The winds of change are blowing again, and they are carrying sweet scents…

This weekend was Jasmine’s wedding, an event that I’ve been looking forward to attending and been hoping would never come. For obvious reasons, I have been really excited to go and witness one of my closest friends go through a life-changing experience and support her through it. The fact that I was performing, however, placed a good amount of stress on me and, with Jasmine’s very laissez-faire attitude, I was going crazy.

The weekend started off when Jessica came on Friday to check out a mutual friend’s show here in town. Then plan was for her to stay here for the weekend. On Saturday, five of us left for Dorchester (muchos gracias, Chris!) in reasonably good time and made it there about twenty minutes before the wedding started (thanks, in part, to a series of wrong turns).

By the time we arrived, a bunch of us needed to hit a washroom and, much to our dismay, we find a single, solitary toilet in the entire church! To add insult to injury, the man that was there first took his sweet time (and then some)!

Because I was playing during the ceremony, I had remarked that it would be nice if we could avoid sitting at the back of the church. Our bad luck streak continued, though, as we found that the church was nearly full and the seats close to the aisle were at the back. Boo-urns!

From the back, I missed my queue to go up and do my little piece with Jasmine. So Jasmine took to waving me down from the front, which was pretty embarrassing for me 🙁 I had a heck of a time getting the piano open (it was one of those slidey covers, and I wasn’t expecting that) and, after a deep breath for composure, I started playing.

The first sound was made and I instantly knew that it was messed up; I was an octave too high. Shoot! But, the first rule of live performance is to continue playing. Things were going smooth-ish from there (despite my foot quivering on the pedal) so I was getting a bit more confidence was we went further into the song (which was Hanson’s As Surely As The Sun with Apocalyptica’s Reflections intro). Then there was a slight miscommunication between Jasmine and I and things came screeching to a halt. I let out a bit of a yelp and tried to improvise and adjust on-the-fly. I was so relieved when the song finished.

Another disadvantage of sitting in the back row is that pictures SUCK when they are taken from there! The vast majority of the pictures that I took turned out blurry 🙁 After the ceremony, a bunch of people randomly commented about how well I played and blah blah… I gave a nervous “thank-you” to all of them, but I was still disappointed inside. Some people said that it was good that something like that happened to relieve tension or whatever.. but any tension that was relieved from other people probably got put on me! Aaah!!

There was a fair amount of time between the ceremony and the reception, so we decided to head to London (which was pretty close by) to get some food (as we had all missed lunch). After a bit of deliberation, we found a place and chilled there for a while. While we were inside, bad luck struck again as it began to rain heavily. Joy joy joy!

We zipped back to the Pedde farm in good time for some punch and pictures. Much to our surprise, dinner starting almost smack on time! I was seated with Jess, “Steve” (a.k.a. Cynthia who took our bushman friend’s vacant seat), and a bunch of people from Jasmine’s church. Oh! Plus a little cutie baby!

Following the reception was a coffee house, for which I agreed to play a few songs. The solo ones were as follows: A Hard Day’s Night, a song that I re-wrote for the wedding, and Till Kingdom Come. I did Only Hope with Todd and Jasmine (in fact, we winged it!!).

I was towards the end of the list of performers, so it wasn’t long before the coffee house ended. It was only then that I felt stress-free! I was able to chat it up with Jazz’s brothers, Kristy, Jazz, and some other church folks. I also introduced myself to Bre, who I only knew through reading her blog and random stories that Jazz told me.

We arrived back home before 1am and were pretty fast asleep. Having spent so much time talking about Saturday, I’m going to be very brief about Sunday. We woke up, went to church, checked out the busker festival, ate, napped, ate, chilled, walked, shopped, ate, and chilled some more. This did absolutely no justice to the amount of fun that I had on Sunday but… this post is getting ridiculously long. That said, I think I’m going to call it here.

I hope all of you had a most splendid weekend… gnite!

Ya know, there are some people out there who consistently bail other people out. It’s just the thing they do — they’re LifeSavers. Some do it as a profession (lifeguards, firefighters, etc.), while others do it almost unconsciously (friends, mostly).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been very fortunate to have a LifeSaver for me: Sarah! She’s been going on overdrive to help me out with getting website content, with refining its layout, and with my musical instrument deficiencies (I’m currently borrowing her keyboard to practice, and her guitar for Jasmine’s wedding). And she’s going CA-RAZY because of all of this extra stuff (and more) 🙁

So I just wanted to dish out some mad props to Sar for continuously pulling through! If I had a dime for every time she’s helped me out, I’d be in debt quite a bit 😮 There are, undoubtably, other people who have graciously helped me out on a regular basis, too. While I do not mean to downplay or marginalize their assistance, this particular instance is fresh in my mind and is quite pronounced (since I was in quite a bind). So thanks to all of the others too!

Some miscellaneous props:
– Amanda for doing our dishes!
– Dom for website contribution
– Dom for making me a stressball!
– Cynthia for co-ordinating rides to Jasmine’s wedding
– Chris for providing a ride to Jasmine’s wedding
– John for maybe loaning me a DreamCast!
– Laura K., Jessica, Keith, Dan, Erin, et al. for keeping me sane by not letting me slide away in seclusion in my room

Now… back to practicing…

It’s getting late, but I had this weird urge to post some thoughts that came up tonight.

Between website programming sessions, I was chatting with John and we both noted that our respective relationship failure rates were 100%. That’s pretty depressing, isn’t it?

Well, sure. But most people’s are, I think. Even if a person finds a life-long match, that probably doesn’t happen on the first attempt. Yes, I realize that there are the fortunate few who find love right away but, in all probability, it will take several relationships before one of significant duration is found.

So that means that most people are operating with a 50% floor, and are more than likely to hover in the range above 67%. All of a sudden, 100% isn’t looking that dismal. Nevertheless, it’s not something that about to bring a smile to my face or anything.

I have a lot of respect for those who have cracked the 100% failure rate and found a meaningful relationship; they’re either awfully lucky or awfully good.