Monday, April 23, 2007

Wedding Weekend 1, My Energy Level 0

I hope that regular(ish) blogging will resume as soon as tomorrow night, but for now I'm still recovering from my vacation. It's a cliché widely circulated among working adults that vacations aren't much good for rejuvenation; they mostly render you even more fatigued when it comes time to land back at the office.

The weeklong trip I just returned from was quite pleasant, but still taxing for two reasons. The first half of the week I was in Dallas, which was home for quite a while, and so was taxing for existential reasons. I'm not good at reconciling the past with the present. Never have been. This failure has been known to make me wistful and melancholic and, frankly, a bit confused and misdirected. I had a good time with my friends and family, but four and a half days just isn't enough time to lose the hum of strangeness that accompanies any return to an old stomping ground. Or, in this case, gently-walking-around ground.

The second half of the week was spent in Houston for a friend's wedding. The existential fog had lifted somewhat on the drive down I-45. Even when I lived in Texas, Houston was a place I would visit only briefly to see this same group of friends, so it felt natural to do it again. And because those friends are such good guides, and my experiences there have all been pleasurable, it's probably my favorite place in Texas. It was still taxing, though, for the usual reasons associated with a wedding. Those reasons being, in no particular order: red wine, whiskey, lack of sleep, a glass of vodka (likely the equivalent of about four shots) that I was ordered by the groom to drink during the reception (long story), watching other people dance, red wine, and lack of sleep.

The best news for me came on Thursday, when I showed up just in time to partake in an afternoon poker tournament that kicked off the bachelor-party festivities and ended up besting about 20 others for the grand prize (the specifics of which prize will remain undisclosed due to various local ordinances; let's just say it was healthy). I had to get ridiculously lucky to win it, of course, but any luck I had was reversed the night of the wedding, when I was ticketed for making an illegal left-hand turn on the way back from the reception (the vodka, luckily, had come many, many hours before). The ticket wasn't big enough to negate the undisclosed poker prize, but it was sufficient to put a dent in the evening's mood -- until, that is, about fifteen minutes later, when my passenger-friend and I had legally made our way to a famous local eatery for the best ham-and-egg breakfast tacos I've ever had.

Why any of you would be interested in all that came above, search me. It's my hope that more universal ideas about weddings and record-buying and oak trees will emerge from the trip and appear more seamlessly on the blog in the coming week or so.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice to read that you had a great time with your friends and family.Wow!A friend's wedding!I am expecting one of my friend's wedding later this year. Can't wait for that.Can you post some photos of the wedding?

8:40 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hope you had a nice time enjoying your friend's wedding.And Houston is a great place to be!Cheers!

8:09 AM  

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