over & done with

well, the birds have been sacrificed, the cousin has been wed, the big celebrity has left our midst, it's all over and done with, and now we can all go home. i am relieved. there is only so much excitement i can take. actually my biggest excitement of the entire thanksgiving/wedding weekend was after the wedding when i went into the bathroom to be by myself so i could mope (all the happy people were getting me down) and everyone left without me to go to the after-party. then i had to walk all the way to the big mansion alone in the cold and by the time i got there i realized there was no way i could go in, not in my mopey mood with the sounds of hundreds of people cheering coming from the inside. so i had to call my mom at her hotel and beg her to come rescue me and drive me home to ali's (ali had left early to have some mopey moments of her own.) my mom was a very good sport about it but she & stan got lost on the way and so i spent an hour prowling around the woods outside the mansion, and walking back and forth to the country club just to keep myself from freezing. my toes and fingers went numb five minutes into the long wait. eventually i was rescued (just when it was starting to rain) and driven back. ali was already asleep. since none of the wedding food had been vegan i was hungry and i ate two bowls of peanut noodles and a piece of vegan pumpkin pie while watching "the office" before going to bed.

there were a couple nice moments during the wedding. one was holding hands with al franken while dancing the horah. it was fun having him there, fun for everyone except, perhaps, al franken. he always had somebody mobbing him. i felt like that has got to suck, having to constantly hobnob with strangers who come up to you, but my mother reminded me that this is politics for him, now that he's running for office he has to be a friend of the people. so i felt slightly less bad. anyway i lied when i said there were a couple nice moments because that was really the only one. i thought that the entire wedding ceremony was lovely and romantic, and the celebration was big and celebratory, but being around people in love and looking at happy couples everywhere i turned only served to remind me of the ten years i wasted being married myself. and i don't get happy, as a general rule, so all the overwhelming happiness all around did not rub off on me. instead i felt as if i were watching it all on a screen. i kind of was - i was watching the entire thing on the LCD screen of my camera as i took picture after picture. every single one came out badly and i could only nod and smile politely when people came up to me thanking me for taking so many "great" pictures. just because i was holding a professional camera, they all assumed i was a professional photographer. instead, i was really just sucking major suckage.

i have one more day in little rock before i return home. what kind of day it is will be determined by how ali is feeling. she has been having a sort of episode since i've been here (and before) and her meds aren't working right or she's having an allergic reaction to them or something. whatever it is, it's going terribly terribly wrong and she is not well. there is nothing i can do but be sympathetic because i've been in such states plenty of times myself. anyway we haven't been able to really have much fun because she is feeling so crappy and un-fun and not artistic and so on. so i don't know about the creative jump-start i was hoping to get, if i've gotten it or not. i won't know until i return home. i do know this: having someone i can shoot pix of openly and without reservation has been liberating. the reason why i can't do the same thing at home is that i don't necessarily have a willing victim. i am going to miss ali's and my exhibitionistic/narcissistic way of collaborating. and i am sorry that we did not do more. we would have had she not been having issues with her meds knocking her out and/or giving her panic attacks. oh well. there is always next time. and in the meantime i might have to become my own willing victim. in other words, i'm going to have to learn to make use of my tripod and get a remote shutter thingy and just do this by myself.

now i am going to post a few pictures to flickr and go to bed. it's very very early for bed but ali's already slumbering and there's not much else for me to do. oh well.