2003
I Need Another Pair of Eyes
Is it just this computer or has something gone horribly awry with the layout of my site?
My MT menus are all screwed up too.
2003
Home for the Holidays, Part II
Read Home for the Holidays, Part II
So we missed the temple wedding and we missed seeing the BBC film crew who was shooting a story about the 2002 Oympics there, and we missed the wedding breakfast at Chuck-a-Rama. (If you’ve ever seen Mormons at a buffet, you’ll understand that I was reasonably less upset about missing last of these events …) But still, the flight was good, and we made it here safe and sound, and we declared a truce on the plane, and it was nice to finally be home again for an extended period of time (we were here a month ago for exactly 24 hours, during which I attended my cousin’s wedding shower and my grandpa’s 80th birthday celebration, where he pointed the cake-cutting knife at me and told me that God had commanded me to make lots and lots of babies). My fam and Ethan’s mom had come to pick us up from the airport, and shortly thereafter followed *drumroll* Wonderful Moment of the Trip #2: Eating lunch at the Rio Grande Cafe.
The next thing on the agenda was the wedding reception. Because we had planned to be in town about 12 hours earlier than we actually got here, I thought I’d have time to go shopping for a dress. (Read all about the clothing dilemma here.) But since that was now out of the question, I had to go with the trusty little black dress, another off-the-shoulder number, and the strappy shoes affectionately dubbed my “whore shoes.” It was not unlike what I wore this time. I took a lot of lame pictures at the reception that I’d love to share, but I’m having some technical difficulties that will prevent me from doing so until I get back to Berkeley, so you’ll just have to be patient until then. What I do have, however, is pictures my mom took at the temple hoo-ha earlier that morning. (I’m still having trouble with the photos looking grainy and bitmappy.)
The happy couple. Notice the fur-trimmed hooded cloak that is to die for. I want a fur-trimmed hooded cloak too!
The happy couple trying on their newly acquired righteousness in front of some well-practiced righteous relatives.
I am related to all of these people except the couple at top center. I have no idea who they are or why they are trying to mooch off of my family’s happiness. And here is yet more evidence that my grandparents (far right) can’t resist making faces when they get their picture taken. It’s as if on the count of three my grandpa yells “woo woo” and my grandma gets in touch with her secret Greek heritage and exclaims “Opa!”
Here are both sides of the new family. Note the flip-flops, the shiny track suit, the ankle-length denim dress and matching coat, and the requisite pregnant woman.
On the left, the videographer who has done this family’s weddings since way back in the day when it was okay to take more than one wife. On the right, the photographer who is single-handedly trying to revive the fashion of matching your eyeshadow to your clothes.
R to L: My aunt, my grandma, and my mom (subverting the dominant paradigm by forsaking the requisite gray scarf for purple glasses).
The crew from the BBC who made friends with my mom and probably emerged from the encounter thinking, “Hey, these Mormons sure have a good sense of humor about how strange they are.”
A Mormon tradition: make the unmarried couples stand in front of the temple doors and imagine what it will be like on their special day. This is my sixteen-year-old cousin with his first girlfriend ever. Notice how they don’t seem at all freaked out by the pressure.
2003
Home for the Holidays, Part I
Grrr. I’m in the kind of rut I used to get into with my old paper journals. I get so busy doing all kinds of wonderful things that I don’t have time to write about the very things that I’d most like to remember in the detail afforded only by one’s writing a journal entry about them. Of course, I always have plenty of time to write when absolutely nothing is going on, but then, those are not times really worth writing about, are they? And now I’m stuck because I have so much to write and not nearly enough time or energy to give it all the attention it deserves. Usually this means I work myself into a paralysis of not being able to write anything at all and so I don’t for a long long time (see my collection of half-filled journals), but this time I’m going to try to capture some snippets of the last week and a half in an effort to bust out of this rut and have some record of the good time I’ve been having at home.
It all started out with a not-so-good time. Our flight from OAK to SLC was scheduled for Friday evening. Our arrival would be late enough that I could just let the Dramamine put me to sleep until the next morning, when I would wake up bright and early and go experience the wedding shenanigans at the temple. We got to the airport about an hour ahead of schedule thanks to the always helpful Teddy, who drove us there on his way to Palo Alto to see Bad Santa. As he pulled up to the curb to drop us off, Ethan dug into his bag to pull out the tickets and realized he’d left them at home on the counter, where he put them after taking them out of his bag to make sure they were in his bag. We went through the backpack four times looking for them among what must have been more than a hundred sheets of paper, all needed for a research paper he was finishing. Normally, we could have been issued tickets at the counter, but because we were flying on free passes, we needed the actual passes to get on the plane. So while I sat with the bags and tried not to think about how much I needed to pee and how I hadn’t eaten anything since noon, Teddy and Ethan raced back to the house, 30 minutes away. When they made it back to the airport, the long road to the terminals was completely stopped up with bumper-to-bumper traffic. So about a mile and a half away from the terminal, Ethan decided the best thing to do woud be to get out and run the whole way through the rain. He’s lucky he’s on the wonderdrug that all but cured his asthma. He’s also lucky he didn’t get stopped by the cops who saw him–a thick-bearded man with a heavy black coat and no luggage–running on the side of the freeway toward the airport. He made it back to me at 8:45, right as our flight was taking off. Of course, sitting there on my suitcase for an hour by myself gave me plenty of time to get upset, and his yelling at me for not being already in the baggage check line (which was only two people long) did not help, but it really sucked when we found out we couldn’t get on a flight until 9 the next morning. We went outside and waited another five minutes for Teddy to get his car through the traffic, loaded up our bags, and started home. I didn’t want him to miss his movie date on account of us, so I asked him to just drive us to the nearby BART station so we could take a train home. Problem was we couldn’t find the BART station and drove around in a dark and scary industrial section of Oakland until it was clear Teddy wasn’t going to make the movie and he might as well just drive us home. It was not a pleasant night when we got back to the apartment, but that’s not really something I care to get into here.
Even though I was really pissed off at Ethan for forgetting the tickets, I still have to record part of this incident as *drumroll* Wonderful Moment of the Trip #1: A man ran for a mile and a half through the driving rain, at great personal risk to his health and his clean criminal record, just for me. How could I stay mad at him after all that?
