How To Make Your Best Friend's Wedding Truly Memorable

     Be his ex-fiancée. Be the woman who broke his heart so completely that he did not date for years. Then he discussed you with his dates, including and especially his new fiancée. She will have the whole list of your god-like qualities branded into her wedding-stressed brain. It will occur to her repeatedly that she became engaged to him after they became pregnant, but you were engaged to him sans fetus. He will be alone when he picks you up at the airport. He will burst into tears as soon as he sees you, although neither of you have spoken. Immediately react with the tear-filled equivalent of sympathy vomiting. Have dinner at a bad bar and restaurant whose name contains the word “onion” on the way to his house, where you will be staying with his (and your) other starving artist/student friends who can’t afford a hotel. 

     Drink beer with his guy friends while the happy couple is finalizing details at the Buddhist Center where they will be married the next day. Realize that you forgot your pajamas just as he arrives home ahead of her. Borrow some shorts and a tee shirt from him and go to bed. In the morning, go upstairs wearing his clothes and casually ask his wife-to-be, “What happened to the cabinet?” as soon as you notice the melted door and charred sides. She accidentally set it on fire while attempting to simultaneously make breakfast and perform wedding preparations while you slept soundly in her almost-husband’s clothes. Be too sleepy to notice her mild meltdown and gentle hostility.

     Ride to the wedding with your best friend instead of family, other friends, or the bride. When he merges onto the freeway without looking, nearly killing you, scream hysterically, “What the FUCK are you doing? You almost killed me!” Arrive just before the friends who saw you on the freeway, and who, upon exiting their car, begin yelling, “What the FUCK were you doing back there? You almost killed our friend! You almost killed this precious dakini!”

     Be his best man. When you present the ring, kiss him on the cheek. At the reception everyone will whisper about your inappropriate behavior. Wear a short dress under your traditional Tibetan robes. Change out of the robes after the ceremony. At the reception everyone will whisper about your inappropriate appearance. Be warm and friendly when his friend from work approaches you. You will not know it, but he is the one your best friend’s new sister-in-law has been unsuccessfully attempting to bag for weeks. Spend most of the reception drinking wine and talking with him. Everyone will whisper about what a slut you are. When it is speech time, present your toast in heroic couplets. Everyone will whisper about what a show-off you are. When the reception ends, go with your new friend to buy wine to take back to the newlyweds’ house. Confide the traumas of your lives to each other while watching Winged Migration with the sound turned down. Invite him to share your single-sized guest bed instead of sleeping on the living room floor. Talk about music, books, and films until the time is appropriate for a dry-humping make-out session. Fall asleep together without surrendering to the urge to merge. Pick up where you left off as soon as you regain consciousness. When your best friend comes downstairs to get you for breakfast, be sitting naked atop his sexy and suddenly awkward co-worker. Scowl, call him “Jesus,” and suggest that he try knocking next time.

Bar Etiquette for Drunks

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Scruples

Last night I attended a screening of a friend's new feature film. He is screening to determine what needs to be re-written and/or re-shot. I'm not going to tell you the friend's name, nor the name of the film, because I am about to unveil a few spoilers, and I don't want you to know what I've just spoiled when it is actually released.

The film centers on a thirty year-old woman who has dissociative identity disorder. SPOILER ALERT: she puts herself in incredibly dangerous situations. Her personalities are aware of each other. She does not believe she can ever live without suffering at the hands of the various personalities and their individual harmful ways; they are all that has been consistent in her life, and she is not willing to lose that consistency through "integration." She wants to end her suffering, and her helplessness at being at the mercy of the unmerciful actions of the personalities, and she asks her boyfriend for his approval. She wants to know if he loves her enough to let her end her suffering, but she does not ask him to actually participate. She has stated that she believes her condition is permanent; she sees no way out other than suicide. He has exhibited signs of a savior complex throughout the film, but tells her he must leave, and may be gone for a long time. This is his permission and approval, and a step in his personal evolution. This is the point in the film at which the discussions among my friends became passionate.

One of my friends posited that nobody has "the right" to "allow" another to commit suicide. I argued that close friends, family, and lovers not only have that right, but are actually required to help a friend in this kind of need end his or her suffering. I will say here that I have no religious affiliations forbidding this approach. I believe that we each own our bodies, and our lives, and if we decide that our suffering has become unendurable, we have the right to end those lives. This idea has been a source of comfort to me throughout my life. Knowing that I do not *have* to live makes it easier to *choose* to do so. I do not believe suicide is a decision to be taken lightly, and a recognition of impermanence can prevent permanent solutions to fleeting problems, but I also understand the feeling that life has been a series of waves of pain, each building cumulatively into the next, with small periods of relief. When life feels like that, and seems to be an unending, increasing wave of pain, I understand the desire to end it. I've never heard an argument that made me believe that euthanasia can never be merciful.

Somebody once pointed out to me that when his dog became old, demented, and helpless, he was legally able to end that dog's misery. But, when his wife, after over 40 years of marriage became demented and helpless, when she reached a depth of misery at which she ceased to wish to live, a point at which he knew that he also would not want to live, he could do nothing but watch her slowly deteriorate.

Hypothetical scenario: Your mother has been diagnosed with a terminal illness at an unusually early age. She has many moments of clarity in the early days after the diagnosis, and tells you how terrified she is, that she understands what is in her future and she DOES NOT WANT IT. She knows there is terrible suffering ahead of her, that she will become so demented that she has no idea what is happening to her, who you are, who your brother is, who she is. This illness will kill her, slowly. There is no cure, and the only ways to ease it also slow it. She will lose the ability to walk, to talk, to think. Her essence will leave her mind and body years before that body's pulse stops. She wants to die before that happens. She would kill herself now, if she knew a way, but she can't hold onto an idea long enough to execute it (and herself). Before she goes to bed that night, she screams that she wants to die, repeatedly. You do not want her to suffer as she is now, and this is nothing compared to what is in store for her. You think of the book, "Still Alice," in which Alice set a plan for her own suicide on her computer ahead of time. There are indicators for which she is to check every day, and when she finds them, she is to follow the instructions she wrote for herself in her more aware, healthy days. Only, when the indicators are all there, she is incapable of focusing long enough to follow the steps to end her life, which is about to become unconscious and unwanted.

As if this weren't enough, you are also aware that this illness is hereditary. You have a 50% chance of inheriting it, and if you do, you will most likely be helpless, mute, immobile, demented within twenty years. Are your true friends the ones who tell you not to worry about it, who won't help you avoid years of empty suffering when that time comes (and that time is not now; you know you have the potential for several years of consciousness in front of you...you want to make the most of all that time, to squeeze every moment of connection and pleasure out of all those moments), or the ones who agree to help you exit peacefully when your quality of life ceases to exist? If you really love somebody, do you refuse to help that person die, even though it is their strongest desire, or do you help him or her liberate himself or herself, "discorporate"? Do you leave Alice there, living out her greatest fears, or do you show her the pills she stored away for this very moment? Which is the greatest gift of love, your selfish clinging to an idea of a person who is already gone, or your helping that person die with the integrity with which she lived?

(whose greatest gift is her astounding humility)

Yes, that's the subtitle of this online journal, but it wouldn't fit on the title line. And yes, online journal, not that four-letter word starting with "b" and ending in "log."

Today I am disgusted by the media coverage of the tsunami in Japan. As soon as there was footage, there was sensationalism. It really seems to me that cars, trucks, and buildings being washed away is plenty sensational, but, no, fear sells even better than sex, so we, the public, must be bombarded with "Is it coming here?" Really, for once, can we please just put somebody who is suffering ahead of our own inflated self-regard? People are suffering and dying; can't we spend a few moments empathizing with them, instead of worrying how it will affect us? That attitude is the epitome of the idiotic, self-obsessed American...Every natural disaster leads to the question, "How could this affect me?" Even during coverage of Katrina, here in the Bay Area, the question the news programs kept asking was, "Could it happen here?" Hello? It WAS happening here. New Orleans is a city in Louisiana, which is a state in the United States. That is "here."

Late last night, we were repeatedly warned that there was a tsunami alert. Never in these alert announcements were we advised what steps to take to ensure our safety. We were simply fed fear without reassurance or practical advice, assuring that we'd keep watching. I did not. In the early morning hours today, news shows were announcing that the tsunami was hitting Hawaii right at that moment. They kept talking about it, without showing live footage, because there was nothing happening. Better to keep producing the fear, stretch the suspense, keep viewers watching, than show them there was nothing to watch, that "we" in the United States weren't going to be affected by the tsunami, except those with friends or family in Japan, or those who actually give a shit about the suffering of their fellow human beings.

My final words to the media today: "Just fuck off. Please."