nice day to start again

Attending to a wedding when you have a raging case of PMS can be pretty rough. There's the bloating, which makes you feel less than sexy in that sexy black dress and convinced you look hideous no matter how much your boyfriend reassures you to the contrary. There are the cravings, which leaves no waiter with a hors d'oeuvres tray in a five foot radius safe. There's also the hair-trigger emotions and moodiness of nuclear proportions. Amazingly, I only cried briefly at Clarissa's wedding, once when she walked down the aisle and once when I saw her privately after the ceremony and she gave me a bouquet she had specially made for me (in leiu of tossing hers).

The weather and location (a small castle-like mansion surrounded by lush greenery) were lovely and the couple couldn't be more perfectly suited to each other. However, there was something sad about the day.

For the record, I am not one of those women who goes to weddings and is all, "when is it going to be my turn to get married?" So I wasn't looking over at BF David with a diamond-ring-hungry gleam in my eye. The melancholy stemmed more from the feeling that I truly drifted apart from most of my college friends (with one or two exceptions, other than the bride, of course). These were people I used to frequently run into on the street or in shops when I was in college, people I went clubbing with and always had something to talk about at parties and other gatherings. Yet last weekend, I struggled to come up with any bits of conversation. I used to drink (and, on very rare ocassions, do drugs) with some of these people, stay up all hours talking to them, and here I was, barely being able to scrape together a few sentences. How do you cover such a big time gap and discuss the last five or more years in a few minutes? I couldn't do it, it felt too phoney and awkward. Most of the conversational chemistry I had with this people had dissipated, though I still made an effort. I think it comes down to the fact that we are all at such different places in our lives and I have less in common with the others than I used to, because I'm not married nor do I have a kid or own a home or go rock climbing or joined Weight Watchers or any of the other popular trends among the group. Also, since I never kept in touch with most of them, I haven't seen the evolution of these things, so talking to Aunty Mom, who is a single parent who I have kept in touch with, was different than talking to a couple I haven't seen in years who now have a small child.

However, It wasn't just my flawed social abilities. I think the general atmosphere of the wedding was happy though subdued. People seemed to prefer gathering in small clusters and talking amongst themselves. Which was better than having some crazy uncle try to drag you out on the dance floor to do the electric slide or cringing through another rendition of "Lady in Red."

After the wedding, there was a party at hotel suite, though BF David and I did not attend that one. We had an early start back to New York the next day and I was all tapped out as far as socializing went. Instead, we went back to the hotel (which was rather swanky, as was our room, which was a suite!), had dinner in the hotel's restaurant, and went to our room where we laughed our asses off watching a comedy special on HBO. Despite the awkwardness and my out of control hormones, it was a relaxing and pleasant weekend.

As I write this, Clarissa is on her honeymoon. I wish her and her husband a long and happy life together.