pen_grunt | Cuttiquette

So. I'm in the middle of wedding "junk". By "junk" I mean planning. I find this both terribly frustrating and incredibly uninteresting. I suspect it's also uninteresting to people not currently having weddings. Kind of like how book reviews are lost on non-readers, and kids & cats are rather uninteresting to those devoid of them (unless the anecdotes are of extraordinary amusement). After all, would a non-cat owner understand how cute it is that you cat plays fetch? Not really, but a non-cat owner might be amused by your cat learning to speak in tongues and bitch-slapping the neighbor kids. A non-kid person would look puzzled when it was "just the cutest thing" that my niece told me she was going to marry Derrick. However, a non-kid person might appreciate that my niece figured out how to say "mommy has a big butt" in the middle of a crowded store (my sister prompted that one, not me).

So. I try to keep long anecdotes about cats, books, kids or other-such under cuts. That way I figure people have the freedom to click, or not to click (and is there really any question?). The bonus is that I avoid boring myself--but still get the necessary "my cat ate plastic Easter grass and pooped out green stuff for a month" catharsis (you can't keep that kind of information inside people...it'll kill you).

And cut.

We're having issues with the officiant for our wedding.
My mother and I:

Mom: How about our pastor from United Methodist [The church I grew up in]?
Me: Um...no, she's a nutter, and we wanted a male officiant.
Mom: How about pastor Mark then? [From the same church]
Me: Nope, he's a nutter.
Mom: How about Pastor Gist then? [Also, the same church]
Me: Nuttier than a mad hatter.
Mom: That's right, he did kind of go off the deep end, didn't he?
Me: Um. Yeah. Why'd you make me go to church with the crazies mom?
Mom: Well, we didn't know they were crazy at the time....

It's no wonder that I'm at odds with having a pastor/minister/any religious official perform the ceremony. My church experience was severely altered by having not-quite-right in the head religious "leaders".

One of the pastors (Pastor Mark) did a sermon with a goldfish in his water glass. I forgot the point he was trying to make. By and large, however, I had the greatest exposure to Pastor Gist....who really did go off the deep end. A few things I remember about him from about 10 years ago:

--When paving the driveway, he poured sugar on the sides to attract ants--so he wouldn't harm the ants by paving over them.
--Slapping mosquitoes was also a sin.
--He gave an entire Easter sermon on how babies were made. Not the polite version--there were hand gestures and ample illustrations. This prompted a very small child to ask his daddy, "Dad, what's a sperm?" at the top of his lungs in the middle of the sermon.
--If he couldn't think of a sermon, he took all the furniture from his house, dragged it up to the pulpit...and sat in his living room chair for an hour.
--He decided that it would be a good idea to try to teach the confirmation classes to hypnotize each other.
--He also tried to sell us on the old stoner theory of having a million little universes inside of us with complete civilizations and/or being in someone else's dream as a life.
--My sister and I used to make a game of how many times he would say something completely inappropriate during his sermon. While I can't remember any current examples, I do remember that it was an ample and amusing diversion.

So the hunt for an officiant goes on. Although, it'd be almost worth having Pastor Gist back...just to see what crazy stuff would come out of his mouth.