::WEDDED BLISS (AT LEAST FOR SOME)::

This weekend's road trip highlights:

.: Fayetteville's topography. Living in Dallas, one has few encounters with hills. Fayetteville is hilly, and wooded, and lushly green. A brisk change in altitude was ear-poppingly good, and the necessity of brake-application as we coasted downhill was refreshing. The trees! The sky! The view of the town's night-blinky lights from the highlands!

.: Fayteteville's demography. Hippies. Retired folks. Punks. This town had nightlife -- in the downtown district on a Friday night, I could hear no less than three live bands performing at different clubs. And, for some reason, lots of people around town (I saw this both days) carry squirt guns.

.: The wedding itself. The groom and bride walked in to rock music, got married by an Internet-ordained bartender friend, and The Grateful Dead's "I Just Kissed My Baby" followed them back down the aisle, after the "You may kiss the bride" schtick. They had rings that meshed together as the mountains and a river, and a metaphysical explanation was given. Excellent.

.: The reception. I ran into several old high school friends, though not as many as I'd've hoped. One guy from my class was married and had a kid, and he did the obligatory picture-pulled-out-of-the-wallet thing. One was a crush of mine from my freshman year (he was a senior then), and he had his frumpy girlfriend with him. It was odd. I fielded several flirts, which was kind of fun (I'd never been come onto with the line, "Hey, you look like Fruit Stripe gum, and I'd like to chew you up!" before...) but worthless. I chatted with lots of my parents' friends from Indonesia, too, which held its own charm. They thought I hadn't changed, except for the color of my hair (I was brown-with-blonde-highlights in high school).

.: The wedding kids. (This particular area of Summer's Current Existence is tinged with heady emotions -- babies have been making me cry with their sheer beauty, toddlers have given me giggly moments, and middle schoolers, through the not-yet-antiperspiranted underarm odor, have given me a few new glimpses into magnet behavior -- so beware.) The wedding photographer interacted with the flower girls for quite a while, getting them to ham it up, putting flowers between their teeth, flouncing their dresses, and acting as though merriment was a way of life -- but they were more into figuring out how the camera worked. At one point, one of them noticed the photographer looking into a screen on the back of the (digital SLR) camera, and she nudged her way behind it to see what images displayed themselves. Immediately, she grabbed the camera and made finger-push movements, trying to take a picture. On another occasion, she tried to get a little boy her age to dance, using her feminine wiles (yes, actually batting her eyelashes and bowing her lips) to get him to boogie. He would have none of that, though, and he kept staring, fixated on the band on stage.

I'm glad to be back for a few days, but my next adventure will be amazing. Science Museum of Minnesota, here I come!