Year 09

Tuileries to Eiffel

January 23, 2009 by krisis

My six best of the day, out of hundreds.

I just saw this – like, this picture. It’s not something I really know how to do. Elise wound up being a little impressed that I saw it, I think.

I wish I had taken this at a slower shutter speed, but I would have lost the awesome dynamic clouds. I’ll probably take up the contrast of the wall a bit – it’s actually quite a vibrant red.

This was my first shot of this imposing guardian, which I love, but…

…this is maybe my favorite picture I’ve ever taken.

Elise teases me because I like my photos to be very symmetrical.

Elise’s camera was too high-end to accurately reproduce these twinkling lights – it completely freaked out.

For seven years you have been my best friend and closest companion. You helped me learn how to be more than myself. You kissed me in the rain and said, “I love you.” You taught me how to sing in harmony.

You are the first to assure me when I’m sure that I am wrong, the first to challenge me when I think that I am right, and the first to support me when I am sure that I must try something new.

You are more beautiful, more talented, more intelligent, and more perfect for me than any woman I could have ever imagined or dreamt – but you are something real.

Here, in the witness of all those we care about the most, I promise that I am united with you as a partner and an equal.

I promise to affirm and support you in every endeavor: in your career, at home, and anywhere else.

I promise that I will share with you my success, and seek your guidance in my challenges.

I promise to care for and protect you, through every sickness and concern.

I promise that the attention I devote to you when we are together is the devotion that remains when we are apart.

I promise that this day is neither a beginning nor an end, but a representation of the joy that radiates from us in the moments we share.

I promise that I’m still looking forward to this life with you more than a little bit.

I promise and solemnly vow in the witness of all those who care about us the most that I love you now, that I have loved you only, and that I will love you for the rest of my life.

here goes…

January 17, 2009 by krisis

Okay, here’s my last post as a bachelor.

Bride aside, I am surrounded by the five most awesome people in my life, and they are in rare, rare form. Ross bottled my special wedding lambic in blue bottles labeled with me! I’m on my bottles.

I don’t think life could be any better than it is at the moment.

See you on the other side.

Arcati Crisis takes Trevose

January 16, 2009 by krisis

“In 800 yards. Make. A U-turn.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Gina, it told you to make a U-turn.”

“What if that’s not legal here?”

“Then we just tell the police officer that the nice British lady in your GPS told us it was legal, so it’s totally cool.”

“Okay”

Gina commences epic U-turn across Street Road.

“Whaoooooo!”

Sometimes as Gina and I wander around being – well, us – I catch myself wondering: why are we allowed to do this?

At no time has this question been more present in my mind than today, as Gina chauffeured me around the city to cross last-minute to-dos off of my wedding prep list. Right now we are sitting in a hotel room on a key-protected floor looking at the ridiculously awesome costume jewelry Gina will be wearing tomorrow in my wedding.

This is after nearly crashing our luggage cart in the hotel parking lot, surviving our epic U-turn, me almost pitching my electric guitar through a display case at Bluebond, buying seemingly a hundred travel-sized personal condiments, earlier wandering around a masquerade store discussing the logistics of whether Moses’ crook is effectively the same thing as Little Bo Peep’s crook, and general driving all around the city wailing along to my official last-day-of-bachelordom CD, Pinkerton.

We are two fairly ridiculous human beings on our own, but we don’t typically verbalize or act upon any of our ridiculousness. As a pair both of those impulses are actively engaged. Which makes it clearly insane that I am getting married tomorrow, and Gina is captain in charge of making sure I get married.

We have not trashed the hotel room yet, but I believe that option to still be in the cards.

We are, after all, rock stars.

(As to where I’ve been: I was really sick. A week before my wedding. It wasn’t fun. And I got a chest x-ray. That’s about all that needs to be said.)

a protozoic peter

January 3, 2009 by krisis

I’ve been methodically tagging old CK posts in seemingly every spare moment ever since I first transferred from Blogger to WordPress in November of 2006.

At first the process was easy – I started with a list of my common post topics, and the content was new and familiar. It didn’t begin to get difficult until over a year later, when I found myself in the 2002 era. There I began to encounter memories I didn’t remember, or oblique themes I didn’t anticipate. I found myself walking over to E’s office to ask her about details I had forgotten, and constantly adding new topics to encompass some of my older worries.

As my excavation continued into the fall of 2001 I began to pass by the start of some topics – time traveling into the mind of a former me that had never been in a positive relationship, never met Elise, or never lived with Lindsay and Erika.

I already wrote about my sympathetic response in the current day, about how getting into the headspace of those old posts alters the current me. I’m past that now, though, past the first time I met Selina and the last time I was cast in a play.

It’s hard to imagine a Peter, less those milestones, but easy to understand why he’d seem so foreign without them. Every time I catch myself thinking, “this blogger is so young, so naive,” I remind myself that it’s not the years between us that cause that impression, but the experiences.

The last signpost of the modern me is Rabi, her personage and page omnipresent in my life for a seeming eternity. Yet, she too had a first post, and as I checked the box next to her “Rabi” topic I had a twinge of sadness that I wouldn’t get to check it again, so far back am I into my pre-history.

Two years after my big move from blogger and I am finally entrenched in my first three months, my first 900 posts. Posts about papers I had to write. Posts about days at the coffee shop. Naive posts. Posts about nothing. Posts prior to all of the major players in my current life. Is it even me that’s writing? Would that blogger recognize this current writer, content and a scant 14 days away from his wedding?

As I drilled through another dozen posts of tagging this morning I had an inkling that it might be time to give up, but there this OCD quality of mine to obey: I can’t let it go unfinished.

Will anyone care whether or not a three line post from December of 2000 is categorized in “rain”? The likely answer is no, but if I didn’t care about that I also wouldn’t care about a dozen other things that have kept CK lurching forward for over eight years. It’s the very point of CK – that I can excavate and time travel. It’s why I started it, and why it’s still here.

That’s the connection between your author here and your author then. That’s why I have to tag another 899 posts, no matter how tiny they seem from this great distance.