{"id":1338,"date":"2007-09-25T07:00:08","date_gmt":"2007-09-25T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1338"},"modified":"2007-09-25T07:00:09","modified_gmt":"2007-09-25T12:00:09","slug":"the-second-best-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1338","title":{"rendered":"The Second Best Man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ten years ago I married <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gracedbychrist.com\/\">Heather<\/a>.  My brother Patrick acted as my best man.  This weekend I finally got to return the favor.  I hope married life suits him as well as it has me. <\/p>\n<p>The wedding reception was smashing. This was the first time I&#8217;ve really danced since my own wedding.  I was happy to realize that at thirty-six I&#8217;m healthier, fitter, and thinner than I was at twenty-six. My <a href=\"?p=1256\">recent health problems<\/a> are gone, and I&#8217;m down forty+ pounds. I remember people telling me &#8220;It&#8217;s all downhill from here&#8221; as I entered my twenties.  I&#8217;m glad they were wrong.  I&#8217;m also proud of the rest of the guys in <a href=\"?p=3\">our gaming group<\/a>.  This was a wedding reception of over two hundred people, and I want you to know that our party of geeks <em>owned<\/em> the dance floor Saturday night.  While not everyone rolled a twenty on their performance checks, they made their attempts fearlessly and with gusto.  Once in a while the DJ would put on some YMCA or (shudder) Chicken Dance and we would aggro a bunch of non-dancers.  We&#8217;d execute an Expeditious Retreat and run outside to escape the audio pollution.  Then the DJ would put on something danceable again, and we would renew our all-night raid on the dance floor, like an unstoppable army of bards.  <\/p>\n<p>Here are pictures, for the curious.  One of the last images in the sequence leads to a video of the aforementioned geek dancing.  <\/p>\n<p><center><embed src=\"http:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/s\/c\/bin\/slideshow.swf\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" flashvars=\"host=picasaweb.google.com&amp;captions=1&amp;RGB=0x000000&amp;feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fheather.hmariey%2Falbumid%2F5113421683527671249%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss\" pluginspage=\"http:\/\/www.macromedia.com\/go\/getflashplayer\" height=\"267\" width=\"400\"><\/embed> <\/center><\/p>\n<p>The first several pictures are from the rehearsal on Friday night.  It was then that I really realized just how much weight I&#8217;d lost.  I was swimming in that white shirt.  I looked like a little kid playing dress-up.  Looks like I need to buy some new dress clothes.<\/p>\n<p>(My wife was taking the pictures, which is why you see more of my family than of the bride &#038; groom.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ten years ago I married Heather. My brother Patrick acted as my best man. This weekend I finally got to return the favor. I hope married life suits him as well as it has me. The wedding reception was smashing. This was the first time I&#8217;ve really danced since my own wedding. I was happy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}