(I'm guilty as charged, of course.)

I wanna go to sleep, so I'm going to try to make this fast.

A friend of mine got married today. We met in tenth grade, when he began attending my high school. He was one of three people in my high school class whom I was close friends with, and, of the four of us, he's the first to get married. Although we're far behind the rest of the class, most of which tied the knot some time ago.

Anyway, he found me a ride (with another friend of his, who turns out to live in my area), and I got there right on time, and even ended up being a small part of the show, as an official witness to the Tena'im. That term translates more or less literally to "conditions" (as in, those involved in the contract), and more loosely as "binding engagement." It's extremely binding, to the extent that if such an engagement needs to be called off, the simplest way to do so is generally to get married and then get a divorce (which has legal ramifications, and is Not A Good Thing). This is the reason why most people save it for just before the marriage ceremony, although some -- particularly Chassidim, including my siblings -- do it in advance anyway.

At any rate, the ceremonies went off without a hitch, and the wedding in general was very nice. As usual, I came with a duffle bag full of shtick, which I proceeded to use throughout the night. One particularly active slice of my night, towards the end, went something like this:

Rush to side room. Remove suit jacket. Put on long black coat. Stick right sleeve in pocket of coat, and, with your right arm (hidden inside), grab homemade fake leg. Proceed to walk into main room with (apparently) three legs. Enter circle of dancers, and dance three-leg dance. Zoom back out of room. Remove coat. Toss leg to the side. Pull on Technicolor tie-dyed long-sleeved T-shirt, covering dress shirt. Put on tie-dyed hat. Put on sunglasses, just 'cause they're there. Grab two bright yellow pompons. Run back in and wave pompons all over the place, particularly in the groom's face. Jog back out again. Rip off all of the above. Put suit jacket back on, and put on Really Flashy Red Tie. Reverse tie-dyed hat so that it's now a red-and-white-striped Cat-in-the-Hat hat. Run back in. This time around continue dancing for a few minutes, after which point, stagger out of the circle, clutch your chest, sip some water, and convince yourself that you're not going to die, even if it feels as if you're coming close, because you haven't been this active in a concentrated period of time since, oh, the last wedding you attended.

And, yes, here I am attracting attention to myself, when I claim to be antisocial. No big contradiction there. If you never feel as if you fit in, in a social setting, it can sometimes be helpful to put yourself in a role where you're not supposed to -- where, in fact, you're supposed to be acting silly and wacky, so if you screw up, it's all part of the act. But that's enough amateur psychology for today. :-)

Incidentally, somebody on the women's side of the room apparently brought in one heck of a selection of props -- blowing my own collection out of the water -- some of which made its way over to the men's side. Which is a Good Thing; when it comes to shtick, the more people get in on the action, the better any individual bit of it works. One person with a goofy hat is okay at best, out of place at worst. Ten people with goofy hats is shtick. We had, oh, goofy hats, a few inflatable musical instruments (I need inflatable musical instruments -- I've gone through three electric guitars and a saxophone in the past couple of years, all of which have bitten the dust), the standard jury-rigged jump rope made of napkins, this sort of weird glowing star thing on somebody's shirt, and a wig or two. Plus all of my stuff.

Anyway. The Sandman calls. G'night, guys.