Because I married a Catholic girl (well, pretty much lapsed, but you get the point), there's been a sharp uptick in the number of Catholic weddings I've attended. My own wedding was about three minutes long and was hilariously bungled by the officiant, who started out with some Jesus shit we didn't ask for and it went on for a bit until he realized he was using the wrong vows. We may not even be married, I don't know.
Catholic weddings do not last three minutes.
[SHORT DIGRESSION: My wife, having grown up in Ireland, is obviously Catholic, but doesn't really go to mass that much. HOWEVER, when we moved into our last house before this one, she got a letter from the local Catholic church - ADDRESSED TO HER PERSONALLY - welcoming her to the neighborhood and asking her to come on by and be Catholic with them. HOLY SHIT JESUS, what kind of worldwide monitoring network are you running? How could the Catholic church have known that she just moved in? It's not like she notified the pope or anything. CREEPY.]
At this particular wedding in suburban (way, way suburban) Chicago, the priest had a distinct Eastern European accent but the service was all Rome: stand up, sit down, kneel, here's the reading of "Love is patient love it kind", vows, communion, and so forth. Like an hour. Those Catholics like their long services, huh? Also, there's a lot of talking back and forth, which those of us raised Protestant don't expect. Protestant services are mostly one-way affairs, and the congregation doesn't really get chatty with the preacher like at Catholic.
This has been your musings on weddings and church for today.
ALSO A QUICK BICYCLIST STORY:
We were in Wicker Park in Chicago on Thursday. I guess it's the "hipster" part of Chicago, to use some shorthand so I don't have to do a whole lengthy description of what it's like. Anyway, we're walking down the street and suddenly hear this guy SCREAMING violently. So naturally we look and it's a guy on a bike basically freaking out and unleashing a shitstorm on a car. Now, admittedly, I didn't see what the car did to provoke this but I hope it was REALLY BAD because the guy on the bike was losing his fucking mind. Like "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER? YOU FUCKING IDIOT." The car obviously had Kansas plates because the bicycle guy goes "OH FUCKING KANSAS HUH? GO BACK TO FUCKING KANSAS OR LEARN HOW TO DRIVE" and so on and so on and so on. Now, I am more than willing to accept that the car might have done something very bad and that the bicyclist's safety was endangered but personally I think it was maybe a bit much.
(I know, I sound like C.W. Nevius, but it was actually really amazing how long the guy went on. If somebody cuts you off or something, I can understand being mad, but I really thought this guy was going to kill someone.)
It's hard for me to type on the same screen as the words "CW Nevius", who moved even higher on my What's Wrong With America list after that bike column, so I'm NOT going to go into how if you have to SWERVE into traffic and then oopsie you almost kill someone, maybe you're going TOO FUCKING FAST in the first place. But I digress, since I wanted to just bring up a general analogy. Let's start with the weddings. Sometimes after weddings --and sometimes very soon-- come babies! The baby is totally vulnerable and precious, according to the parents. The baby has nothing between itself and instant death if it were, say, tossed into a cauldron of hot lava. Let's imagine some evil person is swinging the baby over the cauldron. NBD! The person was totally NOT going to toss the baby in the lava BUT the parents are freaking out because HOLY SHIT baby-lava-death, but the evil person's all "Just playing around!". The parents are unamused and unleash on the evil person.
ReplyDeleteI'll let you figure out who the evil person is (hint: careless drivers), what the lava is (hint: crazy traffic), who the baby is (hint: the cyclist's body), and who the parents are (hint: the cyclist epinephine-fueled brain going into survival mode).
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