The {Guest} Post About A Love Hate Relationship With Weddings

Today's guest post is brought to you by best-selling author, Knox McCoy. "Best-selling" when comparing the number of books he's sold to the number I've sold.

He's the best.

A few months back, I added Knox's blog to my Google Reader and filed him in the "If You've Got Time After Everything Else and Dirty Dancing Isn't On TBS" folder. It only took two posts for him to be upgraded to the "Read These, THEN Figure Out Why The Carbon Monoxide Detector Is Sounding And You Feel Sleepy" folder.

Knox's first book, Jesus and The Bachelorette: Finding Christ Among Roses, Tanned Bodies, and Hyperbole released this week and the Rabbit Recommends you buy it. 

Rabbit Disclaimer: I paid cash for my copy of this book, so my opinion is not influenced by anything sketchy. Although I'm open to sketchy if it involves a handsome, funny and God-loving single guy. Or a new roof.

Now to Knox.

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I recently traveled with my wife to the wedding of a very close and old friend. The ceremony was very nice and the reception was excellent. The father of the bride gave a speech that was one for the ages. It was basically the best thing ever all around.

But I'm not here to talk about how dope my friend Mark's wedding was. I'm here to talk about something more serious. Something more insidious.

And that is the perpetual tease that is the typical Wedding Day. 

Anytime cumberbuns are prominently involved, you just know something hinky is going on.

The Tease

You get to dress up and look awesome like Brad and Angelina. Or George Clooney and Brad Pitt. (Basically anyone remotely attractive with Brad Pitt.)

The Reality

You get to dress up, but good luck finding something that looks good on you.

I'm just naturally not a dress up guy. I work with a screen printing company so if I'm not talking to customers about printing a t-shirt featuring Dale Earnhardt riding an eagle while carrying baby Jesus, then I'm probably sweating like Jared Fogle after a Meatball Sub. So I don't exactly gravitate to the Don Draper look if you catch my drift.

So when I do need to do my best Don Draper imitation, it always ends with frustration and me yelling mournfully into a pillow. Nothing is ever ironed that needs to be. Nothing fits right because you've either lost weight or gained it and all it does is send you into a tizzy about how you need new clothes.

Do you know how many shirts and pants I took with me to this wedding? 54. I rented a U-Haul and just attached my entire closet because getting dressed is such a process. My wife is like MacGyver because of all the hoops she has to jump through to get me dressed and out the door.

The Tease

Platters of delicious food among friends and family

The Reality

Platters of delicious food among people you don't want seeing you gorge yourself while wearing nice clothes.

My friend Mark's wedding had some kind of hor d'oeuvres that were like state of the art. I'm pretty sure since the astronaut program closed down that designing hor d'oeuvres is what NASA is doing because these things were just majestic. One of them was like the pigs-in-a-blanket we've all come to know, love, and lust after, BUT WITH A TWIST!

It was on a stick and the bread was cooked to a crisp. It was almost like a corn dog, but it was a more cultured corndog. Like one that would drink martinis, read Chaucer, and summer in Italy.

Do you know how hard I wanted this affluent and cultured corn dog / evolutionary pig-in-a-blanket?

SO hard. I wanted to track down the gatekeeper of this goodness, shove him out of the way and palm that tray of blanketed pigs all the way back to Table #8. But I couldn't, because the only people who can get away with bird-dogging food in a social setting are anorexics.

That's the problem.

For one thing, you've got all these people around to discourage you from taking the platter off of the waiter's hands. The possibility of public humiliation among friends and family is just too much to truly indulge.

Secondly, you're in nice clothes and do you know how much dry cleaning costs? I mean seriously, do you know how fun eating food in a suit and tie is? About as much fun as sitting next to a woman breast-feeding her baby on a bus.

Yeah, I know it's something that has to happen, but it doesn't mean I have to be thrilled with it.

The Tease

Dancing at the reception means moving around like they used to on Soul Train or like the ballroom routines on Dancing With The Stars.

The Reality

Listen, when I was 8, my Aunt Jan had a wedding and I was so hopped up on sugar that I danced the ENTIRE time. I had no formal training mind you, so essentially what I was doing was semi-profane gyrations and what people look like when they're having seizures. Twenty years and thousands of therapy sessions later, I still go catatonic every time I hear Shout by the Isley Brothers.

So you can imagine my hesitance when the dance floor opens up during a reception.

Conga line? No thanks. I'm good here kicking it at the table with the 12 and unders and 80 and overs.

And listen, chill out on the electric slide stuff. I know it's probably so much fun and yeah, it does look easy. But it's not so easy to electric slide when you are shouldering a hulking bag of insecurity.

What teaser did I miss?

You can buy Knox's new book, Jesus and The Bachelorette here. It's also available here through Amazon for your Kindle. You should also visit his website, subscribe to his blog, follow him on Twitter and pray for his wife.