The impetus for our trip was to hit up the wedding of an old acquaintance, a guy i went to high school with and someone i really appreciate and respect very much, but someone who (as fate would have it) i’ve not been able to keep in close contact with over the past few years. Still, whenever a friend or a former friend or a dormant friend, as i like to think of this guy, decides to get married, i care very much to uphold that tradition and honour his or her decision. i am a fan of marriage.
The girl he was marrying in Halifax was, and is, an absolute hottie. She’s very cute and very personable and very pleasant to be around, which was a really nice change of pace because my friend has had nothing but the worst luck with the ladies. He’s one of these guys who manages to seek out girls with whom he’s entirely, abominally mismatched, and it was great to see that him take the plunge with someone uh … well, for lack of a better word, worthy.
The rehearsal party was held at a really nice little boat club on the water in Halifax, where we arrived that afternoon after saying goodbye to the goats and geese and parrots and things in New Brunswick. The sunset was beautiful, the people were friendly and it was a very nice time. There’s nothing sarcastic or angry i can think to say about it, which is bound to make this a pretty boring journal entry.
Oh wait - now i remember. Someone thought it was a good idea to do karaoke. It wasn’t.
Believe me, i can understand the karaoke impulse. i myself toyed with the idea of having it at my wedding, until enough people made me realize what a horribly catastrophic idea it was. It’d be different if my entire family was comprised of circus performers or small-time Canadian celebrities who do Listerine and Tampax commercials, but they’re not. They’re run-of-the-mill people, as were the people at the Halifax wedding. And they couldn’t sing worth a damn. But, as is the kurse of karaoke, they all thought they were far, far better than they actually were.
There’s something about the engineering of Karaoke machines that turns people into instantly awful performing artists. i mean, if someone puts on a CD and plays a song that most people know, most people can hum or sing along in time to the music and then belt out the chorus with a reasonable degree of success. But when you add that herculean task of reading lyrics to the expectation of staying in time with the music, you’ve apparently set up most of the world for failure.
People - and by this, i mean 98 percent of all semi- to fully-literate human beings - cannot read lyrics and sing in time to music. They cannot. It is not a skill that most human beings possess. And despite its tenuous relation to talent or musical ability, i don’t honestly think that singing in time is the hard part. It’s the reading. People just can’t read. It’s the same reason why every year during those awards shows you get perfectly articulate actors reading teleprompters and sounding all stilted and halting as that creepy voice that comes out of Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair. People can’t read. They can’t read fluidly or passably or in any way that makes them sound anything but ignorant. Forget musical talent - i think reading is the real talent. It’s becoming apparent to me lately that the thing that sets really intelligent people apart - the quality about them that belies an ability to learn well and work effectively and just generally be an impressive sort of person - is strong literacy.
So forget about Grandpa Earl botching the lyrics to “Yesterday” so badly that he was 2 and a half lines behind the music. i could rant about karaoke til the cows came home. Believe it.
When we finally trundled out of the boat club, my wife was feeling nauseous. One of the most crucial things we learned on the trip was that, like an extremely unappealing Cinderella, if my wife wasn’t back in the palace by 9:30 PM, she’d start throwing up. So on the way through the parking lot, she started throwing up. An older couple was staring uncomfortably at us from a parked sedan across the lot. Now you have to understand that my wife abhors drinking, to the point where she’d almost rather be caught dead than caught drunk, so between retches she hollared out to the people “i’m not drunk! i’m just pregnant! HOOOOWAAARRRRRRRRFFFFGGGH!” The people looked unfazed, as though she had said “grey is my favourite colour!” Not everyone shares her convictions about alcoholism.
We retired to the dorm where we were staying, a place called King’s College University, and one of the nearly eight hundred universities i’m lead to believe there exist in Nova Scotia. The bed was a slab, and the bathroom was upstairs. Every door in the place made a very loud barking noise whenever it was opened because the wood sat too snugly in the frame, and this made for some very restless mornings. The front desk was manned by a succession of King’s College students, all of who uh … well, to be kind, let’s say they’d be crap at karaoke. i think it was the type of school that taught a lot of … sports admin, if you get my drift.
The next few days in Halifax were enjoyable. We ate, too often, at Cows Ice Cream, part of the famous East Coast chain that, i swear, adds a pinch of heroin to every cone. Nothing else explains why i craved it like oxygen. We walked along the waterfront eating our ice cream and listening to the street performers, most of whom played really disappointingly nonstandard East coast instruments like cellos and kazoos. It wasn’t until we sat down near a fiddler that we finally felt like we were getting the true, stereotypical Halifax experience.
The wedding itself was also a good time, despite the fact that i had to drive my wife back to the dorm early because it was past 9:30 and the lovely dinner she’d just eaten was coming out her nose. i returned to do some dancing, and it was all very fine.
The next morning we took the best man, the groom’s brother, West half an hour to a place called Terence Bay, where we signed up for a sea kayaking trip. We had the choice of single or double kayaks and perdictably, foolishly, i opted for my own boat, leaving my pregnant and often angry-at-everything wife to fend for herself in her own craft.
Owing to my summer of dragonboating, i had no trouble keeping up with the group, but my poor wife lagged behind us for miles, trying to grasp the paddling technique. i felt so bad that she couldn’t get it, but so good sea kayaking, that i was put in one of those awkward positions where i had to choose between the woman i love and myself, whom i also love very very much. True to form, i kept paddling.
The trip was marred only by the fact that my wife wanted to set me on fire with her eyes when she finally caught up. She eventually got the hang of the stroke, but by that time, after seeing ocean and starfish and lobster traps and cormorants, we were fighting a mild current back up the bay towards the dock. And it started to get humid outside. It was the kind of humidity that i found mildly uncomfortable, and that my wife found was like a flaming sheet of burning magma blanketing her boat.
Pregnant women’s bodies do a lot of strange, unpredictable things, and at that moment my wife’s body decided to elevate its temperature 400 degrees. She barely made it back in one piece, gasping for air and shouting “it’s so bloody HAWT! i’m gonna take my clothes off!” It was kinda like they sing it in that hip hop song, except a lot more angry and not quite as acceptable when it’s your wife. The instructor offered to tow her back to the dock, but my wife sometimes sprouts a stubbornly independant streak, and despite the sweat she was determined to get back on her own.
When she did get back, she peeled herself down to a thin white T-shirt and draped herself over a picnic table, letting her overheated and exhausted body ooze through the slats in the wood. Friends, t’weren’t pretty. i knew i had been a bad man at that point. i knew i should have helped her out more. But i also knew that that sea kayaking lesson was the awesomest thing i would do on the entire trip.
