Thanks for inviting me to your wedding! I’m so happy to be included. It speaks volumes that the person I booty call every Saturday and the occasional wine Tuesday has the kind of friends that would shell out $433.77 so he would have someone to grind with on the dance floor. It only took three days of awkward back and forth text messages to confirm that yes, a plus one was included. The fact that the English language has no plural second person unless you want to seem Texan is outrageous. Your wedding has already taught me so much. For example, that I very much do not want to seem Texan.
I appreciate that your wedding website is password protected with a mix of capital and lowercase letters. I see someone was paying attention in corporate IT training! Each time my eyes flit past it on the post-it note on my desk, I’m reminded of how much your love for each other has to teach me about basic computer security. And when I finally type it in correctly on the eighth try and calm down the alarmists on Zola’s hacking investigation team, the date countdown on the homepage is a wonderful reminder to contemplate my own marriage prospects and fertility – all declining, of course – with each passing second.
I am so inspired by your request to be “original” in gift giving. Is it not the textbook definition of “boring” to spend five minutes browsing a registry and then a lifetime knowing the recipients actually wanted the gift? Instead you have actually gifted me an adventure. I’ve been to all corners of the dark web in an attempt to be original, made life-long friends in my subsequent prison stint, and finally landed at Nordstrom’s customer service counter where I finally realized the hubris of claiming to know anyone so well as to believe you could find them the perfect gift. Oh and that friendship is a construct. Anyway, big shout out to the stud in the pink-sequined overcoat, you know who you are. Todd, it is you. Now I sleep easy with valium and the anticipation of many gatherings in your future home where my perfect gift – a decorative wall fan made from plastic forks touched by Banksy – is not proudly displayed and I pretend not to notice and then bitch about it to whatever friends I have left by then. Again, friends are a construct, so consider that when you decide to regift that decorative wall fan made from plastic forks touched by Banksy.
I’m very excited that your two day wedding is so far away from where I live. When my grandfather first arrived in this country – the one where you, me and every guest attending your wedding lives, not the one we will be in on the day of your nuptials – all he had was the clothes on his back and one hundred airline miles. It makes me proud to know that today I will honor all that he sacrificed for future generations by using every last one on a round-trip economy flight. Fret not, it will still require that I drain my bank account. Your wedding is a powerful reminder that love can’t be quantified and your love for each other can’t be quantified by a number that I will ever know in my lifetime.
I have just secured my spot in the sixteen and a half person kayak which will carry us to the ceremony, but only on the condition we spend seventeen and a half hours in perfect paddle synchronicity. The romance of multi-leg journeys that force complete strangers to rely on each other for basic survival cannot be overstated; I won’t allow it. And when we capsize and recall that we didn’t put on life jackets so as not to wrinkle our formal wear, we will be all that more empathetic to the “death do us part” portion of your ceremony. Sure, we will lose a few children and perhaps some of the elderly in the process but hey, at least the line to the “New York City prices” themed bar will be that much shorter.
You were far too thoughtful to leave the dress code at something as basic as “formal.” I shudder just recalling a prior wedding where – and this is a true story – I had to construct three unique outfits from items that had been purchased on entirely different days under entirely different pretenses. Instead you have inspired us to open our minds, to reinvent what it really means to “get dressed” with your incredibly specific and hard to decipher dress codes: “garden chic but someone invited Gene Simmons”, “if elephants could dance”, “circle; red”.
What luck that there was a venue opening in the country of Ukraine, an absolutely stunning place where you claim no friends, relatives, or ancestry and also there is a war there. The air raid sirens were a nice overture to the DJ whose shift to freestyling when the power went out was a poignant reminder of why DJ’s usually just sample other people’s music. The humility of knowing our lives could end at any moment was an excellent reminder of how short and precious life is and the perfect impetus for half the wedding guests to break up with their respective partners. This truly was a wedding celebrating what is important in life. Thank you for the reminder to kiss my loved ones and grieve for the state of the world.
I can only hope to return the favor by marrying your college best friend in a ceremony held on the bottom of the sea floor. To prepare, I kindly request you start your dive training today and continue a daily practice for at least the next ten years. Congrats to the happy couple!