Saturday and Sunday were both very long days, in very different ways very connected to each other. As in, Saturday was entirely consumed with Shobhit's and my attendance at Britni and David's wedding in Chehalis; then, I'd say, yesterday was about 80% consumed with my uploading photos and videos of the wedding, and then fashioning them into the forty-minute video you see above.

I've done this for four other couples' weddings now, although none of the others has been anywhere near as long: Gabriel and Kornelija's was 14:27 (technically I did not do that one until their one-year anniversary, in 2013); Brandi and Nick's -- Brandi being Britni's older sister -- 2013 wedding video was 17:56; Nikki and TJ's -- Nikki being my brother's eldest -- 2014 wedding video was 8:21.

I suppose I could mention my own wedding, for which I actually made two versions of a wedding video: the original, 75-minute video (precisely 1:15:14) was shared on the two-month anniversary of our June 14, 2013 wedding; a year later, I shared a far more manageable 15-minute edit (15:17) for our first anniversary. Obviously from my own perspective, though, my own wedding would be in a far different category.

When it comes to videos made for other people's weddings, though, there is a key reason the one I made for Britni and David is more than twice the length of any of the others. For Brandi's wedding in 2013 -- a month and a half after Shobhit's and mine -- for instance, as I recall, they actually hired a professional videographer. The 18-minute video I created, with my 13 video clips and tons of photos, was just to supplement that, something to offer from another perspective.

Angel (my sister, Britni's mom) actually mentioned to me a few months ago, I think when Shobhit and I were down in Olympia for Easter, that Britni and David did not hire a videographer, and she told me then that she suggested Britni just ask that I record the wedding for them. I planned to whether she asked for it or not, and actually, Britni never did reach out to me directly. I was on the phone with Dad for a couple of minutes last Friday, and he asked me for her -- apparently Britni had asked him to run it by me, if I would record the wedding for them. "As much as I can!" I said. Admittedly, I actually did go out of my way to record Britni and David's mercifully brief (just like Elise and Sean's wedding in Syracuse two weeks ago, yay!), 10-minute ceremony in one single, unbroken shot (which is included in the above YouTube video in its entirety) because I knew I was the only one doing so; at Brandi's wedding, I took merely a few brief video clips of their ceremony, each of them a minute or less.

So that alone took up ten minutes of Britni and David's video. Then, I record every single one of the reception speeches -- except the first two, the most important ones: the Best Man speech (that was David's brother, whose name I don't know) and the Maid of Honor speech (by Brandi). The only reason I missed those was that I was too preoccupied with getting still photos, and then I suddenly thought, Oh, shit! I should be taping these! And so I taped every single one of the rest -- fully 25 of them! I quickly came up with a recording process for these: video of the speech, followed by quick still shots of the hug they would give both Britni and David in turn. That's why, in the YouTube video, I run all of the 25 speech videos together, and then follow them up with a quick-run slide show of all those hugs. I think it's pretty nice and effective.

And so, the speeches section of the YouTube video fills up twenty minutes of it -- fully half the total. Those plus the wedding ceremony itself take thirty minutes, then, which leaves a pretty standard length of video and photos that blend into each other like any other standard wedding video I have made -- another ten minutes, which is how we get to the total of forty minutes. Given all I have included, I think it's a pretty reasonable length. I chose not to worry about whether anything was going on too long; if anybody gets bored watching it now largely because they already lived it in person, so what? All that matters is that Britni and David are pleased with it, and I guarantee you, particularly many years from now, they will love that it exists, even at that length. Britni certainly already loves it. (That link is to Britni's Facebook friends only, so I'll share what she wrote when she shared my video post: I am overwhelmed with emotion! Thank you so much uncle Matthew McQuilkin for capturing our greatest moments. I couldn't be happier.) Plenty of other people clearly love it as well -- Britni's share-post has gotten a lot of positive feedback. So I'm feeling pretty good about it.

In any case, I worked maybe about eight hours total on that, pretty much nonstop yesterday afternoon and early evening. I deliberately kept my schedule open -- no going to a movie -- just for that purpose. I'm almost grateful I did not also have a bunch of photos from the canceled Portland trip to worry about processing. Almost! I still would rather have gone to Portland! But, yes, Shobhit's back was more important.

This was the process. I had done most of the photo editing on my phone already, largely on the drive home from the wedding Saturday evening. I did just a bit more fine tuning after viewing the photos in the Photos app on my iMac; then exported them to my external hard drive; then renamed the files so they order chronologically. Then, begore even bothering with loading to Flickr, I loaded the video clips to iMovie, after which I edited out all the unnecessary moments from all the smaller video clips, just to cut the overall video down for length as much as I could. Then, the photos were loaded to iMovie. I purchased four different tracks from iTunes that were not already in my iTunes library, so I could use music they had used at the wedding -- for the procession, for the wedding party's exit; for the bride and groom re-entry; for the party. Two Beyoncé tracks were used for the party, and those at least, I already owned. It cost me just a little more than five bucks to get those tracks, so that was fine. I did the placement of the audio tracks and the necessary editing of those. Then, exporting the video from iMovie to my external hard drive took nearly an hour on its own; uploading that to YouTube took another long while. I was really afraid of YouTube removing audio due to copyright claims on the music, but, so far so good -- knock wood! (Audio had once been removed from my own wedding videos for that reason; it seems currently to have been reinstated.)

It was while that lengthy uploading was happening that I then loaded the photos and videos to Flickr, because I wanted to be able to share links to those in my video post as well, in case anyone wants to be able to look at the photos for more than just the one to four seconds they might stay visible in the YouTube video. I have them on Flickr arranged in two different ways: as one, 183-shot photo album so that it can be more easily included in my broader "weddings" collection (where you can see that I had 121 shots for even Brandi and Nick's wedding, and I didn't even go out of my way to get a lot more than usual at that one); and then as its own collection of four separated albums, separated by theme (venue, procession & ceremony, speeches, reception & party). This way people can look at each album with a more manageable number of shots than to be overwhelmed with scrolling through 183 shots at once. I mean, if that's what they want, I guess.

I've only managed to write captions for about seven of the photos so far. I did get tags put on them all last night, though, before Shobhit got home from his first shift at either job in a week -- which apparently went okay. I also broke to make pizza for dinner.

So what about the wedding itself, then? It was lovely. I only bristled slightly at the relative religiosity of the wedding ceremony specifically, with its vague element of heterosexism, referring to God calling on "a man and a woman" coming together with the subtext of that being the only option. My sister and I were both part of two gay couples there, but whatever -- it was hard to care that much about it considering the ceremony lasted only ten minutes. I feel like this must be a thing now: after years of complaints about wedding ceremonies going on forever, people now go out of their way to make them brief so wedding guests don't get bored.

Side note: yes, Shobhit's and my wedding ceremony took about an hour. But! In our defense, our wedding was very different, far from your standard American wedding, in that we did an approximation of a traditional Hindu ceremony, which I would argue was fascinating to many of our guests in a unique way. And more importantly, we did not have the standard rows of chairs, either; everyone sat at tables the entire time, and were able to eat during the ceremony, not to mention get up and down at will for bathroom breaks and such. So it's not like we held our audience captive for that entire hour, unable to do anything but squirm in their chairs.

I could have found things to get annoyed with had I chosen to engage, but I'm not close enough to Britni to engage, or really care. Apparently Ricky, the middle sibling between Brandi and Britni, was super high, or maybe also drunk, or both, I don't know; I heard something to that effect from both Shobhit and Brandi. Ricky had found me outside the venue at one point when I was grabbing the binoculars out of the car to get clearer shots of the mountains (there are views of three volcanoes from there: a stunning one of Mt. Rainier; and others of Mt. Adams and even Mt. St. Helens) when the sky had gotten less hazy, and he complained about how hard it was to keep his pants up because "I have no hips!" I didn't really notice anything different than normal about him, though, and I also got a pretty great picture of him. Brandi later mentioned people in some room somewhere "hotboxing a bunch of kids," but wherever people were smoking pot, I was never around it, so, whatever.

Brandi consistently cracks me up. I went over to ask her a question at one point and she immediately said, "Yeah, my dress is bunching up my snatch," or something like that. I was like, um, no that's not what I wanted to ask. She also gave my camera the peace sign while she was walking down the aisle arm in arm with the Best Man -- David's brother -- during the reception. Anyway, I had to ask her about this bizarre "tradition" that Rick -- of course it's Rick (Angel's ex, Brandi, Ricky and Britni's dad) -- insisted David take part in: to be initiated into the Benson family, you have to eat dirt. I did get video of this -- and all the other Benson men present, whether biological or married into it, gathered to take part in this "eating dirt" ritual.

The thing is, I had no memory of this happening at Brandi and Nick's wedding in 2013. So I went to ask her about it, and she was like, "No, that's stupid, we weren't doing that!" But, a moment later she revealed Nick actually did eat dirt at some point, at Rick's behest -- it just wasn't a big production in the middle of the reception party like it was this time at Britni's wedding. Brandi told me she said to Nick, "You actually did it? You're such a pussy." Ha! Brandi is nothing if not a straight talker.

Anyway, that would pretty easily qualify as the weirdest part of Britni and David's wedding, at least that I was witness to -- an "eating dirt" ritual. I was kind of like, Really? Rick was sure pleased with himself. I guess now I'll actually express some slightly begrudging appreciation for Rick, though, as he really kept things moving through all the reception speeches, basically acting as emcee, and although he was a bit characteristically belligerent about it -- he tried to pressure Sherri into coming up to speak before she was ready, and Sherri wasn't having it, until later she made the choice on her own -- he was still pretty efficient about it.

He did have chew in his lip the entire day and that was pretty fucking disgusting.

Of the people in Britni and David's life that I know, which would limit it pretty much to family, the only noticeable absence was Gina's son David (not to be confused with Britni's husband David, too many Davids! -- Brandi's boyfriend before Nick was named David too, thank god she got rid of him before this new David came along, even though everyone liked that guy). He was doing his final Army Reserve training he had to do before being done with the military altogether. His good friend from the army (who is extremely good looking) Brian, and his now-pregnant wife (or girlfriend? who knows, whatever, his S.O.) Dani did make it, though. Brian and Dani would be the most sort of degrees-of-separation connection I knew to be present, except maybe for Aunt Raenae.

Speaking of whom, Aunt Raenae attended mostly just because she'd had a phone call about it with Dad and Sherri and they offered to drive her. Apparently Toni Marie and James got a "Save the Date" but never received a bona fide invite, so they weren't sure whether they should come and so they did not. The same was the case with Aunt Raenae -- she also got a Save the Date but not an actual invite -- but she still came with Dad and Sherri. Britni and David likely considered them all invited, mostly because they are all present at most family holiday functions. Britni is hardly close with any of them, though -- Toni Marie would be regarded in shorthand as Britni's cousin, although technically they are first cousins once removed (a technicality only I care about), and even that only by marriage: if you want to get really technical, Toni would be Britni's mom's stepbrothers' cousin. Aunt Raenae, then, would be Britni's grandma's sister-in-law. (Aunt Raenae is my aunt, Dad's oldest sibling, the only one of his siblings still coming to a lot of family holidays, now that Uncle Paul and Sarah no longer bring their unruly children around.)

I guess I could also mention a couple of Rick's siblings, with him I have a vague but history that goes pretty far back -- to the early nineties. First, there's Chris, who is the youngest in Rick's family -- three years younger than I, even: in the summer of 1990, when we spent a lot of time together, I was 14 and he was 11. That would have to make him an even 40 now. Back then, it's pretty fair to say I had a crush on him. He gave me a "friendship bracelet" that I really took to heart and wore for months after returning home to Spokane until it finally fell off.

Apparently a part of the language about friendship bracelets was to say you were "going steady," which I did not know, so I was kind of baffled when Sherri found out about Chris giving it to me and she said, "Now you guys can go steeaaadyy!" (She kind of said "steady" in a singsong voice.) And later, at home in Spokane, Mom got so tired of hearing me talk about Chris that she snapped, "You're not 'going steady' with Chris. One of these days you're going to discover girls." Hmm, touch a nerve did I? Ha! Shows what she knew. (Wishful thinking.) Anyway, I never forgot Mom saying that; it's a vivid memory permanently etched into my brain.

Chris and I only spent a lot of time together that one summer; we quickly grew apart after that, and I don't remember seeing much of him even in subsequent summer visits with Dad and Sherri. I've seen him very sporadically at various family events over the intervening years, and he usually says hi to me. I was assuming he must have been at Brandi and Nick's wedding, although I cannot find him in any of those photos or any mention of him in my LiveJournal entry about him. So, I couldn't say at all when was the last time I saw him, although I would still assume it was at that wedding -- and that would be six years ago.

He did say hi to me this time too, and our interaction was pretty brief. I didn't even realize who he was at first; Shobhit was telling me Brian had gained some weight (he really hasn't), and I did not remember at first who Brian was, and so I thought Shobhit was talking about who I later realized was Chris -- he's now got a very bushy beard and he was just wearing jeans and a "Punisher" skull logo T-shirt. (Some people, including Gina and Beth, came in shorts. Shobhit and I were almost overdressed. Some other people, outside the wedding party, dressed up too though.) I obviously don't know him well at all enough now to make a serious judgment, but I got a current vibe from him that made him seem vaguely . . . I don't know. Fragile. I heard he's been married once before, and with the woman he's with now, she brought with her four kids, so he's apparently basically father to five now as a result. I don't know all the details of how he got there; it sounded like maybe he has no biological children. However he got them, five kids is a lot. Anyway, he brought up the story I once wrote for him, which I haven't thought about in years and still don't even remember what the plot was, and said he still has it. That was sweet.

So Chris is the youngest of six; apparently Rick was #4; the eldest is Erica, who I was also seeing now for the first time since Brandi's wedding in 2013 -- in fact this time around I briefly forgot her name. She was sixteen when their mother died in a car accident, and she basically raised Chris on her own. I remember that from 1990, Erica being plainly referred to as his sister but still being Chris's de facto mother -- Chris was 11 then, and at the time Erica had two very young children of her own. As I recall, they were both at Brandi's wedding; I don't think they were at this one, although I couldn't say for sure. They would be Brandi, Ricky and Britni's cousins, after all. Anyway, Chris had pretty severe ADD, and Sherri brought up the story about that summer that she has never forgotten: when he got into Dad and Sherri's van, sucking straight up sugar through a straw out of a jar as though it was all cool and normal. Sherri asked him, "Does Erica know you have that?" and he said yes -- quite reasonably not believing him, Sherri took it away. Sherri mentioned that story to both Chris himself and to Erica at different times on Saturday.

This was the first time Erica got to meet Shobhit, which she was clearly interested in doing -- he was off somewhere else when Erica first came up to me and she asked where he was, so I made sure to introduce them the next time I had a chance. I realized later that, of all of my niece's weddings that I actually attended, this was the first Shobhit was able to come to: in both 2013 and 2014, when Brandi and Nikki got married, respectively, Shobhit was in L.A. and unable to abandon his very sporadic commitments on which he relied heavily for income. Ricky has since gotten married, and so has Becca, but neither of them had ceremonies at which extended family was invited (although Dad and Sherri apparently were present when Ricky and Rachael got married, whatever year that was). Becca did have a reception party the day after their wedding, and Shobhit actually was able to accompany me to that. (Dad and Sherri were not at either that party or the wedding the day before, but if I recall correctly, it was because they were not given very far advanced notice and they already had other plans taking them out of town. Something like that.) When it comes to actual wedding days of any of my nieces and nephews, though, this was the first Shobhit was ever able to attend.

This means fully half my nieces and nephews are now married: Angel's oldest three (Brandi, Ricky, Britni) and Christopher's oldest two (Nikki, Becca). I would argue that Gina's only child, David, is the only one left of reasonable age for marriage -- he's 29 -- but marriage does not seem in the cards for him any time soon. (At one point at our table, Gina even talked about how "David does not have game at all.") The rest are all still too young, even if two are of legal age: Angel's youngest (from someone besides Rick), Alex, will be 21 in August; and then there are Christopher's three boys, Tristen (19), Christian (17 in November) and Braeden (13). So, I'm just going to assume it will likely be several more years before I am invited to another one of their weddings.

And, honestly? Kudos to the rest of them for getting married several years later than their parents -- or grandparents -- either had children or got married themselves: Brandi married at age 28 (four years after becoming a mother at 24); Nikki married at age 22 (a year before becoming a mom at age 23); if I assume Ricky got married in, say, 2015 (??) then he married at age 26 (two years after becoming a father at 24); Becca married at age 21 -- borderline, but better than as a teenager; also she was three months from age 22 -- and Britni will be 28 later this very month. Some people might argue it's best in all cases to wait until you're at least 30, but they don't know what I have to compare them to: Grandma and Grandpa McQuilkin were 18 when they got married; Dad and Sherri were both 17 when they married their respective first spouses -- and both had their first children at the same age; Angel was 15 when she had Brandi and then 19, I think, when she married Rick; Gina was 19 as well when she both married Dave (the first Dave! the only one who has gone by Dave and not David though) and had David. Compared to all that, every one of my nieces and nephews have really taken their time, and good on them for doing so!

I would not particularly consider myself a role model for any of this, for reasons both in and out of my control. I was a virgin until I met Shobhit at 28; pregnancy was never even a possibility; I could not even legally get married until 2012 and, since we wanted to do it the next time the date of the anniversary we were already celebrating every year came around, we married in 2013 when I was 37 and he was 39. For me, getting married so late was just a matter of limitations and circumstance.

I guess I've rambled on enough now -- I've gone beyond saying anything specific about the wedding, and you can glean plenty from the video and the photos anyway. Oh, just one slight disappointment: I was unable to get any photos or video of the cake cutting, as I had no idea that was happening when I had gone to the car to get the binoculars for the mountain photos. Hmm, that must mean Ricky missed out on cake too. By the time I got back in to the cake table, it was completely gone! That’s okay, I guess; I had a couple of cookies.

[posted 12:20 pm]