Symbolic logic

I love trick endings and Dan Savage tricked me but good!  I won't spoil it for you because you WILL read this book (and you will love it)!

The wisdom of his 6 year-old floors me: Savage and Terry debate the whole wedding idea up to the end of the book.  In a cheap jewelry store in Chinatown they consider last-minute rings (they're having an "anniversary-party-pretending-to-be-a-wedding-reception"but think about driving to Canada to actually get married).  Savage asks his son for jewelry advice.  Six-year-old DJ is already a metal-head who owns an Iron Maiden lunchbox, so naturally he gravitates towards the skull rings.  His rationale cannot be faulted; he tells his dads that they plan to be together until they die, so the skulls would remind them of this.  A matrimonial memento mori.  I love alliteration, I love this logic, and I may need to switch out our wedding bands for a couple of cheap skull rings.

Weddings always make me think of genocide

This made me snort.

Dan Savage and his siblings abused his older brother Eddie about his second wedding ceremony for three years and here's why: it was held in Iowa; in the middle of a mosquito-infested cornfield; in the middle of July.  But it wasn't the location, the bugs, or even the heat that spurred their relentless razzing; it was the ceremony itself.  The year before the wedding, Eddie discovered Native American spirituality and wanted his second wedding ceremony to reflect this new-found belief.  So when Savage sees his brother at the altar, this Chicago-born, Irish-Catholic, former cop is donning a long white robe covered in colorful ribbons, feathers and beads.  The ceremony opened with a "ritual smudging".

And here I quote:

"Standing in a field of corn, an Indian crop, in the middle of the Great Plains, which had once been Indian land, watching a white guy marry an almost entirely white girl in a Native-American ceremony . . . well, it felt like a poltergeist moment, the kind of cultural appropriation that might cause the spirits of Native Americans to emerge from the rows of corn and scalp us all.  Eddie's sincere appreciation for Native-American culture couldn't erase the sinister subtext of what we were doing.  European Americans stole the continent from Native Americans, drove them from their land, herded the handful of tribes we didn't exterminate onto reservations, and finally hybridized and patented their staple crop, corn.  White Americans getting married in a traditional Native-American ceremony in a cornfield in Iowa was like a couple of Germans get [sic] married under a huppah in the ruins of a Berlin synagogue in 1946.  It seemed a tad insensitive." (p. 188)

What traditions did or will you use in your wedding ceremony?  Think long and hard about it.

Onward and Upward

Finished Committed tonight.  Elizabeth Gilbert is a modest and generous writer.  She managed to weave her own fretful story in between the stories of friends, family, strangers she met in Southeast Asia, and historical figures.  She dispels myths and enriches the meaning of matrimony with great humor.  In the end, she decides that, despite her own fears and trepidations (as well as those of Felipe's), marriage is an act of subversion because in the end no church, despot, government or repressive regime has been able to control what happens in the privacy of one's bedroom and cannot prevent the bond that two people in love have for one another.  As Gilbert says, slave owners in pre-Civil War America forbade slavery, but slaves invented jumping the broom as a commitment ceremony, just as today, gay and lesbian couples in the U.S. celebrate their weddings without state approval. She ends the book with her own simple ceremony, in her new home, surrounded by family and friends.  I threw rice.