As many of you know (since I beat you all over the head with it pretty much every single week), I got married on October 13, 2006 here in Boston.  I've been sort of dragging my heels with regards to writing this update, since even thinking about beginning to attempt to cover half of the stuff that went down during the week of my wedding is so overwhelming that I kind of want to kill myself by eating a folded-up frisbee.  However, I've been hyping this thing up so much that at this point I feel like I need to finally deliver something or shut the hell up about it already.  In the interest of brevity I've decided to cut out a lot of the minutiae and just touch on some of the highlights of the wedding, and some of the crazy and sort-of crazy shit that went down.

As a side note, I'd like to thank Craig Molway of Craig Molway Photography in Boston for taking most of the pictures I'm using in the update.  He was totally cool and easy to work with, and the photos he took came out amazingly well.  Plus he was like a mix between Bruce Campbell and Morloc Darkfucker, which is awesome.  It probably actually ended up being a good thing that Morloc wasn't able to make it to the wedding (due to his full-time job of headbutting terrorists' brains to the back of the auditorium), because if the two of these were in the same room at the same time it might have caused an anti-matter/matter explosion the likes of which would have made Jean-Luc Picard crap his pants.

Craig and me.

I guess we'll start off with one of the most important things I learned during a week that was largely filled with driving around Cambridge and Boston picking stuff up, dropping things off, getting people from the airport, meeting obscure family members and basically being everyone's bitch.  Take the following to heart, because it has now been time-tested and proven solid:

Ingredients for an Awesome Bachelor Party

1. Eight nerds


2. Two televisions


3. Two Xboxes


4. Eight controllers


5. One Xbox System Link Cable


6. Two copies of Star Wars: Battlefront II


7. Two copies of Halo: Combat Evolved


8. One twelve pack of Sam Adams


9. One twelve pack of some other kind of beer that I can't remember what it was


10. Two 40 ounce bottles of Colt 45


11. Two 40 ounce bottles of Olde English


12. Two 40 ounce bottles of Miller High Life


13. Two 40 ounce bottles of King Cobra


14. Two 40 ounce bottles of some other kind of malt liquor or something I think


15. A $50 bottle of whiskey courtesy of J. Catfood


16. Some other beers and shots probably


17. Pizza


18. Maybe like some chips and stuff


19. Beef jerky

One thing I was not really expecting (but probably should have been) is that the actual wedding day is far less stressful for the groom than it is for the bride.  The night before the wedding I stayed over at the apartment Andrea and I had rented for Clastor B., J. Catfood, Sexx, Snakeyes and my mother.  The only thing that was even remotely eventful that night was when I thought the half-deflated air mattress I was sleeping on was leaking air, so I spent like twenty minutes flopping around in a futile effort to find the leak only to find that the noise I was hearing was actually just the radiator.  Meanwhile, Andrea was up working on decorations and stuff for the wedding until about 4 AM, only to wake up at 6 AM and start putting together flowers and have some massive panic attacks.

In contrast, the sound of my mother making coffee, bacon and pancakes in the kitchen woke me up at around 11.  We had a nice relaxed breakfast before settling in for a nice long game of cards.  The most stressful thing we did was when we devised rules for how to play Gin Rummy with six people using two decks shuffled together.  Oh, and when my mother played a prank on me by running Coca-Cola through the coffee machine and then acting heartbroken when I told her I didn't like the taste of the "expensive flavored coffee" she made for me, thereby causing me to be totally guilted into drinking a half a cup of hot Coke with sugar and cream.

The scene in the apartment at about 2 PM.

Somewhere between playing cards, writing an incredibly brief update for the website and perusing the random cookbooks we found sitting in a drawer somewhere, I received a call from Hot Andrea, my lovely blushing bride-to-be.

She was in the middle of a full-blown wedding day meltdown.

See, Andrea was running late for her hair appointment and was having extreme difficulty finding a parking place downtown.  According to her family, who happened to be on the street when she when flying by them in her car, Andrea was crying hysterically and screaming profanities at the top of her lungs at other drivers.  Luckily, this meltdown was pretty short-lived as I was able to sort of talk her down, and she finally found a parking spot.

By many accounts, she was a nervous wreck for most of the afternoon.  I however had no such problems, even when 3pm rolled around and I still hadn't written my vows and Sexx was yelling such useful advice as, "you should say 'being with you is like being On Fire in NBA Jam'", and, "find a nice way to say stacked".  Perhaps it was the calming influence brought on by the unusual artwork we found in the bathroom of our place:

Gay dancing gypsy Jesus.

Eventually though, it was time to get serious.  We got dressed at like 3:30 and rolled out the the site at about 4.  We all had to take some formal photos and then return for the actual ceremony.

The ceremony musicians we hired were awesome.  While everybody filed in and I started flipping out they did violin-and-guitar arrangements of What the World Needs Now by Burt Bacharach and Paranoid by Black Sabbath.  Andrea came down the aisle to Everlong and we made our exit to White Wedding by Billy Idol.  Is there anything cooler than that?  Plus the chick had a bitchin' green electric violin.

The moments leading up the the actual ceremony were much more stressful than I had expected them to be.  I didn't have any doubts about marrying Andrea, but the sheer gravity of the situation really weighed pretty heavily on me.  My hands were shaking, and by all accounts I pretty much looked like I was going to barf when Andrea and her father started walking down the aisle.

Once things got rolling and the anticipation of waiting for the ceremony to begin was over, I loosened up quite a bit.  I was really nervous about reading my vows, and I seriously almost didn't get through them because I'm such an over-emotional pussy and I almost completely lost it.  One thing that helped loosen up the mood though was when the boutonniere Andrea made for me started falling apart while I was in the middle of my vows.  Petals were falling off all over the place and finally everyone just busted out laughing:

Once the hard part was over and we were officially tied to each other forever, Andrea and I (and our respective entourages) headed up to our hotel room to get her dress bustled (no that's not a euphemism for something dirty).  Andrea's sister probably spent a half an hour trying to get all the knobs, whistles and drawstrings tied so that Andrea wasn't walking around with a giant train all night while Matt and I held up various parts of her massive dress so she could see what she was doing.  It was epic.

After that was finally finished, we made our grand entrance back to the party to the tune of The Final Countdown by Europe, and had our first dance to Accidentally in Love by the Counting Crows.  Yes, I know that's the song from Shrek II and it probably symbolizes how she's too hot for me and how I'm a giant clumsy ogre, but the song pretty much fits our courtship perfectly.

So remember how in my Groom's Guide to Getting Married I mentioned that we had gone to about ten hours of dance classes to prepare for the ceremonial first dance?  Well I/we forgot everything.  I seriously spent half the dance crushing her toes with my giant clown feet and the rest of the time emphatically yelling for her to "do that thing", while raising my arms and hoping that she'd do something cool looking.  Luckily I don't think we embarrassed ourselves too bad, and Craig was able to take pictures that made it look like we actually knew what we were doing.

We were not even remotely as graceful as it would seem.

Andrea is a certified dancing queen though, which certainly helped us out in the department of "not embarrassing ourselves", and also provided her and our guests hours of entertainment in the party that followed.  She was dancing up a storm all night, shaking her bootay to everything from Kenny Loggins to the Electric Fucking Slide.  In all honesty, the best dancing I did all night was when me and Andrea's best friend David cut it up to Are You Gonna Be My Girl? by Jet, which was both ridiculous and ridiculously awesome.  That guy can really dance his ass off.  He even dipped me:

Andrea really busted her ass designing all of the decorations and The highlight of our wedding decorum has to have been our cake topper.  Most of the stuff we went with was a sort of "Fall in New England" theme - we had cranberries, leaves, branches, etc.  However, we felt that we needed to acknowledge the fact that we were getting married on a Friday the 13th in October, so we went with a slightly nontraditional cake accessory:

All in all, everything went very well.  We were both sort of expecting a catastrophic breakdown where the building would catch on fire or our entire wedding party would get food poisoning or something, but apparently our chronic case of crippling bad luck decided to give us that night off.  We did have one wedding crasher, but she was very nice and really just wanted to grab a piece of our delicious strawberry-and-cream cake.  We got her some, but our bartender kicked her out when she started dancing so hard that her mascara ran and made her look like a sad intoxicated clown.  Andrea and I had a blast, and judging by the signature mat we put out it seems that many of our guests did too.

See, we put out a matted picture and left pens out all night for people to sign their names and/or write us notes about how awesome we are.  The next day, when we looked at the mat, we could tell that our guests had a good time because one of my relatives had signed the thing *twice*, and one of her 50 year old relatives wrote, "FAMILY ROCKS!" and then signed it, spelling her own name incorrectly and following it up with the notation (sp?).

(L-R) Amazing Ben, Clastor B., Sexx, Hot Andrea, J. Catfood

The next morning, Andrea and I checked out of the hotel, packed up our stuff, and headed for home.  When we reached our car, however, we discovered that many of our friends had snuck out the night before and decorated/trashed it with shoe polish graffiti.

Here's the run-down:  The passenger's side door read "Da Moon Rulz #1", followed by my older half-brother writing, "Hit it 4 Me!".  The driver's side door was a large amount of unintelligible scribbling.  The moonroof read, "U-Suck".  There was kite string all over our steering wheel (Andrea's brother had taken our keys out of our room).  The wiper blades had dozens of small silver-colored bells tied to it so that every time we turned the wipers on for the next week we were treated to a delightful plastic-on-glass scraping sound across our windshield.

To top it all off, the back window read, "Just Married - Sex to Follow", and had a picture of a giant cartoon dong.  Andrea and I then were forced to drive down Boston's über posh Newbury Street offending the sensibilities of many prissy debutante bitches with our giant phallus.  As we pulled out of our parking spot hoping to get away without further embarrassment, we heard the ominous click-clack of the inordinately large number of cans had been surreptitiously tied to the bottom of our car.  Our "drive of shame" was not to go unnoticed by everyone within a two mile radius.

For our honeymoon, we drove out the Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.  Andrea's first travel experience outside the United States was to one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen.  It was a small, very British town with lots of character and many, many wineries.  We toured wineries until neither of us were able to stand under our own power, had dinner at a really awesome restaurant, and battled the metric system at every corner.

Of course, we also visited Niagara Falls, which was awesome.  It's the sort of thing that you can't really appreciate from pictures.  Nothing can prepare you for the sheer size and scope of seeing this thing in person, and getting out on the Maid of the Mist and sailing right out to the base of the falls was simply unbelievable.

Even more unbelievable than viewing the Falls up close was the fact that fucking Ontario Canada has goddamned black squirrels.  BLACK SQUIRRELS.  I'd never even heard of such a thing before, but there they were, running around grabbing nuts like a regular squirrel, only blacker.

Andrea and I were determined to get a good picture of a black squirrel at all costs, if for no other reason than to prove to everyone that these strange creatures actually existed.  We sort of felt like a cross between Bigfoot hunters and Captain Ahab searching for the damned White Whale as we scoured the countryside looking for these little bastards while all the native Canadians looked at us like we were complete psychos.  We seriously pulled the car off the road on the way to Niagara Falls so we could break out the camera and chase one of these fuckers half a mile across a privately-owned country club golf course trying to get a good shot, and there were probably a dozen other times when we went tearing ass chasing these things through the Canadian wilderness.  It was every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.

We never did capture a good picture, but we sure as hell got a lot of grainy images of black squirrels running away from us!

When we finally returned home after a pleasant and relaxing week of being low-quality black squirrel paparazzi, we got down to the serious business of opening presents.  According to Hot Andrea's Big Mysterious Book of Wedding Etiquette, it's impolite to open gifts before you're married (I guess in case you don't go through with the wedding?), but as soon as you're officially hitched you can totally go nuts.  We got a lot of awesome presents, such as J. Catfood's wine package (two bottles of wine, a wine rack and the most bitchin' wine bottle opening machine in the history of God), as well as about a half a dozen waffle makers and more food processors than we will ever know what to do with.  Two gifts stuck out like a sore thumb among the rest of them, simply for the sheer weirdness of them.

The first one was from Sexx.  We received a small box from him, which was ordered off of one of our gift registries.  Well, Sexx, in his infinite ability to be a pain in the ass whenever he wants to be, decided that in lieu of sending us one gift card for $40, he would send us twenty gift cards worth $2 a piece.  This is because he hates us.  We opened the box to find twenty individually-packaged gift cards inside sleeves containing the following delightful poem:

Happy nupts
Two become one
Like bread and beef
Becoming
A delicious hamburger
Love and kisses
Sexx

Twenty ways to make a cashier want to murder you.

The weirdest gift we received however was from the one and only Jack Shannon, Viking Warrior.  Now many people who regularly read this site generally have one of two misguided opinions as to my and Jack's interesting relationship:

1. Jack Shannon is a fictional character;  I actually write all of his updates and post them under a pen name.


2. Jack Shannon is an old friend of mine whom I have met in real life.

In all honesty, Jack is an actual person who I have never met before in real life and whom I only know through conversations via the internet.  And even then, I probably know as much about him as you do, since I print pretty much everything he emails me.  Well Jack Shannon, Viking Warrior bought me and Andrea a wedding present, and it by far the craziest present we received.

My first clue this was going to be bizarre was when I read the customs declaration form on the package:

Inside the main package were two smaller packages - one addressed to me, and for Andrea.  My package contained two packages of Rocking JC brand beef jerky (an excellent jerky which interestingly enough features an American flag on the wrapper), a letter of congratulations for the wedding and a letter of condolence for my grandfather.  Andrea's package contained two full-color printed out Official Jack Shannon, Viking Warrior Masks, two condoms, a packet of personal lubricant, and a letter informing her that they condoms were "ribberd for her pleasure".

I put on a Mask of Charisma +4.

Well, all in all I'm very pleased with the way everything turned out.  Helping your fianceé plan a wedding can be quite a headache at times, but in the end it's great to have al your friends around to help you celebrate as you and your wife declare your undying love for each other.  I wouldn't change anything about it.

Does that make me lame?