Month: September 2005

Buddha’s Thoughts on Weddings

First of all, and most importantly, I have come to understand that a wedding is for the bride.
Period.
Now, I had heard this sentiment before, but didn’t put much stock in it because, hey, I’m psyched about our wedding, too. The thing is though, like most guys, I’m psyched about a lot of things – trying a new beer, having a good feed, sleeping in on the weekends. I look forward to all of these things and profoundly enjoy every new experience. I’m psyched that I found a used lens for my camera. I’m psyched that I’ve put my car through its last car inspection and I can now theoretically cut the top off and remove the muffler with impunity. I’m especially psyched that I will be living in a new country next year, learning a new language among friendly people. However.
Observing Nam making plans for the wedding has made me realize that I am a total lightweight, a absolute noobie in Everygirl’s Land of Being Psyched. Let me explain.
When I go home from work every day, my living room floor is totally covered with magazines and brochures with names like, “Bride to Be,” “Perfect Wedding,” and, “101 Guest Gift Ideas.” They are splayed out so I can see the writing in the margins and pages marked with Post Its that she wants me to read. Yeah, right. When I fail to comply with her wishes, she takes all of my reading materials out of the bathroom (Aaron Cometbus, Kevin Kim, and car/fishing/computer mags), hides them upstairs, and substitutes them with bridal magazines! Many a potentially pleasurable crapping experience has been ruined by this heresy, I tell you (Vibration lures are hot! Wedding veils are not!).
We sit down and have dinner. Topics of conversation include what we will serve at the wedding party and… well that’s pretty much it. I am a chowhound, not a food snob, and I excel at:
1. Making good food, and
2. Eating good food,
but I pretty much suck about planning what we will be eating on a planned date half a year from now. It is fun to try to keep up with Nam for the first ten minutes or so, but I’m cursed with a short attention span when it comes to this stuff.
For instance, the other day we went shopping with nothing specific in mind, I just wanted to make her happy by taking her where she wanted to go, and she just wanted to look for “ideas or stuff she could use for the wedding.” Guys, between you and me, by the end of the day I just wanted a quiet place to shoot myself. Girls, I know that sounds horrible and selfish, and it probably is, but I’m just not wired that way. Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife and will get her anything she wants (I will even buy her the things she at first says she wants then changes her mind about and says “save your money” about but I know she still secretly wants but feels genuinely guilty about, not fake-guilty like a master-of-puppets), and I am very much psyched about being married and our upcoming wedding, it’s just that I AM NOT A GIRL.
And by default, compared to Nam, I am less psyched about, say, the type and color of flowers to be used for table settings. I want something pretty and classy and fresh, but other than that I really don’t care if it’s lilies or roses or even Birds of Paradise. But for girls, this is different. Apparently due to some estrogenous primal instinct, it is natural for them to raise the level of planning and meticulousness to one normally reserved (in a guy’s mind) for say, an amphibious assault on European beaches against numerically superior and better-armed adversaries. Even after professing to be sick of it all, she will browse for hours online looking for the One True Tablecloth Pattern. Me, I just want them to be white linen (OK, maybe I secretly want 3 per table, but still…).
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In the end, this is going to be such a cool wedding party. Nam will love it, I just know it. I just hope everybody knows how much I will never want to see a bridal magazine, ever again.

Digging a hole to China

This is the coolest application for Google Maps EVER! Use it to see where you would come out if you dug a hole to the other side of the Earth: Go forth and dig!
Tip: There is a bug with the zoom that brings up Australia as the default result every time. In order to resolve this, once you have chosen where to dig and the results come up, zoom all the way out and see the note that says “your hole ends up here!”

Danjiri Photostream

Well, the Danjiri lived up to its reputation and was, in a word, exhilarating. In my free time, I’m looking through the hundreds of photos I took and will post the best ones here. I might have gotten five really killer pics, only half of what I set out for, but more than I expected. The main difference between my new D50 and the digital cameras I have used in the past is simply that I like a lot more of my own photos than I used to – and that’s a remarkable thing, really.
While I’m getting my best ten or so photos ready to publish on this blog, you can get a sneak peek of about 200 or so I posted in my Flickr photostream:
Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri 2005

Day Before Danjiri

Tomorrow morning, Nam and I will ride the hydrofoil from Sumoto to Kansai Airport. From there we will ride the train a couple stops and step into the semi-controlled chaos of the Danjiri Matsuri. This is one of the few things I promised myself that I would do before leaving Japan (some of the other things include watching someone disembowel themself with a short, sharp sword, and just once not being told “but you look Japanese” after introducing myself as American).
I am taking a cumulative 2.5 GB storage space in memory cards, as well as my trusty micronote to transfer data to should this be insufficient.
I want to take at least ten really killer photos. That’s a lot, I know, but I will set my sights high since the weather should be nice and since I am, after all, ditching work to drink beers and watch gigantic wooden floats collide together in unrehearsed and seriously dangerous ways.
Wish me luck!