Our wedding is the day after tomorrow. We’re excited. We’re ready. We’re tired. We feel good. We’re sleeping fitfully. Our car broke the other day and we had to send it to the shop for a couple days, which was annoying, and then it turned out that the back wheel was holding on by a thread. We only just finalized our flowers TODAY. We spend our days running around doing errands, our evenings watching mindless action movies and courtroom dramas while we craft. We’ve done so much crafting that may never craft another craft as long as I live. Except I’m about to become an elementary school teacher. Whoops!

Anyway, to all of you who’ve read this blog, I sincerely thank you. You’re great, you’re loyal, and you say nice things to me. After the wedding I’ll post a final FINAL post, with photos, and then I’m outta here for reals.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you sincerely. Sorry for the lack of posts during the home stretch. I hope you’ll forgive me.

Love,

Bret

PS – I can’t end the blog without finally posting this:

It’s finally here, everybody – so throw your hands in the ayer, and wave ‘em like you absolutely cay-er, because you totally do. The most-anticipated installment of a series since The Twilight Saga: The Deathly Hallows hit theaters worldwide, we arrive upon Part III of III of my Tri-Andrewlar Friendship: Andy.

Here is Andy, my Third Groomsman, old college chum, reputed lover, and tree-mocker:

Andy and I have a friendship that is largely defined by competition, jointly-endeavored creative projects, our shared college experience, traveling together, and a blood pact we made late one night in the pit of an active Hawaiian volcano. These five things, more than any other, form the bedrock of our man-love, and are the foundation upon we built the third-most solid of all Andy-Bret Friendships in the Northern Hemisphere. We fully intend to overtake the other two by 2020.

Together we have ventured to Maui, Paris, Mexico (on a cruise), Utah (for skiing), Chicago, Solvang and San Diego (with Josh), and, in an alternate universe, Australia. Andy’s dad worked for years as a pilot, and I was frequent recipient of his coveted “Very Special Guest Passes For Super Cool People Only,” which allowed me to fly standby alongside Andy for very, very cheap, but always with the possibility we wouldn’t make it on the flight. In fact, on our Spring Break trip to Paris, we were told that there was no room on the flight – and we were seconds away from heading over to a flight for Plan B: Australia. But at the very last second, we were called back to the gate and given a couple of tickets to Gay Paree. And what’s Paris if not “The French Australia?”

Andy and I compete, really the old friend I have that I am so often engaged in battle with. It’s awesome. Here are all the things I can think of that we have competed against each other in (minimum one occurrence), though I may be missing a few: Scrabble, racquetball, chess, basketball, checkers, tennis, ghost, superghost, bowling, croquet, shufflepuck, ping pong, caps (a drinking game), beer die (another drinking game), miniature golf, six degrees of separation, Boticelli, and of course, extreme ironing. Special bonus: we’ll often throw down a couple of dollars to make things a little more interesting. When Andy loses, he offers me the chance to double down, and then when I lose, we’re even, and then usually someone cries, and then we go out and get ice cream sodas!

Andy, Josh and I enjoying a nice wine in Solvang, CA

Andy and I met freshman year at Pomona but have slightly divergent accounts of how it all went down. The controversy involved two films, one he’d made earlier in the year on campus and one I’d made while still in high school, both of which were screened at a Pomona film festival. His was a sort of spy/mystery/action thriller (starring Mary of Fishers Island fame), and mine was a film called Chickenbread that was a mock documentary that told the tale of the two clumsy, oafish, but ultimately lovable saps who developed and created Chickenbread. Both films were pretty popular at the festival, but Andy recalls me meeting him and being immediately smug and condescending about the obvious superiority of Chickenbread; the way I remember it, I approached him holding forth an actual olive branch, atop which perched a dove, and immediately suggested we become best friends. I’m sure the truth lies in between the two.

There are lots of great things about Andy and our friendship, and I’ll recount just a choice few for you here.

- In college, we used to order pizza from Round Table with some regularity. They had these amazingly cheap deals for college students, and, well, we were powerless against them. Our fabulous friend Josh joined us on many of these occasions. We developed a system wherein I would call to place the order, and while I was wrapping up the call, Andy would whisper in my ear a challenge. A few I remember were: To sing I’d like to leave a two dollar tip to the driver; to end the call by saying “I love you;” to tell the operator “You pizza with the best of them!”; when I told Andy that the man had introduced himself as “James,” he had me end the call with “Thank you, Top Jimmy!”

You get the idea. Ah, we were such crazy kids back then. I feel a mixture of college-type pride, fondness, nostalgia, and embarrassment when reflecting upon those memories.

- A few years back, Andy and Josh and I planned a short trip to San Diego around New Year’s – we rented a house, grilled some steaks, played nerdy games, survived a crazy rainstorm that blew a large umbrella off the deck, and slept in rotating beds. Well, the beds themselves did not rotate. But forever in search of the fairest way to go about things, we rotated our way through the two beds and futon, since they were different degrees of comfortable. Two days before the trip, I got a call from Andy’s dad, which was unusual in that I knew him pretty well by that point but he’d never called me before. “Hey Bret,” he said, “Um… when is your tip to San Diego?”
“Not for another two days,” I replied.
“Oh, well,” he answered, “Andy’s on a plane there right now.”
“Oh geez.”
To be fair to Andy, he was already planning on going a day early. But not two. He landed, I called and made fun of him, his faced got super red, and he spent an extra day kicking it solo in San Diego. I suppose there are worse mistakes to make.

- We take lots of photos on our travels. During our Paris trip, we went to the Louvre, and there was a shopping cart in the giant courtyard for some reason, which of course led to the photo “Shopping At The Louvre.” Also, since the Louvre just happened to be closed on the one day we chose to visit it (we’re still pretty sure that someone tipped them off we were coming), we took another photo called “Flipping Off The Louvre.”

We do photo essays, too, like this one from somewhere in Mexico, presenting contrasting reactions to a bunch of 2-dimensional frogs:

- We once did a multimedia art performance together. I performed my original tune (co-written by Groomsman Drew) “The Loneliness of the Semi-Colon” at an open mic while Andy silently showed the audience little drawings he’d done to accompany the lyrics. It was the best music-drawing combination since, well, since ever!

So, that’s just a little slice of Andy. He’s a cool guy. Great, even. Magnificent? You could argue that, but watch out, because Andy loves to argue. But anyway, yeah. Andy. What a guy. He’s one of the very best dudes I know, a great friend, and I’m pleased as punch he’ll be up at the “altar” with me.

*Still debating that one.

Anyway, this right here is a chair:

Ring a bell? It should. Odds are you’ve either sat in one today, are sitting in one right now, or have designs to sit in one later today – or all three. Last year, Americans sat in an estimated 900 million chairs. OK, that’s not a real statistic, but it sort of sounded like one, right? Am I right? I think I’m right.

The Point, though, besides being an awesomely odd animated movie from 1971, is that one of the odd little budget-y things we’re going to do is to ask all of our guests to move their chairs indoors from the patio when the ceremony is over. Of course, if anyone is unable to move their own chair, or opposed to it for religious or ethical reasons, we’ll have waivers available on every chair prior to the ceremony so people can opt out. It’s only fair, after all.

As with many of these types of logistical/budgetary issues, a simple Pro & Con list reveals what we suspected all along: it just makes sense.

The Great Guestular Chair Relocation of 2011 | Pros & Cons

Cons

• Unusual.
• Tacky? Is it tacky?
• Potential logjam of 150 confused guests, running wildly, heads jammed inside half-folded chairs, screaming and gesticulating, sobbing into their suits, bawling into their shawls, ensuring a visit from the Park Rangers summoned to shut the party down and revoke our right to ever set foot in an East bay Regional Park ever again.

This is a homemade sourdough pizza I made one time with an egg on it. We will not be serving this at our wedding so don't even ask.

“Surely you jest,” you say with a doff of your hand and a knowing grin.

“Surely I just what?” I reply.

“No, I’m mean…” you say, flustered at my poor vocabulary skills. “I mean, surely you jest, j-e-s-t, like surely you’re joking.”

“Ah,” I say, “yes. But no. I’m not jesting. We’re serving pizza. At our wedding.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” you say, incredulous. “Pizza? The Italian dish of crisped flatbread topped with tomato juice and curdled milk?”

“That’s right,” I say, nodding, “that’s 100% right. Well, it’s tomato sauce, not juice, and cheese isn’t exactly curdled milk, so maybe it’s more like 50% right.”

A faint smile of understanding teases your lips. “I get it,” you say, index finger aloft in a gesture of Aha-ery, “I get it now, you magnificent bastard. You’re serving artisanal pizzetas! Broasted Swiss chard and nettle pizzeta with julienned yogurt and Bald Eagle cheese, and caramelized pancetta and biscotti pizzeta with a wine-glazed radicchio reduction, that kind of thing!”

I sigh, grab you by the lapels, hoist you off the ground and stare deep into your scarlet orbs.

“No,” I say very calmly, “not pizzeta. PIZZA. Bread and cheese and tomato sauce slash pesto, with toppings like sausage and mushrooms and pineapple and extra cheese.”

It finally dawns on you. Pizza.

Not pulled pork sandwiches, not barbecue.

Pizza!

The story of how we arrived at that decision will be for another post, but the general gist of the decision had to do with (1) budget and (2) logistics. First it was “can we really serve pizza at our wedding?”, then we moved on to “well, everyone likes pizza, right?” and then finally we graduated to “Hey everyone! We’re serving pizza at our wedding!”

We’re pretty stoked about it. Pizza’s not the only thing we’ll be serving, but it’s the main dish – for now I’ll keep the other stuff a secret for our guests. You know, to keep ‘em honest. If I tell you everything now, someone’ll show up at the wedding, elbow everyone out of the way, and demand to know where we’re hiding the churros.

Note: to my knowledge, we will not be serving churros. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.

So, yeah. Pizza. We love pizza. One time I ate so much pizza in college with Andy that I broke my stomach and couldn’t eat for a week. One time I made 24 pizzas all by myself for a fundraiser, which actually wasn’t very much fun at all, but the point remains: pizza.

So if you’re coming to my wedding, be sure to wear your pizza shoes.

Love,

Bret

He’s kind of like a mini Harry Caray.

Happy Friday, everyone. Rock And Roll.

Recess.

It’s a kind of interesting word:

1530s, “act of receding,” from L. recessus ”a going back, retreat,” from recessum, pp. of recedere ”to recede.” Meaning “hidden or remote part” first recorded 1610s; that of “period of stopping from usual work” is from 1620s, probably from parliamentary notion of “recessing” into private chambers.

It also happens to be the word that Jessica and I decided to use with Wynette to indicate that she’s free to go. On walks with her, for instance, she has to sit and hear us say “recess!” before she can go explore and sniff a patch of grass. Similarly, when we arrive home from a walk, she has to sit while we take off her leash, and then she can’t go off into the house to chew on our socks until we say the magic word. Early on in our training I wanted to use the word break! but Jessica liked recess, and she won somehow. I’m pretty sure that was the first and only time she’s ever won an argument or disagreement of any kind. Yeah.

Anyway, it’s related to the word recession, possibly related to cesspool (through a linguistic process called aphesis), and is most certainly related to recessional. Look at that, we got to my point! Welcome to my point. I hope you enjoy your stay.

On Sunday, I spent the day at my good pal John’s place, recording music for the recessional at my wedding.

It certainly comes in handy having a great friend who (1) is extremely generous, (2) has a magical basement filled with wonder, delight, and unicorn puppies (and a giant movie screen and recording studio), (3) wants to help with music for my wedding, and I should also mention (4) is extremely generous. I know that (4) was a repeat, but look,  he shared one of these bad boys with me:

That right there is a barrel-aged version of what is already perhaps my favorite beer, Old Stock Ale, from North Coast Brewery in Fort Bragg (near Mendocino). It’s fairly hard to fin, tastes like a crazy combination of bourbon and beer and moonbeams, and it’s 13% alcohol and just forget about it. If you ever see one of these bottles, grab hold of it and don’t let it go. Don’t let go.

So, we spent the day recording an original tune of mine for the recessional at my wedding. It’s a jaunty, happy little folksy number, with a strummy rhythm guitar played on a steelstring and a fingerpicky lead guitar played on a classical, with occasional little banjo accents. When we were satisfied with those tracks, John laid down a nice little baseline whilst I manned the controls:

Then we decided to get a little crazy and call up John’s friend John, still known in some circles as Big John because of a time when we were younger when there were more Johns than we knew what to do with, and he came over to lay down a rippin’ solo on the end of the tune:

The thinking was, by the end of the tune, we’d want to inject some energy into the wedding as a means of indicating “Ceremony Over, Reception Beginning,” which we all know is best accomplished with some hott guitar licks.

It was a great time, and it felt especially great to be doing something creative and personal for the ceremony. My original plan of writing pieces for every conceivable moment of the wedding may have been a bit ambitious, but a little of that will still survive, and I’m extremely grateful to have all the help I’m getting for it.

A huge thanks to John (and also John) for always being so generous with his time, talent, and friendship. I owe him a lot.

The reason I’m even thinking of the word in the first place, other than the fact that I’m a word nerd, is that Jessica and I have hired ourself a day-of wedding coordinator. Her name is Holly, she’s a friend and coworker, and this is her:

She’s smiling so big because she’s at the merchandise table for an event at our workplace, doing one of the things she does best: raising money for preschoolers. Seriously, that’s her job. She raises money for adorable little children so that they can play and grow and laugh and nap and snack, sometimes all at once. Every time Holly smiles, a preschooler, somewhere on Earth, learns to tie his or her own shoes.

Holly’s actually been mentioned on this blog before, mostly in the context of her dogs. Jessica and I have taken care of her two adorable mutts, Dumpy and Ziggy, a couple of times; you may recall this shot of Jessica and Dumpy, among my favorite photos of Jessica ever:

Jessica and I are seriously thrilled to have Holly on board. She’s already gone above and beyond by meeting with us a couple times and grilling us on all kinds of details, including many we’d never thought of. Holly (a) planned and essentially coordinated her own wedding recently (with a much, much shorter engagement than ours) and (b) is extremely organized, so she’s basically an ideal wedding day coordinator. If she ever decides to change careers, I don’t see why she couldn’t be a wedding planner. I would totally write her a 4-star Yelp review.

Hiring her coincided, and not unrelatedly, with Jessica and I turning a bit of a corner in how we felt about our wedding. A couple months ago, we were both beginning to feel more and more unsteady about certain aspects of the wedding, and our planning was sort of fumbling along for a bit. But we made a couple of major decisions about the wedding – I’ll totally blog about them, I swear – and also hired Holly.

Since then, she’s stepped in and really helped anchor us. She’s respectful of our choices and our sometimes ridiculous ideas, while at the same time she asks the types of questions we really need to be asking ourselves, and lays bare some basic truths about our wedding day. She provides us with some Real Talk, which we’ve sorely needed.

I swear it's the same person despite the differently-colored hair.

So let’s give a warm, All-Things-Zilla welcome to Holly!

Photo by Drew Beck

Happy Friday, everyone. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week.

Love,

Bret

See?

See, it's shorter now

I’m not a “hair guy,” which is an expression I’ve made up just now to describe a “guy” who pays close attention to his “hair.” I rarely pay my hair much attention. A few years ago I noticed my hairline receding a little and some Male Pattern Baldness settling in, and I freaked out a bit, probably bit my nails extra a lot, and braced myself for the inevitable.

But when I finally realized that it’s actually progressing VERY slowly and also that the ceiling light in the bathroom of my former workplace shone down unflatteringly upon my thinning hair, I relaxed, and now have mostly stopped caring. Plus, Jessica’s already agreed to marry me, so ha!

Just kidding. Not about the marrying part. About the “ha” part.

It’s an occasionally sad thought that pops into my head: I have never done anything with my hair. No new cuts, styles, lengths, colors. Just the same old thing year in and year out. If we venture into facial hair, I did experiment once: I grew a beard a few years ago when I lived with my three good pals Drew, Andrew, and Julien, and Drew even made pins for us for a party that said “ask me about my beard.” People did, and I told them all about it. The pin worked! My beard was dark and full and I never truly embraced it, though I was told it looked pretty good. I liked the way it looked, sometimes, and then other times it just seemed like I had this dark cloud on my face that had no reason to be there. One day, for no particular reason, I grabbed a razor and took it off, and that was that.

But as for my hair – the hair on the top of my head – well, the most daring thing I’ve ever done with it was to go several weeks after optimal cutting day, which is totally dangerous and I’m a bad-ass for doing it. Mohawks? Leopard-spot dying? Feather extensions? Please. Try letting your hair grow out 1/2 an inch longer than usual.

But really, in the end it doesn’t bother me. If I don’t care, then, I don’t care. I’m not going to force myself to get all excited about hair. It’s a little bit like jewelry – I’m astoundingly unknowledgeable about jewelry. I have a hard time even with a binary view of it; that is, deciding whether an earring or a bracelet or a ring is pretty or not. Sometimes I’ll be thinking “huh, that necklace seems kinda pretty” just as Jessica is talking about how garish it is. Or vice versa.

Anyway, I got my hair cut the other day. It was getting a little on the scruffy side, and so I made an appointment with a woman I’ll call “Sarah” at a place I’ve been going to for over a year now. Her haircuts are $15, take about 30 minutes, and she’s fantastic – she even throws in a rinse and a quick head rub for good measure. She spends the haircut asking me questions about life, work, love, and cooking – especially cooking. She’s from Vietnam and tells me stories of her life there when she was younger, of her family, and of how different her life is now.

“I get married when I was 20,” she told me the other day, “and it was too soon. Too young. Not mature. We make mistakes. But I still love my husband, and he still love me.”

I knew from chatting with her over the past year or so that she has an uncomfortable relationship with her in-laws, because, as she tells me, they are very traditionally Vietnamese – highly demanding and overtly critical of their daughter-in-law. She used to be extremely intimidated, always nervous around them.

“But my husband,” she said, “he stand up for me. He say to them, she my wife, you respect her. I love her and you need to try to love her too.”

She beamed with pride.

It was touching not only because she clearly still loves her husband very much after being married so long, and not only because he has stood up for her in fairly rare fashion, but also because she rags on him so much. She complains about him during the haircuts, says he can’t cook, can’t clean, and can’t do anything around the house. Says he was stupid to open a pho restaurant in Vietnam without knowing the first thing about making it. But she says it all with a smile and a laugh.

Now, she says she gets along fine with her in-laws. They’re old, she sees them only rarely, and she’s a lot older too. She stands up for herself now. She no longer feels the pressure of always needing to impress them.

I find that as I approach the world of married life, it’s even nicer to see living, happy examples of couples who have made it. Couples who dealt with adversity as it came along and worked through it. Couples who have found new things to love about each other as they age together. We hear and read so much about divorce rates being high, about how gay marriage is threatening the very foundation of love and happiness*, that it can be easy to forget that a lot of marriages succeed, too. And when they do succeed, well, it’s a beautiful thing.

*At least, that’s what Republican men keep trying to tell me so it has to be true.

Sarah knows that my wedding is approaching, and there are a few things she tells me several times during every haircut: “You so handsome!” and “stop losing weight!” (even though I haven’t lost any for a long time), and recently, “Don’t forget, you come see me, day before wedding. I make you handsome.”

I tell her that there’s no one else I’d have cut my hair, and that I’ll be there for my very important haircut.

I am proud of Jessica. Over the weekend, she graduated from her two-year teaching credential program, and is now ready to be a lead teacher in an elementary school classroom. She took and passed a disgustingly large number of standardized tests, took weekend seminars, planned lessons, wrote papers, got up early every day, went to staff meetings, and never once complained.

OK, so she complained from time to time. If she hadn’t I probably would have checked for a circuitry panel behind her neck , since it would have meant she was a robot designed by the US Government. But the point is, she survived her two-year challenge by doing what she does best – working hard, putting her heart and soul into it, being reflective and thoughtful, and by being a generally fantastic person in every way imaginable. Not only did she survive the two years, she thrived.

I am so very proud of her. She succeeded at something very difficult, very demanding, and did it with grace and style. She is a role model to me, both in a general sense and a more specific one – I’ll be starting that very same credential program in a few short months.

If I handle it half as well as she did, I’ll be in good shape.

With each passing day she settles in more and more, gets more doggie-socialized, gets even cuter somehow, and elicits old and new reactions from passersby on the street. You’ll recall she’s a tripod, or you won’t, but in either case you know it now. Anyway, we hear a lot of wows and that’s amazings and such, and then from time to time we get something a little different. So far my personal favorite happened the other day when a woman took a look at her and simply exclaimed “Whoops!”

One woman, who clearly was a dog person, mustered up her cutesiest syrupy-sweet doggie voice and gently chided Wynette for forgetting her missing leg at home. It sounds rude as I type it out, but it actually came across as sweet and loving, and so I tabled my stink-eye for someone more deserving. Then there was the little boy, age 10 or so, who took one look at Wynette and put his hand over his heart and said quietly: “I just feel so bad.”

Anyway, the best reactions come when I take her to the dog park, which I’ve started doing a lot recently. The dog park, you understand, is the very best most greatest thing ever to Wynette. She achieves nirvana every time she goes.  She spends the entire time sprinting madly from one spot to another, pausing occasionally to wrestle with another dog or to eat a stick, and when she’s in full sprint it’s pretty hard not to watch. And though I tend not to think of Wynette as disabled – since she really isn’t – I can’t help but beam with a little bit of pride when folks gasp and marvel at her resilience. I can’t pretend to take any credit for her cuteness and athleticism, but I can certainly enjoy it.

Beware the blurry tripod

Anyway, Wynette’s become such a fixture in our lives – a member of the family, really – that we’re a little sad she can’t participate in the wedding. Ideally, we’d put a bow or a doggie tux or something horrendously cute like that on her and have her walk down the aisle or carry the rings or something like that, but the truth is, she’s not that kind of dog. Or maybe she’s too young to pull it off. The point is, though, she’d have absolutely no interest in the ceremony. She’d probably wind her way through the guests, jump on a lap or two, lick some face, and then sprint off down the hillside and eat grass, and we’d have to assign a “Dog Wrangler” to watch her the whole time.

But along with sadness comes a healthy dose of acceptance. Wynette just isn’t a dog who we can take everywhere and not worry about. She isn’t independent in any way. She may not ever be an off-leash dog. But you know what? Many dogs are like her. Most, probably. And she’s so gosh-darned awesome in so many ways that it really doesn’t matter. During the process of training her and socializing her, I had the wonderful realization that we’re not helping her become the dog we want; we’re helping guide her towards being the best dog she can be. And so far, she’s been an incredible dog and we could not possibly love her any more than we do.

And finally, she’ll actually be participating in the wedding without even knowing it. Without giving too much away, her likeness will (partially) grace at least two things – invitations and wedding cake – and perhaps more. So while she won’t be there with us on our special day, her presence will be felt. After all, she’s part of the family.