Brandon & Molly's Wedding

Molly, my cousin, lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was getting married to Brandon on April 7th, 2007 so I flew out there for a three day weekend. Everyone stayed at a nice hotel with a great pool. I had a ton of fun talking with all my cousins that I hadn't seen in awhile. By "awhile" I mean like over a decade for some of them. On the first night I spent some time in the pool with most of my cousins who were all bridesmaids. All the groomsmen were also there. I haven't had so much fun in a pool in a long time.

Beyond conversing and swimming with my cousin who have become beautiful young women (I'm not sure why my mom didn't give me any of the pretty gene's that my cousins have), I also met my grandma and all her sisters. I was impressed at how good of shape they all are in for being in their 80's. It gave me hope that there might be some good gene's in my blood. One of the conversations we had was about all my ancestors. Some of them promised to send me the parts of the family tree they have compiled. I said I'd spend some time trying to compile a family tree. I know that there are some websites setup to help with this and I'll probably check them out. It should be fun.

The actual wedding was good times had by all. Before the wedding there were a few people frantically running around. It doesn’t make much sense why people get so stressed out about weddings. I've never seen anyone get a failing grade and have to retake the wedding. I wish everyone could just chill out and have fun at a wedding, but I suppose it just depends on your personality. Some people need something to worry about. With all that said, nobody seemed too stressed out by this wedding and as expected everything turned out fine.

In all the conversations I had it amazed me how much I had in common with this side of the family, but there were some pretty big differences too. It sort of surprised me that so many of the older people still held to the idea of segregation of whites and blacks. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me too much. Hopefully those sorts of beliefs will mostly die out with my parent's generation. I was also bombarded with questions about my current girlfriend, to which I always replied that I didn’t have one. They usually replied with something about how I was still young and had plenty of time to find someone. While I won't say I'm definitely not getting married, I don't think it's a necessary thing like this folks did. I believe I can live a great life without a wife. Even though I disagreed on these few things, I still found these conversations interesting.

Overall it was a good weekend. The best part was meeting up with all my extended family I hadn't seen in years. And the swimming was enough physical activity to prevent me from getting cranky like I do when I do too much sitting around.