wedding crashing

after posting on wednesday i went shopping for a birthday gift for my TL. i began with a miner's light (for reading at night), passed by my art for a small canvas as a greeting card*, and found the chocolate place.

* i bought a canvas, pens and a cute sticker to scribble around. unfortunately the sticker turned out to be a piece of card, and by the time i realized my mistake there was no way to find glue to affix it.

deskalides (go with what you know) is a dangerous place to enter, and i walked in and lost myself trying to figure out what to get. the saleswoman convinced me to go with what i like, and i just randomly began pointing until i got to the other side... and stopped.

"what's the problem?"
(mumbling) "i'm not gonna have any i'm not gonna have any..."
"what're you looking at?"
"dark chocolate with nougat filling."
"i know what you mean..."
"how can you go wrong with dark chocolate and nougat?!"
"you can't! i love dark chocolate too... here, on me!"

after a few seconds of nibbling, i apologized for my impending lack of communication and popped it into my mouth, and for the rest of our encounter i used impromptu sign language or wrote little notes. this wouldn't have been so complicated, but the saleswoman's little sister got all excited when she saw my wallet but couldn't remember the name "jack skellington" :P

the section evening was... awkward. not to mention the scaly, stupid waitress at mike's place who relieved us of way more cash than she should have AND provided really, really shoddy service.

watching the game (chelsea vs man u) wasn't something i'd have chosen to do, but it had a few good moments. it was a nice way to do the military goodbye, and it was nice to see a couple of guys from my old team - they were shocked at how... weird my new co-workers are.

the kid, piles and i walked home slowly, and after a quick shower i crashed. i woke up late, slowly, vegetable-like, and bussed to base... i had a long day ahead of me, an "outlook not positive" on my internal magic eight-ball, and i didn't need to enter a two hour section status meeting before hitting some coffee.

i suppose it wasn't all bad - my TL explained (nicely) to our SC that's he's incompetent, and i got an opportunity to neatly summarize all the shit that's been annoying me for the last couple of months.

lunch was unpleasant. one of the guys drew everyone into a political argument with his naïveté, and when he began to state irrelevant and likely unrealistic statistics and i responded, he turned around and explained to me that i haven't been in the country long enough to participate in the debate - that right pissed me off.

there's nothing that annoys me more than trying to explain something to someone who rejects it out of hand because i'm the person saying it.

the rest of the day was hard work, with some entertaining bits forced on me at random intervals. i'm still in shock that i managed to get almost everything done, although it took so long that i messed up all the kid and his brother's plans for getting to our first TL's wedding.

i had a choice of walking to meet them (25 minute estimate) or getting a ride (5 minutes), which wasn't a difficult choice to make. the guy giving me a ride finished working about five minutes later, and as i began to feel relief he pulled out an orange, went to find a knife, and stood eating over the trash can for another five. he knew i was in a hurry, i reminded him, and he told me to chill.

when he finished with the orange, he began to get undressed. "WTF?!" i yelled, and he just smiled and slowly changed into civvies.

when he was done, and i was all stressed out, we began moving. he dropped his bag and went off to the toilet for another five minutes, but hey, what could i do?

as he picked up his bag he exlaimed "oh shit! it's my turn to take out the trash!"

i pleaded with him to do it on sunday... it's always done a day late and nobody's on base for the weekend... but no, it had to be done now. so that's where the next ten minutes went, so instead of saving fifteen i lost five AND got pissed off.

for the past week i've been unsure of whether i'd go to the wedding or not - when the couple set a date they sent out an invitation on facebook, and i accepted, but i've been a little offended that i didn't get a real invitation. especially seeing as the kid did. in fact, until wednesday night i was leaning towards not going, but then one of the girls in my old section said that the groom had told her a while back that he'd intended to send both of us invitations, so i figured i'd go.

and crash the wedding - i wasn't on the register. we had a good laugh over his possible reactions: i imagined him whispering "security" into his watch :P

the ceremony was nice, and he was excited to see me. the evening was fun, but i was really exhausted and drank too much rum. most of his friends are people we all served together with, so it was kind of like a unit trip but with alcohol served and slightly better music :)

i'm now about to begin packing for the next week, and then i'm going to go buy whatever's missing. like a guitar case.