That Corpse is Just Full of Surprises

A few random thoughts to keep the synapses firing and the eyes focusing. First, a narrative...

This weekend featured both the strangest bachelor party and one of the better weddings I've been to, which is not all that many, though enough to know that its worth the extra money to hire a band if only to avoid the Chicken Dance. My roommate's brother's bachelor party was Friday night and featured...I kid you not...all the orange soda you could drink and XBox games like it was 1999. Sure, some might say that it more closely resembled a 12 year old's birthday party than a final hedonistic hurrah of bachelor boisterism, but those people would of course be right. Still, I enjoyed the experience in much the same way you enjoy seeing that one guy who shows up for casual day wearing a hawaiian shirt and jeans when it is, in fact, not casual day. Oh the sights these eyes have seen. Two days later came the wedding, beginning early in the morning with the groom riding shotgun in my car as we discussed the finer points of Jack Bauer's bad-ass-itude and the gradual decline in quality of McDonald's greasy delights (these topics were the groom's choice, and who is to argue on his wedding day?). Then, in sheer defiance of all traditional ideas of luck, the bride and groom not only saw each other before the wedding, but had all of their wedding photos taken prior to the wedding, while also wearing the wedding bands. The wedding itself was brief, if only because it's hard to combine Italian and Jewish traditions into a single ceremony without a lot of butchering of languages and unintentional racism. The food was good, and I got to hang out in the bridal party VIP room for cocktail hour due to the fact that I was escorting the groom's sister, and then my friends and I became the resident jerks of the wedding, mocking all that we saw. It was a great wedding though, and to Pete and Melanie, I saw Mozol Tov.

That took up more room than I was planning, so I'll keep it to a sentence per topic.

My father should stop attempting to convert me into a neo-conservative ideologue simply because he has given up on reason (which is sad, considering his Princeton education has now gone to waste).

Religious groups should stop protesting things, because all it ever does is increase people's interest in those things and give them free advertising (i.e. Da Vinci Code, Passion of the Christ, South Park, popular music.)

It's racist to assume that all Italian people love the song "That's Amore" and that we enjoy cannolis, even if they are delicious.

Based on the paleness of my skin, my last name seems to now be the only thing representing my Italian heritage while my Irish heritage is taking over like some sort of X-gene, giving me a super ability to drink and burn in daylight.

There is a distinct and important difference between bluegrass & folk music and country music, namely that country music is awful and listening to it makes you wish that we had let the south secede after all.

No one has ever used the phrase "I don't want to bother you" and actually meant it, though at least they had the honesty to acknowledge how intrusive they were being.

Politicians won't stop rolling out the same b.s. legislation just before an election until the voters stop falling for their "keep the gays and mexicans at bay by voting for us" strategy.

And finally, people you went to elementary school with will turn out almost exactly as you expected but look nothing like they used to, thus making it very confusing when you run into them a decade later.

Thank you for bothering to read all of that, because I certainly wouldn't.