Supersonic August

This month is zipping by. My weekday evenings are filled with Ultimate, working out, and various social gatherings. My weekends have been busier than that.

Feeling like a first-class jet-setter flying coach, I took to Chicago two weeks ago Saturday to catch a wedding. I arrived by plane, subway train, bus, and a mile walk on or to the boulevards of the University of Chicago. With overnight bag strapped to my back. I wandered the empty ivy- and construction-covered campus searching for food, chapel, and something to occupy my time. I found a bit of what I was looking for and then stumbled on to the wedding party early and by mistake. Fortunately, catching a wedding does not require the same stealth that catching a fox might.

My love for the wedding has only grown stronger in the last few years. It's not the wedding, as much as the eating and dancing of the reception, but for the sake of brevity, "I like weddings." This one proved no exception. The company of the groom, his new bride, their friends, and friends I haven't seen for years were so delightful that I almost forgot to dance. Almost.

It may have been during Aretha's "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" that I looked up from the flailing I was doing and realized that I was lip-synching right along with 11 women. I was the only male on the makeshift dance floor in the lobby of the SmArt museum. One friend turned to me and said, "I'm glad I know you or I might think you were a little creepy."

I think it's the beard.

As the night wound down and the line dances grew in complexity, I was whisked away to Amy's where I was treated like the princess and the pea. On a hard floor stacked with multiple area rugs for padding I laid my weary head down after several hours of catching up. I felt no pea and instead slept wonderfully secure with old familiarity and thoughts of how nice these good people had turned out and how wonderful it was to see them. In the blink of an eye I was back to work and answering "What did you do this weekend?" with, "Went to Chicago."

Last weekend, celebration of a different sort convened on the beach of South Carolina. My roommate from sophomore year of college had a 30th birthday party in a beach house. My friends have been rocking the 30th birthday and this was no exception. It was really neat to see how the people I knew had grown up in the last few years and to meet people from his high school and his post-collegiate life. Everyone got along well and had a good time. I stayed up to watch poker one night, but mostly I couldn't hang with the late night crowd. For the weekend as a whole, I was particularly pleased with the camping that C and I did on the way there and on the way back. It pleased my desire to be rugged and thrifty which was deeply offset by the huge house a block from the beach, not that I don't have desires to be treated like beach royalty too. It's conflicted in here sometimes. We stayed one night at Jones Lake State Park. C had been laughing about the brochure that called the lake "tea-colored." The brochure wasn't turning mud into hyperbole, instead when we went to swim, we found ourselves in what looked and felt like a big cup of tea. We made the most of it, but I probably could've seeped a little less.

This weekend I'm packing which has been broken up by long periods of not packing. Soon it's on to the next adventure. Hi-ho blog reader. Away!