Monday, March 26, 2007

Lab Coats And Fairy Dust

I was going to write about weedings and weddings and I had the cute little buat lawak bodoh all worked out and everyone (well, almost everyone) has their nice little chuckles and that's the end of it. But somehow I've been musing a little differently these days.

If you're a string player - bowed or plucked - you know weddings. You know them a little too well, and are just about as jaded as one can get about the ceremony, the audience (and, really, that's what they are), the critics (a.k.a. the in-laws...) and the champagne bottles that don't quite pop (not good imagery, let me tell you). Ok. Sikit lawak bodoh.

It's this interesting little mix of where the intellectual mind will lead you and where the rest of your body seems to want to remain. There's a certain kind of path that one follows when you're a geek to the world and yet self assured that the white lab coat of secular logic will protect you from the fluff that seems to never stop floating under your nose. You know, the religious ceremonies that are ceremonial than religious, the classroom gossip that is sign of psychological projecting, placing career in front of having a cool apartment, eating to live instead of living to eat.

That's the path which looks at the melodrama of moronic food presentations at weddings counterpointed with the fact that they have cheap (or sometimes downright fake) champagne. And wonder why they have a four layer cake when three layers are made out of plastic.

But there are other times that the clarity of logic gives way to thinking things your brain knows better, especially when you're at some gig and your hands are on autopilot. This is the same voice which talks to God behind one's secular back, the one which wants the approval of people you don't approve of, the one which gets tempted by the lobster and cheese.

The one that thinks, you know, maybe she isn't a golddigger and he isn't a horny geezer, and maybe they'll have a good marriage though their wedding seems to point in a different direction and the prompter for the wedding vows was a hint.

OK, maybe weddings are a stretch for me, I've just been to too many of them. Proposals though, those I still like. And you might notice that proposals are far more a Hollywood favourite than actual weddings (and we all know that Hollywood stars are simply experts on marriage, considering how much multiple practice they have in the field). I think it's the last real romantic gesture left, and I know this because it hasn't yet been conquered by Hallmark, and it exists as a brilliant memory that needs not a wedding album to certify it (though a ring is generally a good idea).

Proposals are the real thing, I think. It doesn't have quite the sheer scale of redundancy that a wedding has (think: ice sculpture!), and it has that beautiful surprise, that very special element of the moment, and it gives you a brief inkling that we should have something with a touch of that special magic fairy dust once a day, right when the second star to the right of our careers is clear. It's a kind of beauty in its simplicity, a kind of mist of life that we need more of.

We have years, and those are important to build things and have a certain length that makes goals difficult to achieve and when we actually grasp some of them - that's makes the victory sweeter and the path ahead more assured.

And we have moments, those moments, and that drives us forward too, when the lab coat is ready to rest for the night.

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