burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

I remembered in the shower this morning that the black pumps I would usually wear to a wedding are at my desk at my office now that I've been wearing skirts and thus not wearing boots with my work clothes. I considered biking in to the office to retrieve them (despite the fact that that would give me helmet hair), but I have other dressy shes -- and my black pumps are starting to fall apart, so probably not the best choice for e.g. a night of dancing -- so I wore my rainbow heels.

Kristen's friend Kristen and her fiance Jay (both of whom I'd never met before) picked me up around 12:40 and we headed up to NH (the wedding was at the Enfield Shaker Museum). We chatted a bit and listened to some Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on NPR and I dozed a bit. Then Jay (who was driving, despite it being Kristen's car) comments on the fact that the speedometer says zero -- and oh, also smoke is coming from the hood. So we pull over and call AAA -- and call some friends who are also attending the wedding to drive us the rest of the way.

The original plan was that we'd stay at the museum hotel overnight, but since their car was towed to a garage, they asked some friends to drive them home (they're a two-car household). The two families I knew at the wedding had no room in their vehicles, but the people who picked us up by the side of the road said they could drive me home.

I would have liked better-labelled food, and more vegetarian food period, but I was sufficiently fed.

Their DJ was really good. Yay, dancing. I ended up leaving about an hour and a half into the dancing, by which point the DJ was playing stuff I didn't think was as easy to dance to, so I felt fairly okay about leaving.

When I first started dancing, I thought the shoes were gonna be a real problem, but they ended up being fine.

Mike and Kristen's first dance was to "The Book of Love" by The Magnetic Fields. (It occurs to me that I have the whole 69 Love Songs album on my computer and have never listened to it.)

I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am,
When I am with you.

-from a poem by Roy Croft (which I totally misheard as Robert Frost ... and which in Googling I find is possibly an originally German poem)

I chatted with Molly & co. some before the ceremony.

Molly said they made some concessions to tradition -- like Kristen thought her parents would freak out if they used the Riverside formulation. I asked Molly which one that was and she said: "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, Mother of us all." I said that's what I thought, that I was gonna say, "Isn't that the one that isn't ... WHATEVER enough for me?"

I also expressed surprise when Molly robed. She said because it's all made up we need the trappings to remind us to take it seriously.
I said that because I'm so low church, despite the fact that I have plenty of experience with (my) pastors in robes, I would feel like, "You are not really my pastor." Actually seeing her during the wedding I actually experienced it fine, I think it was largely the dissonance of, "You are existing here, in your summer dress, being my pastor, and now you are donning this black robe and that is WEIRD."

***

"Joy Sadhana is a daily practice in the observation of joy."
-mylittleredgirl [more info]
Thus says God to these bones: "I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am God." (Ezekiel 37:5-6, NRSV, alt.)

( Read more... )

Yesterday was Jeff and Julie's "Friends, Food, and the Purge" -- an Open House in which people were invited to take lots of the stuff they're not bringing with them when they leave town next month.

I thought I was gonna have to fight Missy for All The Theology Books, but she had to work yesterday, so Jess picked up some Christian Ed/small group books for her (Missy just took a new job as Minister of Christian Ed at another church).

I filled 4 bags (though okay the fourth, and even arguably the third, weren't entirely filled), so Jeff and Julie said they would drive them to my house. Julie spread the contents out into 5 bags because they were too heavy for her to lift :)

They were gonna bring them to church this morning and then drive them and me home, but they didn't have time to shovel and get to church on time, so they walked to church and will be dropping off my books sometime before ~4pm today. *waits*

***

George and Jenny's wedding is 3 weeks from yesterday. I was beginning to feel like closed-toe silver heels I could wear to their wedding didn't exist anywhere (in my size, in stock anywhere). But on Wednesday I found Easy Street Strap Mary Jane in Silver Satin (Strap-Silver Satin-7.5-M) for $36 plus free shipping. And yesterday they arrived at my house. They are more pointy-toed than I'd envisioned, and I don't really love the quasi-buckle strap, so I'm not sure I would wear them otherwise, but that is really okay. They're serviceable for the wedding (I can walk in them fine).

***

It started snowing late last night/early this morning. Light fluffy snow.

***

Jeff was liturgist at FCS this morning. The Gospel text is Matthew 6:24-34 ("Do not worry about tomorrow...").

Jeff talked about sometimes being "paralyzed by my own comfort" -- which really resonated with me... that in keeping ourselves protected from anything going drastically wrong in our lives, we also don't allow ourselves to be open to so many opportunities.

In closing he talked about learning to swim -- to relax with your face in the water makes no sense until the moment it does, at which point the alternative -- flailing your arms, or refusal to enter the water -- makes no sense.
He talked about the Dead Sea, so thick with salt that even those who don't know how to swim float. He said he's not a very good swimmer, and he's often not a very good disciple, but that Sea where even those who worry are bouyed, that is what love is like. ♥

From the November CHPC newsletter:

Wedding Invitation
The Clarendon Hill community is invited to witness the joyous wedding of Mike Nickey and Steven Bucchianer (service only), Nov. 22 at 11 a.m., Gordon Chapel in Old South Church. They will be having a small family reception. CHPC offers Mike and Steve many blessings and congratulations!

It took me about 50 minutes to get there -- so I was 15 minutes early (I got both a Red Line and a Green Line almost immediately but had allowed for having to wait).  It's the church that hosted Boston Pride's interfaith service this year, but I hadn't noticed the chapel that time.  It's a very simple stone chapel.

There were maybe 40 people present (and barely enough chairs).  There was a good showing of the core CHPC folks -- SarahG did the bagpipe prelude/recessional, and also in attendance were SarahD, Pierre (Corinne had a recital, hence why she and his wife Jill weren't present), Karl and Katherine, me, and Gusti.

Steve was wearing a white jacket (black vest and bowtie, white shirt and black pants).  Mike was wearing a white shirt and tie (black jacket and pants).

The hymns were "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise," "Here I Am Lord," and "Joyful, Joyful."

The Scripture was 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 and Colossians 3:12-17.

I'm always thrown by Communion at a wedding.  The minister said some nice stuff about "share a meal" as relates to the whole family/cebration aspect of a wedding.  She said the table is open to everyone -- "saint or sinner, gay or straight, Catholic or Protestant" ... Christ is the host and we are all guests and Christ never turned anyone away from his table.

The program didn't indicate which version of The Lord's Prayer and I honestly couldn't remember which version the UCC uses so at first I said "debts" because I was sitting with CHPC folks and that's the version they use but it was "trespasses" -- which I think is still my default were I to recite it unthinkingly on my own, but I got too wrapped up in thinking to be on autopilot.

Lighting the Unity Candle is adorable -- two thin white candles (already lit) on either side of a thicker white candle (unlit) and each partner picks up one of the thin candles and they hold them horizontal and touching (so they make one flame) and lower them down to light the thick candle and the T shape unity thing is a really nice visual.

The vows emphasized encouraging and supporting each other in their growth, which felt different to me than other weddings I've been to but I liked it.  One line was, iirc, "I give myself to you as I am and as I will be."

I'd been looking forward to the "by the power invested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I now pronounce you..." because this was the first same-sex wedding I'd attended and I wondered if I'd get all teary.  (I was thinking about how I've been legally allowed to get married to whomever I want since I was 20, a little less than 3 years after I came to self-identify as queer, and how that potentially influences how I react to the same-sex marriage debates.)

The whole service lasted about 35min.

Edit: While we're talking about same-sex weddings, mjules linked me to the photos from Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi's wedding day.

Friday

I downloaded Firefox 2.0.0.4 on my work computer.
I'm not sure how I feel about the glossy gray rounded edge style.
It gives me the red-underline spellcheck in all windows where there's a composing box, which is neat.
I'm really not sure how I feel about the fact that the close tab is on the active tab itself, not off at the end -- so you can't just quickly click closed a lot of them (unless you start at the far right end).
Also interesting (and kind of annoying), only a limited number of tabs are shown, so you have to use the drop-down menu at the end of the bar to select other ones -- though this does mean you can actually read the titles of your open tabs (the ones that are showing) which ultimately makes navigation easier.

In other news: I am tempted to switch to S2 so for the ease of seeing what other tags an entry has when viewing by tag [I also really like the sidebar of tiered tags -- as seen on emotionalperil, marginalia, nikitangel, etc.,], but I hate S2 on principle, and it's so unwieldy.  Okay, my S1 mainpage ("lastn") style is tweaked from one that someone had already customized, but still, not that hard -- whereas S2 so often feels non-intuitive to me.  *growls*

[I also continue to be annoyed by people who force their styles on the comment page.  I have my flist set to give me ?style=mine, but when I'm browsing other journals, or visiting from Message Center or Memories, I have it inflicted on me.  Yes, I know there are GreaseMonkey scripts for that.  But still.]

And so often I'm browsing journals of people who do have S2 and it makes me sad that their entries aren't (consistently) tagged.  Hi, "cataloguer at heart" = no lie.

/complaint (for the moment, on that topic, anyway)

***

The book my mom's boss is co-writing, turns out they don't need the References, which is good news for her in that she doesn't have to format them, but this makes the baby jesus me cry 'cause it's a nonfiction book, how can you not include References?  And it's easy to list them all in the back, so it's not like they're gonna infringe on your reading experience.  Are people really gonna be intimidated by the presence of superscript numerals?  Oh the irony that the title is: "Come on, People! On the Path from Victims to Victors."

I felt tired after dinner (had kinda napped on the train ride home) but obviously 7:30pm is a bit early to go to bed -- especially when you're sleeping on the living room couch.

Excluding West Wing at work, this is the most tv I've watched in I don't know how long.

We watched Jeopardy (trivia learned: W. H. Harrison was the first POTUS to die in office).

My brother channel-surfed during the commercial breaks, so we watched a large chunk of The Simpsons -- "Eight Misbehavin' " [11.07] -- and some snippets Malcolm in the Middle -- "Secret Boyfriend" [7.06].

I was frequently like dead from laughter at The Simpsons.  For shame.  Hi, that show is not allowed to be that funny.

Malcolm in the Middle had a character who struck me as a Topanga knock-off, and my brother said I should know the actress, and indeed, it was Hayden Panettiere.

A couple minutes before 8:00 it was pointed out that Smackdown would be on soon.  Aww, father-daughter bonding.  ( Read more... )

I also saw more commercials than I have in ages. ( Read more... )

Saturday

My great-aunt Grace died early in June, and we went down to Falmouth for the Memorial Mass.  ( Read more... )

I finally went to Keegan's to get my watchband fixed/replaced. I also stopped by the library -- in part because I was purposely postponing going home to where OriginalRoomie's high-energy chatty family would be waiting.

I was wearing my light blue shirt, Beth said it was a great color on me, was in fact my color.  I tend to prefer darker colors, but I can see that.  (And she didn't ask me if I'd lost weight!  Which, okay, is Marcia's schtick, but still.  I don't actually have weight issues, but I get so tired of the idea that looking good clearly equals looking thinner.)  She said, "You look great -- better than you ever have before.  Whatever you're doing must agree with you."

I told her I was learning ASL, and she said she'd learned some way back in the day but forgotten most of it now.  But she signed that sentence, which I was impressed by.

I really should check out Simmons' night school program.  She said she thought if I went into librarianship I should become an academic librarian -- academic or some specialty like business, law, medical library.  People tell me this, and I'm honestly not sure it's true, but I haven't hashed out exactly what "being a librarian" would look like for me ideally, so I just nod at people.
She said she can see me running my own library (♥!) and if I ever need reference letters, let them know :)

I forget how it came up, but my dad and I finally looked up "que sera sera."  Was nice to know that we're right that in Spanish it would be "Lo que será, será.

There has been some minor controversy about the reputed language of the song title. The phrase "Que sera, sera" was an alteration by the songwriters of a quasi-Italian phrase, "Che sara, sara," a fictional family motto in the 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa. It is not Spanish, Italian, or French (but is acceptable in spoken Portuguese). The correct Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese renderings of the phrase are: 
* Portuguese: O que será, será
* Spanish: Lo que será, será
* Italian: Quello che sarà, sarà
* French: Ce qui sera, sera.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Que_sera_sera#Trivia

I saw Mrs. Leary on my way back to the train, and she mentioned Glasgow.  I'd heard about London, but Glasgow was news to me.  Sigh.  Last time I flew overseas people worried (it was summer of 2003, so people were still recovering from 9/11; I memoried this entry as "i'm not afraid of flying overseas even with a war") and I'm not enjoying starting to have these conversations again.

OriginalRoomie's family was actually not overwhelming (and they did dishes and bought lots of food including booze and ice cream).

My "For the Next X: A Benefit CD for RAINN" arrived, and I am underwhelmed.  Anyone want it?

Sunday

I thought my string of dreams of destruction was over, but this morning I had an extended dream which was not only full of destruction but also actually hit me on an emotional level, as the previous string of dreams hadn't.

As I walked to the laundromat, a car drove by and a guy in it yelled, "Happy Canada Day."

OriginalRoomie's mom's chattiness is starting to grate on me.

However, she asked about where to go to get a new parking pass.  I hadn't realized mine expired Jan. 1 rather than 12 months after I got it, so that was good.  I have definitely been loaning them to visitors, though, and no one has told me they've gotten a ticket.

And they keep washing our dishes, so I can't complain too much.

Do I want to even have a birthday party this year?  I'm already planning to party two weekends in a row, and the Saturday that looks like it'll work better for more people is the date of the CWM benefit concert.

Monday

I slept for ~9 hours.  Rock.

OriginalRoomie's mom gave me a heart-shaped throw pillow with an American flag design.  Um, okay.  Last time she gave me a couple of nice gold-and-black ones.

I did a couple errands and went to the gym.
I was kinda tired, so I started in the weight room, did a few of the machines.
I decided to try the the StairMaster.  Intensity ranges from 1 (lowest) to 20 (highest).  I started at 1, which felt obscenely slow, and ended up spending most of my time at 7 (my average was 6.3).
I am not a fan of the machine.  I kept stepping too far forward and thus smushing my shoe, and I felt like I had to keep watching the stairs because if I wasn't I would get off rhythm and that would be bad.  I also felt like I was being bad to my back, like I was leaning down funny or something, but I couldn't figure out how to do it right.
I had plugged in 20minutes (Fat Burner program, 'cause why not), but I stopped at 10min 'cause I didn't feel like dying.
workout summary: 41 flights of stairs, 0.84miles

I stopped by the office to see if Katie had killed herself from boredom yet :) and chatted with her and Greg for an hour or two.
Katie said her mom has been stressing for the past 8 weeks trying to find a dress to wear to her cousin's wedding.  This led to conversations about how when it's your own kid's wedding, and I insisted that my parents were not of that sort, was like, "They will wear clothes..." though this then prompted ideas (which I did not voice) about having a nude wedding.  Which then reminded me of a recent conversation with Katie about a wedding one of her roommates is going to which will have a pig roast.  I'm a vegetarian so of course I'm opposed to this in principle, but I also thought it would be such a great visual to have a giant pig roasting on a spit.  Katie was joking about going dressed in tattered clothes with a nametag saying "Simon" and going off to die in the bushes.

I felt like I should go clothes shopping but was really not excited about that.  Meh.  Tomorrow will be more productive.

I saw Katherine from CHPC on my way out of the T station.  She's reading Jasper Fforde, on her son's recommendation.  Yay.
I hadn't realized they lived right on Curtis St. so close to Davis Square (for some reason I thought they lived up toward Medford).

What is up with our disappearing trash barrels?  I know we started out with 3 (I recall boggling that we filled them up since there were only 5 of us living in bathe house, and my family of 4 growing up would fill up one trash bag maybe 3/4 of the way each week) but we've had 2 for a while now, but tonight we were down to 1. [Edit: Turns out DownstairsNeighbors are moving to a place closer to the Square, but I think all the trash barrels pre-dated them anyway, so that doesn't help.]

I do not react well to people fussing over me -- which I think is a control freak thing.
OriginalRoomie's grandma was moving stuff in the fridge so I could fit my stuff in when I came back with groceries, and I was like, "No, it's fine, I'll make it fit, don't worry about it {flaps hands}."

Hi, it's my birthday in a week.  Craziness.

The Firefly movie made EW's 2205 "Must List".  Best section is Joss on Summer: ''She brings a haunting quality, while fulfilling my apparent need to have a superpowered adolescent in everything I do.''

applejuicegirl stayed overnight on Friday ‘cause she was attending the Boston Bacterial Conference.  I gave her a grand tour of Norwood -- walking for about an hour and a half.  Surprising how many things were still open at nearly ten o'clock.  Oh and when she was in Boston Friday she was gonna get me flowers, but the place was closed, so she got me a marzipan bunny reptile.

On Saturday i went to athene and lordaerith's "hippy pagan ren wedding".

I changed my clothes multiple times, finally coming up with something that felt more Renaissance than gypsy -- black boots, black skirt, maroon shirt, my mother's tan fringy shawl and fake pearl brooch, my new Tiffany necklace.

I said i felt like a peasant or something, but my mom pointed out that with the shawl and particularly the brooch that really didn't work, so we settled on low gentility or fallen aristocracy.
My mom: "Your father was--"
My dad, interrupting: "A hamster"

I thought cool and rainy had been predicted, but it was warm and humid and rather sunny throughout the ceremony.  It even remained so during the reception.  (There was a brief period of rain over some of the tree-covered mountain visible through the window, and there was a rainbow right there as well which was really cool.)

The wedding was very pagan, with elements of Judaism.  So gorgeous.  Right up there with Paul and Barbara's.  Oh, and after all the official wedding pictures had been taken before we all went inside for the reception, the wedding party rushed the gazebo (and had photos taken by the official photographer).

I'm sure there'll be pictures up at the wedding website eventually, but for now kjpepper has a bunch.

At the reception, everyone was assigned a "castle" (a table).  Mine was Neuschwanstein.  (The wedding party table was Windsor Castle.)  Everyone else at my table was wearing green, so someone joked that really it had all been arranged to offset my maroon.  As it turned out, the common bond was Smith.

The food was good, and we each got a champagne flute glass of mead.

Someone mentioned how it seems like all the [Pioneer] Valley geeks are gonna be married by the end of the summer -- which only kind of puts them off the market as so many of them are poly :)  I was extra amused as recently i had been feeling like there were so many Big Gay Weddings in the offing -- phineasjones&mmm_cake, ladyvivien&how_i_lie... and i thought there was another one but perhaps i was mistaken.

I came home from the wedding to an e-mail from collegecate, so i spent Sunday with her and jadasc.  He dorks Whedonverse, so i actually got to geek out with someone (since i don't do gaming or roleplaying and am not into all that interested/well-versed in most sci-fi/fantasy, i tend to do the sit in the corner quietly thing when i'm around geeks).

The 89 from Powderhouse Square to Sullivan Square passes Norwood Ave. followed by Thurston St.  I was amused.

We watched Shaun of the Dead, which was amusing, but i don't understand the love katemonkey et al have for it.

---

I'm unsure how i feel about tags.

• They show up in individual entries period, and what i've been able to glean so far is that they just show up in main view if you have S2 but not in S1.  I dislike S2, as i have ever since it came out, but not having them show up on one's main page doesn't seem a big deal since for use of one's own journal, one has the Memories feature.
• Looking at the FAQs, okay you can pull up the entries of yours that have a particular tag which i'll grant being neat and useful (though apparently it only pulls up the most recent 100). And of course this also only works with S2.
• They don't seem to show up on friendspages so far as i can tell regardless of style, which bugs me because i thought the major point of tags was to label your entries so people reading could more easily skip over the items not of interest to them, and the majority of people read via friendspages rather than main view of individual journals.

Edit thanks to wisdomeagle: Apparently they do show up on your flist in S2. So basically, for everything except seeing them in individual entries, they only work for S2. I dislike S2 and even if i didn't, i would still think it unfair. (The fact that you can only the most recent 100 entries with a certain tag is also in my opinion a major flaw in the system.) "There are no plans to support tags in S1 in the future." *hates*


Inspired by a post by illiterate, using the phraseology of babyrocket...

[Poll #516594]

( After you fill out the poll, you can read my answer. )