The Wedding Daze Part 4: The Couple Shots

More, and more, and more photos happened:

Super pretty photos:




Kissing photos:


Serious photos:


Not serious photos:


Blue photos:


And many, many more. All by Somer

It was definitely a new experience for me to be on the other side of the lens in this situation. It was fun though. And I love looking back at the pictures and how beautiful my wife is. I even like myself in most of these photos. That never happens.

A Brief Thought On Marriage

It seems that once you get married in this particular culture, that it is expected that you are no longer your self. People don't ask you how you are any more. They only ask you how married life is. Your individuality is no longer a question, as though you have been assimilated by the Borg in Star Trek:



But I assure you. It's not like that at all. It really isn't. Marriage is great. But I still have thoughts of my own. I still have good days and bad days that are my own good/bad days. I still do things all by myself. I still have my own opinions, and I actually can have a conversation about things unrelated to marriage. I am still me. But no one asks about me. It is only we. And somehow it always comes back to that.

Am I weird? Has my programming failed me, like Hugh in the episode "I Borg". I will have to speak with some serious nerds about this.

Adventures In Dating

I've been posting all over this blog this week. The wedding story has a few more parts to reveal, but I figure I'll take a little break from that. It was such an epic day that it requires a long time to properly tell the story. So I had something else I intended to post about today, but now I can't remember what that was. Maybe it will come back to me over the weekend or something. Right now I am thinking about Dating.

Dating is a really, really horrible and confusing game that adults play. If I ever have children I will strongly advise them to wait until they are at least 24 to get into that. At least my experience would seem to advise such a strategy. My dating life was nothing to brag about for sure. And everyone knew it. I was always the butt end of many a dating joke among my peers. I was the guy that made all the other guys feel better about their own horrors. I was the tale that you told around a campfire that ended with something like, "and if you aren't careful, the curse of Brandon may befall you too."

I spent a lot of years in the friend zone. I also spent a lot of years being the 'cool guy'. When a girl says you are a 'cool guy', it's not a good thing. Take my word for it. They never date the cool guy. They just wear you like an accessory because you go well with their outfit. Another thing I heard a lot from women is, "Your wife is going to be so lucky." I don't know what that means, but it isn't good. A girl never says that to you if she thinks she's going to be the one. So I became sort of a professional at making friends with girls. I can make friends with a girl just by walking into the room and saying nothing. It happens all the time. But when it comes to dating them I am just as clueless as the next guy, quite possibly even more so. I was always that guy that the other guys took pity on and tried to tell me what I was doing wrong.

Now that I am married, however, it seems that the roles have been reversed. Now other guys actually sometimes ask me for advice on their dating situations, and I'm at a loss to help them. I don't know anything.

"But you are married?" They desperately implore. "You must know something?"

Many honest married men I know have admitted to a certain cluelessness that I can now attest to. Even if you once thought you knew what women were all about, as soon as you get married you just realize that there are a lot more things you never even knew you didn't know. You ask yourself, "How did I get here?" And your mind seems to know even less than it did before. Every answer provides a new question.

There are a lot of serial daters who will give you all sorts of advice on dating. I know a few of those. And I learned nothing from them. I broke all of their rules, and somehow ended up happily married in the end.

Then there are women. If you are friends with them then they too will give you lots of advice on how it's done. I had a few of those womanly friends, and I found that their advice can give you lots of insights into what women are thinking, but it doesn't really help in the practical way of actually getting them to like you. Women are better at telling you what not to do, than what to do.

So the rules of dating seem to be highly open to personal interpretation. They are merely guidelines to keep you away from hornets nests, and other obvious pitfalls. These are the rules as I know them:

#1 - Be direct: If you want to go on a date with a girl, you absolutely have to ask her using these words, "Would you like to go out on a date?" Or something very close to that. While you are busy trying to decide whether they like you and you should ask them out, they are busy wondering when you are going to get around to asking them out. They are always 2 steps ahead. And girls are very literal. If you don't ask them out literally they think you just want to be their friend, and you will end up in the friend zone. The friend zone is actually under rated. It's not a bad place to be. Unless you don't want to be in the friend zone. And if you are a single guy, you definitely don't want to be there:

#2 - Don't be a douche: Seriously dudes, walking up to a strange girl and saying something like, "You lookin' hot tonight. Let's go to my car and tear off a piece!" Never actually works. Ever. I know because I know those guys. If you want a girl to respect you, then you have to respect her. It's as simple as that. I find that most girls get into the dating situation expecting you to be a jerk, precisely because every single one of them has dated one, or two, or twenty, jerks already. If you get away with it it's because they have stopped expecting any different. It's much better to surprise them by not being a jerk.

#3 - Don't be weird: Ok, you can get away with a lot of weirdness if you meet the right girl. But it's a very fine line. Weirdness is a dangerous game. Leave it to the professionals like me.

#4 - Aim High In Dating - I know a lot of dudes who try to date every girl who crosses their path. Don't be desperate. This also falls under the Don't be weird rule. Save it for the ones you are really interested in. If you don't want to seriously date someone, you probably shouldn't be worried about getting them into bed within 7 days either. If you want women to date you, you have to respect yourself as well. Don't be afraid to just be friends once in a while.

#5 - Space: Once you find yourself in a dating situation don't move super fast, or act super desperate. Don't call them several times a day, and leave creepy messages on their phone. You don't have to be with them all the time. They won't forget about you if you wait for half a day to send them a text message. Every girl I know absolutely hates when she's out with her friends and you're blowing up her phone asking her what she's doing. They hate it so bad that their rage propelled Lady Gaga's song "Telephone" to #3 on the billboard charts. (Lady Gaga can actually give you a lot of insight in how to deal with Women.)

#6 - Act confident/Fake it if you have to: You will make mistakes. You will sometimes be a jerk. You will often act weird. Don't let it get to you. Just be yourself, and don't get obsessed with a whole bunch of rules. Even when you think you have totally struck out, call her back. A great girl is always worth totally humiliating yourself for.

So there you go. That's how you date a girl. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just doesn't. It only worked once for me. But that's all I got. It probably doesn't help you at all.

The Wedding Daze Part 3: The Group Photos

Now it was time to try and round up all the right people so that we could have our pictures taken together. I know how easy that sounds. But then, I also know how difficult it actually is. Fortunately our photographer, Somer Ahonen, has done this a million times. It went a lot smoother than it could have, for sure. And it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be to keep on smiling, although I'm not the best model.

I'm definitely glad we captured everyone in their fancy clothes. Everyone looked great. My woman looked very tasty.

Election Day Pumpkins

It's the first Tuesday in November and our pumpkins have had it. It was a long, hard Halloween season, and they are ready to be retired.

The Lesser of Three Evils

Election Tuesday - South Salt Lake

For reasons I will never understand, I often get a good migraine headache on Tuesday afternoons. I have also noticed a pattern, since George W. Bush's re-election in 2004, of getting a really solid migraine headache on all election days, which also happens to fall on Tuesday. Therefore, I have a very special place in my heart for elections, and voting.

I'm always torn between the two dominant political philosophies of our time; pure apathy, or vengeful spite. I often feel that there is absolutely no point to voting in Utah. The result is a foregone conclusion. Mitt Romney got something like 85% of the vote here in the Republican primary in 2008. That should tell you everything you need to know. Especially, if like me, your political leanings are toward the bleeding-heart left. But then I also feel that I need to go down and vote just for the sake of dissension. I like the feeling of standing on the edge of a tall cliff and peeing into the wind.

So my democratic instincts usually get the better of me, even when I have no idea who I'm voting for, or why. Local elections in Utah are a lot like High School elections. We are expected to vote on the person who has the prettiest signs posted out on the street, or sometimes by straight name recognition. When I don't know any of the names, I just vote for the Democrat because I know they will lose anyway, so I can't be held responsible for any crimes against humanity if I accidentally voting in some Nazi sympathizer who ends up destroying the world with toxic rhetoric.

This particular mid-term, my primary motivation in going to the polls was in hopes of expressing my disapproval of all those unAmerican, fascist, pig-sucking, bastard tea-baggers by writing in Robert F. Bennett for the US Senate. I believe he has always served this state well, in spite of his conservative handicap, and only got railroaded out of this election because he is, in fact, a decent human being. The tea-baggers don't want any human beings in office at all. Only robots who will do their bidding even if it means screwing the 99 percent of Americans who still have a brain and don't prescribe to their hateful bull crap.

I resent that half of our political system is now being controlled and manipulated by a small group of fringe radicals who claim to be standing up for our constitution by voting for people who can't even tell you what the constitution actually says. But damn it! They will defend it at all costs. They will burn us to the ground in the name of freedom. Even as I am typing this I am sure some heavy-handed thugs are running up the stairs to knock me down and stomp on my head, and then call the police to have me arrested for soiling the ground that only they deserve to tread upon. It could happen to you too. We are all going to get Tea-bagged in the end.

But enough of that. I'm starting to get a headache already. So I went down there to cast my votes. As usual, I was the youngest person there, and I could tell by the reaction of the old ladies when I walked in that I was probably the youngest person in to walk in all day. They seem to get all pleased and satisfied at the sight of someone who still has teeth. I feel really awkward and exposed in this situation. But alas, it will be a good 40 years before I run into someone my own age at the polls.

On the way home I was then stopped by an old lady driving her car around in circles. She asked me if I knew where Lincoln Elementary School was. Some person had told her it was 450 East and 2700 South. She just wanted to vote, but couldn't find the place. I told her I knew there was an elementary school down 300 East but couldn't remember. She said she would go look, but then she was giving up, and resumed driving in circles.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a feeling of deep liberal guilt. I imagined that this poor woman would never get to vote. All she wanted was to make her voice heard one last time, and I was failing to help her. She would go off to tell all her friends at Bingo night that she was on her way to vote, like a proper, responsible citizen, when she was thrown off course by some filthy, bearded, long-hair liberal on the side of the street who sent her on a wild-goose chase down 300 east through all the scariest neighborhoods.

I didn't need that kind of heavy rap on my conscience. So I flagged her down as she passed by me again on her next circle, and told her I could look up the address on my phone. I soon found that Lincoln Elementary is actually located at 450 East and 3700 South, and I was able to send her on a much more direct route to do her civic duty, even though I know that her votes will cancel out all of mine. That's just how democracy works.

And now, just to end this on a particularly disturbing counterpoint, I present you with the most unsettling campaign ad I have ever seen. If this does not throw you into a murderous frenzy, and make you want to run down to your local voting location to vote for someone, anyone then nothing will:

The Wedding Daze Part 2: The Ceremony

*All photos by Somer Ahonen

I proceeded downstairs with a bunch of dudes a few minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin. I have never seen a wedding happen on time, but I figured I better be early, just in case. After all, we men have no real excuse to take any longer than absolutely necessary. We don't have to wear a dress or anything. So we were ready.



I went with our wedding officiant, Mike Braxton, to the Gazebo to wait for our cue. He asked me how I was feeling? I wasn't really nervous at all. In fact, I hadn't really become nervous at any point leading up to this wedding. Rachel often said she was sorry to be the weird one freaking out about everything. I was more sorry to be the weird one not freaking out about everything. That's not normal at all. Nevertheless, I was pretty calm.



I looked around at the entire scene and soaked it all in for a moment. I figured this might be my last chance to look at the place with any level of objectivity. So I looked at everything and it was all amazing. It was far more beautiful than I ever expected, and the day was perfect. It did make me a little misty, but I stopped those tears in their tracks. I figured I better save them for now. We men only have a limited amount, after all.

We could not see it, but the photography shows us that the beautiful women, and especially the gorgeous bride, were making their way down the long stairs without any mishaps, only a very few minutes behind schedule.



We finally got our cue and walked over to where it was going to happen. I stood and smiled at everyone in the wedding party as they walked down to the music that was playing somewhere. Maybe I was a little nervous at this point. When Rachel walked out the door I looked something like this:



What a dork, right? And then I started to cry. Nevertheless, Mike Braxton kept things under control and made sure I was able to walk forward and greet Rachel and her dad at the end of the aisle. Then there was some talking, and then we said "I do." And then it was all over, and we were married for real. And then I cried a lot more, in all the right ways. Who knew I could be all emotional and stuff.







It was the best wedding ceremony ever. We signed the papers to satisfy The Man. And then it was on to the photo session.

The Wedding Daze Part 1.5: A couple of photos

Just a disclaimer really, all photos attached to this story are by my friend Somer. You can see her work at her websiteLovestoriesbysomer.com or on her blog at somerphotography.blogspot.com/. Big thanks to Somer for coming through on this at the last minute.

Also I wanted to show off a couple pictures of flowers to go with the first part of the story and thank Angel for doing such an excellent job with them.