For those of you who may not already know, I'm getting married tomorrow. And, now that you know I'm getting married tomorrow, you also now know that I've been living with a psychotic and obsessive-compulsive female now for the last month or so.
It's long been understood that women go slightly out of their minds when it comes to their own weddings, but it's difficult to appreciate the truth behind that statement until you've witnessed about the 50th straight mental meltdown about a mundane wedding detail that matters to absolutely no one except the bride-to-be.
For example, I came home from work one day this week, and after about 15 minutes or so, I became aware that I heard the voice of my significant other coming from somewhere in the backyard. When I followed her voice, I eventually found her squatting in the grass, holding a can of pink spray paint, busily coating several small, heart-shaped boxes. When I asked her what she was doing, she responded simply, with an awkward smile: "making things." In any other context, that would have been grounds for calling the fellows in the white coats, but I just chalked it up to wedding insanity and went inside to watch TV.
As it turns out, those small, heart-shaped boxes have become somewhat of an obsession for my wife-to-be. After painting them pink, she set about meticulously adorning the boxes with the names of each of the wedding guests. All of this strikes me as an amazing waste of time and effort for something that's more-than-likely going to be either thrown away or tossed into a junk drawer and forgotten. From my male perspective, a far better approach would be to use a sharpie marker and write on $1 bills. At least then you pretty much know your guests will at least SPEND your hard "work."
But, it wasn't until last night that I realized the true depth of bride-to-be insanity. As background information here, I feel I should note that the bride-to-be is a redhead, which means she has, almost by definition, a pretty fair complexion. Therefore, I found it a little bit odd when I walked by her office last night, and she asked, with her back towards me, whether she looked tan. Almost by default, I responded "of course not." To which she responded "I don't?" And it was at that point in the conversation that I knew something was amiss.
It turns out, the bride-to-be had undergone an application of some sort of tanning chemical earlier in the day, a substance I recognized only from my college days as something some males slathered themselves in on Friday nights so they could look like pumpkins in an attempt to attract the opposite sex at local watering holes. Apparently, the tanning chemical has evolved and become a popular fixture in a lot of salons nowadays.
To say my bride-to-be looked unusual would be a fairly large understatement. She had taken on the hue of a Thanksgiving turkey in its sixth hour in the oven, her skin golden brown and her teeth looking unnaturally white against the dark background (not that turkeys have teeth, mind you). She didn't look so much tan as she did "almost done."
After about ten minutes or so of me reacting more with laughter than supportive enthusiasm, the bride-to-be started to seriously doubt her sudden tanning initiative, and she jumped in the shower in an attempt to halt any further descent into self-bronzing.
Of course, after getting out of the shower, she started to worry that she'd washed off the chemical too early, and so began another round of obsessive worrying.
Remind me again why I'm marrying her?
I'm in downtown Rochester right now, waiting for a meeting to begin. I'm in the waiting area on the 19th floor of the Gonda building, which means nothing to you if you're not from Rochester. Basically, if you're going through Rochester, the Gonda building is the huge, obvious white building with the wavy glass facade.
One of the things I'm slowly starting to grasp is that, even though I have an actual office, with my name on it, I'm basically allowed to work anywhere my laptop can pick up a Mayo WiFi signal, which, from what I can gather, is a sizable footprint of the city. Then again, judging by my current bird's eye view of Rochester, this city isn't really that large. I suppose once you've looked down over Tokyo from the observation deck of Tokyo tower, a lot of cities look pretty small by comparison.
So anyway, yeah, this remote office idea. Obviously, I like it a lot, but I just can't shake the feeling that's it's just somehow. . . wrong. I suppose nearly a decade of toiling in jobs where I've been tethered to an office for eight straight hours a day has probably had some sort of psychological effect. Not unlike prison, he says, knowing it's not at all like prison. The idea that wherever the laptop goes, so goes my office is one of the really great aspects of this new job, so long as my laptop doesn't go sailing through the window and down 19 stories to the concrete below.
That would be most unfortunate.
More People Than Ever Concerned About Nonsensical Shit, Report Finds
Aug. 4, 2008, NEW YORK (Rhodes Media Services)--According to a recent report released by the non-profit, bi-partisan, unincorporated, union-employed, unaffiliated think tank "The Center for Independent Thinking," the world today is tearing itself apart thanks to the phenomenon of "Global Alarming."
Whether they're concerned about the plight of polar bears, drilling for oil in Alaska's wildlife refuge, or any number of naturally-occurring meteorological events, people today are filling their minds with more and more alarmist bullshit than at any other time in history, the report finds.
"It seems we've reached a conclusive consensus on Global Alarming," said Bradley Richardson, senior spokesman for The Center for Independent Thinking. "People are just generally freaked out about everything. With each day's rising of the sun, more and more people are finding incredibly mundane shit to worry about. Just a couple of hours ago, I was speaking to a mother of four children--one of which was horribly sick with the flu--and all the mother could talk about was how migrating caribou herds might have to walk around oil drilling sites in Alaska. It was kind of amazing, in a pathetic sort of way. I even asked her to locate Alaska on a map, and she pointed to Greenland. Fucking incredible."
According to the report, titled "You Simply Won't Believe the Kind of Shit People are Worried About Nowadays," the worldwide media is primarily to blame for the phenomenon of Global Alarming, since the media is largely driven by a fatalistic agenda wherein fantastic and defeatist narratives dominate the headlines, feeding into public dread and often creating new, typically "grim," narratives based on incomplete research and wildly inaccurate conjecture.
"A major component to Global Alarming seems to be the fact that the reporters and talking heads of most of the world's largest media organizations are more interested in themselves than the stories they're reporting on," explained Richardson. "So, you have all these self-absorbed people who typically look good on camera and those who can write decent articles, but who can't think critically for shit, and these are the people shaping public discourse. It's pretty fucked up, when you think about it."
Jonathan Feldman, 38, devoted husband and father of three children, has worked in a local factory for 15 years, in addition to a part-time bartending job. He was one of the respondents cited in the report. Although two of his children are currently suffering chicken pox, and his wife is on dialysis, he says he's more concerned about California wildfires and tropical storms off the Gulf coast.
"Something's gotta be done about all this shit," said Feldman. "Offshore drilling is going to kill all the whales, and Iraqistan is turning into a civil war between the Shiites and the Hindus. The polar bears are running out of igloos and the Japanese Olympics are showing just how fascist that part of the world truly is. I don't see how mankind will possible survive beyond the next decade. It's sad, really."
