John Bauschatz got married this weekend!

Early Saturday morning, I flew down to Raleigh, North Carolina to attend the wedding. Julia Oliver drove up from Charlotte and picked me up at the airport, from whence we drove directly to the wedding at a quaint bed and breakfast compound complete with cows and pastures. Both the ceremony and reception were fun; John and Retina are jokers so they pretty much made fun of everything while also respecting the ritual of it all. John, for example, repeated after the minister exactly, even when he mispronounced his name, and Retina exaggerated the word "obey." They had also choreographed their first dance, which was highly entertaining; never before, and perhaps never again, had I seen John dance, so it was a special treat.

Everything was beautiful; the gardens, the weather (sunny but not too hot, and no thunderstorm as predicted), the toasts, the food, the open bar (hooray!).... We all had a lovely time.

Julia and I took the opportunity of having an audience at our table, consisting of two couples who, like Julia and I, did not know anybody else at the wedding, to tell college stories about John. They asked how we knew John, so we talked about working in the Ratty (our dining hall) with him. I had actually met him in a fiction writing class we both had during my sophomore year. There were eighteen students, so we workshopped eighteen stories, only two of which I liked, and his was one of them. His story, the longest of any of the stories we workshopped, told of a boy who discovered that he had superpowers -- he could shoot milk out of his fingers -- which then led him to join a nutrition-promoting team of superheroes.

We told them about Phlegm, the newsletter of the John Bauschatz fan club, which was written and distributed to friends and family by John himself. He would write hilarious stories and rhyming poems (with footnotes) in a tiny font, sometimes making strategic edits to our letters to him so that he could publish a more interesting Letters to the Editor section.

We sang songs that John and other student workers at the Ratty (our dining hall) had made up while they were laboring over the dish line during the week of orientation or commencement, when we could all work as many hours as we wanted because we had no classes. They would make a song out of anything the supervisor would say to them, such as "Hit the red button, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo" or "Glass stuff doesn't go on the shelf."

What I didn't tell them was that John and I only became good friends after we began writing letters to each other. I believe that began with Phlegm, the earliest issues of which I received in my sophomore or junior year. While I was abroad in England my junior year, we wrote letters to each other, because John refused to use e-mail. After college, John moved to Atlanta to teach Latin to boys and I was in Taipei teaching English to kids, so we continued writing letters. It was then or while we were graduate students, John at Duke and I at Ohio State, that we switched to e-mail. During that time, we would sometimes talk on the phone (as long as I didn't call during The Simpsons or after his 10 pm bedtime) and on occasion John visited Ohio to see his brother so we might meet up for lunch, which dissipated our written correspondence. But for many years we corresponded frequently and prolifically, making John my only real pen pal. We both love to read and write, and it was as if we were continuing to exercise ourselves in that fiction-writing workshop manner by corresponding. Because we were never very familiar with each other in person, I felt completely comfortable telling him all my psycho stories in my letters. And John, being the natural writer that he is, could make anything in his life exciting simply by narrating it in his hilarious way. He always said he liked reading my adventures; I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but to this day John is my most faithful blog reader. (Even during the reception, he asked whether my pink eye had cleared up.)

What is it about weddings that makes one want to sum up one's relationship to the friend or family member getting married? The toasts get you going, and I suppose in a way marriage is a marker in the life of those being wed; in a way it's true the relationship to that person changes because of it. However, that is still to be seen. Perhaps with John moving to Tucson to teach at the University of Arizona, my hometown and the university where my father taught and where my mother still teaches, we shall still see each other often, and, who knows, a written correspondence could spring up again. That or we shall publish an epistolary novel consisting of sensationalized versions of our real letters....

After the reception, Julia and I checked into our hotel and took a nap before dinner. We met up with a couple we'd met at our table at the wedding for drinks and dinner, and we planned to meet up with the other couple at our table to go salsa dancing, except it turned out the salsa place was closed. Julia and I looked all over Chapel Hill for another place to dance salsa, but there wasn't a single one, so we gave up and went back to the hotel to turn in early, which didn't end up being so early because we kind of got lost on the way back. It was still a fun time, though.

In other news, the student-teaching program director replied to my email with another bitchy message. It basically said that our professional lives sometimes interfere with our personal lives, and hopefully not vice versa. I was again appalled, but instead of getting angry like I had with her first email, I just felt totally defeated. Here is a woman who holds power, and I can do nothing about her disrespectful comments to me. I thought again of leaving this school. Once I got over the depressing mood her email casted, however, I decided that I should not let this horrible person get to me. I have done the best I could in behaving civilly, and that is all I can control of the situation.

That said, I thought I had let it go, but when I discussed this with my therapist the next day, all the anger came back up again. It was a difficult session; I was still feeling a lot of anger. By the end of the session, I had a throbbing headache that lasted well into the evening. Fortunately for me, my weekend in North Carolina attending John's wedding and hanging out with Julia made me forget all about the silly troubles here at school. It helps, also, to know that I shall soon have a two-week vacation in Guatemala. It is sorely needed! Shane and I leave this Saturday....