everybody knows weddings = fun

I'm at the beginning of what will surely be several consecutive years of attending multiple weddings. Last night's was one of my boyfriend's college roommates, marrying his high school sweetheart. (Many jokes were cracked about the soap-opera tendencies of their relationship, breaking up during college, getting back together, all that.) I was going to write about some of the funny encounters before and during the wedding, but I realized that even the eccentric characters are standard fare for "funny wedding" stories (the cousins who groped the stripper at the bachelor party, or the drunken bartender who called "shots" filling a wine glass halfway with gin).

But having to present the three-sentence version of my life ("So, what are you up to these days?") to various people did clarify that the thing I'm most excited about this fall is teaching freshman writing. Of all of the milestones, or hurdles if you prefer, in my program, this is certainly the one so far that has forced me to take the most intellectual responsibility for the connections I see between works of literature and the way in which I approach them when I read or write. The rest of the semester looming on the horizon is just much more scattered -- I need to take a course or two, develop a reading list for a short but intensive exam at the end of the year, set up one or two lectures by visiting professors, and revise a seminar paper for a conference in October. Everything's pulling in different directions.

At least my boyfriend and I agree -- we seem to have a tradition that after each of these weddings, we decide not to get married. Although that may have been revised to not have a wedding. If I've eloped one of these days, it's because I'm scared of caterers and smiling family friends.