t be raised differently.” No take here, I’m still figuring out this genre.
The Best Thing I Heard: Our incredibly good wedding playlist, which I’ll upload at some point. But first, my wife and I have to go to Japan. It would be funny to everyone but me if I missed our flight because of substack.
Congrats!
Loved the recommendation on the Tom Brady thing also, gonna get it.
Is the lesson of bullet point five (second to last) that you undid decisions that would have increased guests’ expenses or went through with them because those expenses led to a better party?