My life’s been pretty lame lately. After the abuse in Korea and Vegas, things have a lot to live up to. Since I got back to the States in June I’ve been pretty much bouncing around to different places – my friend Steph’s, to Chicago to get an apartment, a wedding, home to help my G-ma move, etc. I was actually supposed to go back to the Turkish restaurant and work a few days a week, but my boss mysteriously closed down her email and so I have no way of contacting her. I’m not so self absorbed to think that she actually changed her email contact info just to avoid me emailing her to see if I could work again, but it is an odd coincidence… Not that I’m too upset to skip out on killing cockroaches for three weeks, but the extra pocket money would have been nice.
So…now on to the nonsense:
Wildcard Grams
So at my friends wedding I was a Groomsman and, evidently an usher. So at the rehearsal my friend told me that me and my friend were going to be ushering in the grandmothers. No biggie. But while the pastor was explaining stuff it came out like:
“Tedd and Kralik when you escort the Grandma’s blah blah blah be ready about 245 blah blah”
I was confused because the wedding was at 3:30, so I saw no purpose why the G-mas would have to be shuttled in a fully 45 minutes before the ceremony when no one would even be there. But the next time he said stuff it was along the lines of:
“So you show in the Grandmas. Be ready about 245.”
It seemed like nonsense to me and that night I asked my other friends if what I heard was valid, and they affirmed it.
So the next day it got to be 245 and I totally ignored the pastor, because it made no sense. It all came together, however, when the wedding planner busted into the Groomsmen’s room all sweaty and kerfuffled screaming for us.
“Oh my GAWD! Where are you guys! You’re supposed to be USH-ering!”
As a side rant, this lady was CAR-RAZY. You would have thought the Duchess and Duke of Windsor were getting married in this church. I mean, I love my friend and wanted things to be great, but this lady was having panic attacks all over the place. The night before at the rehearsal dinner my friend’s dad was setting up his DJ equipment and he was testing stuff with a Fall Out Boy song. She just busted in and was like, “Turn it off.” My friends dad was really nice and said he wanted to test some more stuff, to which this lady responded with a classic:
“It’s just, it’s getting late and I have – UH – I have so much to DO, tomorrow. Like so MUCH to do. Things and stuff and ERRANDS – so much.” It was one of those instances where someone complains of having so much to do without actually being able to detail a single thing that needs to be done. She kept rolling her eyes, however, and wiping her forehead with a chubby hand as if the sweat on her brow that night was only a sign of the deluge that would cover it the next day when she had SO MUCH to do.
Anyway, this lady busted in and told us that we were supposed to be ushering at which point I realized that we weren’t ONLY ushering the grandparents but EVERYONE. (Yes, I am an idiot.) So my buddy and I sprint into the church and discover that there is a huge glob of people at the back of the church milling around like cattle. We just kind of start moving people in, keeping the first two rows open for the immediate families of the bride and groom.
Well, after we sat the first ten people the Grandfather of the bride comes over and really nicely tells us that we are morons. Evidently, our friend had a bunch of other immediate family that we didn’t know about that needed to be sat up front too. So the grandfather comes over and tells us this, to which my friend kind of gets really panicky. I tell him I think it’s all right and we’ll get along. But I also send him over to take care of Gramps and smooth things over. It all worked out and the other immediate family got seated up front.
So it’s 3:25 and we get the signal from the pastor to get the grandparents and parents ready for their processional. My buddy and I take a roll of the people who are supposed to be there and notice we’re missing the groom’s mom. I walk across the back of the church to head towards the groom’s room only to be intercepted by psycho planner lady who is giving me a look like she’s going to rip out my throat.
“It’s 3:28!” She wails as she watches me go by. I have to say that at this point I was really close to just turning to her and being like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right, let’s just go. Let’s just go ahead and forget the whole mother of the groom – ‘cause she’s not important at all.” But I just ignored her and went to the mother of the bride to ask if she’d seen the renegade mom.
It took all of 10 seconds to round her up and get everyone to the back of the church. At this point it was 3:29 and I wanted to look across the sanctuary and give the wedding planner a big “Suck it!” but I was interrupted when the mother of the groom was like, “Well, where’s the other grandma?”
My buddy and I just kind of look at each other – neither one of us expected the Wildcard Grandma who had not come to the rehearsal dinner, or even bothered to show up to the church yet. So we just kind of stare at each other and at that moment Wildcard G-ma rolls in with another forty family members that we had to awkwardly seat to get ready for the wedding.
That was pretty much all the drama for the ushering…but I don’t think I’ll make it into the Ushering Hall of Fame anytime soon.
Uncling
Being an uncle pretty much rocks, ‘cause you really don’t have to be anything but be cool and let the kids do whatever they want. It is a documented fact that my nephews and nieces are the only people to rate me above a 3 on a coolness scale from 1-10. This past week I went up to my brosefs house and hung with his family for an afternoon. He has three kids – Ryan’s 8, Claire’s 6 and Elle is 4. They are pretty awesome kids. Ryan had a baseball game that night, so I was excited to play with the family that afternoon and then see my nephew tear it up on the baseball diamond.
Elle was friggin’ hilarious that night; she thought it was so cool that I was visiting. After my bro got home from work he and I went into their backyard and started cooking on the grill. The other kids stayed inside, but she wanted to hang with us in the backyard, so she rolled up and started clucking all over the place. She was telling classic little kid stories that go on and on and on and on and then get to a point that could have been stated in one sentence. One of my favorite exchanges happened when their neighbors came outside and Elle goes:
“Uncle Teddy that’s Bobby and his Daddy and their fixin the playset.”
And I said: “Oh, they’re fixin, it huh?”
And then she jumps on my foot and yells: “Don’t yell about Bobby’s dad!!”
Which was funny because I hadn’t yelled anything…
During that same time frame my brother saw a caterpillar creeping across the porch and told Elle. She got super pumped about it and picked him up and in a matter of seconds they became BFFs. So she tosses him in a Ziploc Tupperware thing which is basically the equivalent to caterpillar waterboarding. This caterpillar is running around the container absolutely freaking out about this while Elle was petting him and making sure he had no means of escape. She decided to name him Cutiepie and put him on their screen porch. Three or four times that evening she walked out to the porch to say, “Good night.” The last time she grabbed me and took me out to give my regards as well. By this time the caterpillar had entered a depression and was just laying in a ball in the middle of the Ziploc thing. Not wanting to say anything that would damage her psyche, I merely said, “He looks tired.” To which Elle responded that we should go inside and let him rest.
Later that night we went inside to play Wii and we were all sitting around the TV together. Ryan started to make my Mii and made him really short and fat. All the kids started laughing, at the conclusion of which Claire said, “you have gotten fat, Uncle Teddy.” Which may or may not have caused Tedd to kick up his running regimen over the next several days.
The last event was the actual baseball game. My brother is one of the coaches of the team, so that meant that I had to sit in the bleachers by myself like a pedophile. Prior to my nephew’s game starting another game was going on. It was a pretty typical 7 year old game with any hit resulting in getting on a base. It was cute to watch and I expected my nephew’s game to have the same kind of outcome.
What I wasn’t expecting was the massacre that occurred as my nephew’s team of little professionals took the field. Their first four batters just crushed the ball and scored runs – they made it to the end of the batting order when they have to switch sides. Then my nephew’s team proceeded to get three outs in like ten seconds. When my brother came to the fence at the end of the inning I was like,
“Your team is just destroying this other team.”
To which his response was pretty much, “I know, right?”
Why I’m Effed
This past week has also had me looking up jobs in Chicago to get rejected by. I kind of expected things to be pretty thin, what I wasn’t expecting was a bunch of awesome job offerings that I would get rejected from. This past week there have been a bunch of writing and editing jobs open for entry-level positions, but so far…wah waaaah…no calls. I guess I shouldn’t really expect to get a job that quick, but all this stuff has been so good that I was hoping that something would come through.
One of the positions was actually as a humor copywriter for this online company. I sent in one of my blog entries as an example of my humorous stuff. Ay yi yi…well, we’ll see how it turns out I suppose.
The other promising position was as a male escort in Chicago. The ad promised that you neither a) had to look good and b) had to have relations with the women, so I figured my chances could be pretty decent. I also wondered, however, how much a professional thirty something woman would want an awkward, 18 year-old looking (evidently), dude taking her to fancy parties… Maybe I should go back to the drawing board.
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