Salmon Trip, Day 3: The Wedding

(This is a travelog of my adventures at Kelly and Caleb's wedding.
Link to Salmon Trip, Day 1; Salmon Trip, Day 2; and Salmon Trip, Day 4.).

Much of Saturday passed by in a drunken blur. The actual ceremony was held in Salmon's cute little Episcopal Church, which I was excited to see the inside of. Unfortunately, the whole thing overwhelmed me at first and I lost it and started crying as soon as I signed the guest book. Noel thought I was sweet, but couldn't help asking if I was going to cry for the whole 30 minutes leading up to the actual ceremony. Of course I couldn't do that, since I didn't have any tissues and crying makes me get all snotty. And blotchy. Anyway, the ceremony had a lot of stuff about God and a confusing analogy about matter and intention. I don't know if I just took stupid pills that morning or what, but as she was saying it, it was like she was speaking another language. Each individual word seemed to make sense on its own, but more than one of them just melded together into a conglomeration of "what? what?!" Oh, well. After that, we all went to the Syringa Lodge and did our best to put a dent in the 2 kegs, 3 cases of wine, and tons of yummy food supplied for the reception.

I took a lot of pictures and didn't dance much because I have a hard time dancing to non hip-hop. Also, as Caleb's grandma Marge pointed out, the floor felt like it was going to cave in. That reminds me, I also spent lots of time telling Caleb's various family members that I loved them. They are all super nice. Caleb's aunt Christy told me she thougt it was really cool that he'd found a woman who liked the fact that he lives in a cabin with no electricity. And I was like, no, it's cool that Kelly found a man who likes living in a cabin with no electricity, because that's just the kind of man she's into. Boy was I drunk. Sadly, there was nobody to make out with. I took a video of Kelly and Caleb leaving the Lodge and all the bridesmaids mooning them, which nobody will ever see because you can hear drunk Jenny going on and on about how awesome it all is. We got a ride with Glen and I went to Kelly's house and played with Hank and Gus and demanded to see Pudgie Wudgie, the world's cutest cat.

Later we went to the Salmon River Inn, where Sadie tried to teach me to dance "like you're kicking the shit off." It's really hard to do! I guess Kelly M. got up on the stage and sang with the band, because I have dark, blurry pictures of it, (I'm against using the flash because it's totally obnoxious). Later, we all went to Whiskey Willie's, or as I've heard it called, The Sweaty Butt club. Tyler and Noel left, but Kelly M. and I stayed and were quite popular with the 50-year-old men in the club. Afterwards we wandered home and Tyler and Noel and I enjoyed the second frozen pizza of the night. We tried for a repeat of the powwow, but Tyler and I were too tired and went to bed. Noel stayed and a deer came out and frolicked around the campsite until it noticed her.

Salmon Trip, Day 2: Missoula, MT

(This is a travelog of my adventures at Kelly and Caleb's wedding.
Link to Salmon Trip, Day 1; Salmon Trip, Day 3; and Salmon Trip, Day 4).

The next day, Tyler, Noel, and I went to Missoula because Tyler and I had never set foot in Montana. Dirty minded people that we are, one of the first things we noticed about Montana besides the high number of casinos and personalized license plates was the number of things with suggestive names. There’s the Kum and Go convenience store and the Town Pump convenience store, which has signs warning that you’ll lose your license if you’re caught in a “pump and run,” (gas ‘n go to us Idahoans), and several others, including a daycare called Wiggles and Giggles. The trend of naming daycares with yucky-sounding names is nothing novel, though, as there is currently an ad for a daycare called “Tugs-n-Hugs” in the breakroom at my job.

Also, there’s a town and a mountain range called Lolo, which sounds disgusting to me for several reasons which I’ll not enumerate here. One good thing, I guess, is that the casinos advertise themselves as “Montana’s most liberal casino” rather than saying they have the “loosest slots” like the ones in Reno. We wandered around a bit in downtown Missoula, and went to Butterfly Herbs despite Noel’s protests that the name is stupid. After that we went to across the street to a store specializing in old and rare books where there lives the sweetest old doggie ever and we all petted her. I was surprised to find a collection that I swear was stolen directly from my preteen self. They had Sweet Valley Twins, The Babysitters Club, The Fabulous Five, and The Sleepover Friends collections, all in the original editions with the same artwork as when I read them in fifth and sixth grade before discovering Stephen King and Dean Koontz. After passing the annoyingly named Junga Juice, (which will later be opening a store in Bodo), we stopped in a secondhand store called the Loose Moose. Noel and I went to rescue her car from potential parking tickets while Tyler flirted with the cute shop boy. Later, we went to a place called the Raven Café, which serves up something called The Raven Burger (not made of raven meat, they promise), and listened to the jukebox whilst drinking beer and watching a near hurricane outside.

We met Noel’s brother for dinner at the OPP, or Old Post Pub, where I had a really good portabella mushroom, roasted red pepper, and gouda sandwich and my new favorite food, beer cheese soup. After that we left Missoula and headed back to Salmon to have a powwow at Tee-Pee Island.

However, just before we headed out the door with our booze, Noel discovered the A&E Biography of Johnny Depp, which we stayed and watched. We spent the remainder of the evening hanging out in the tipi, and retired at 3:30 am.

Salmon Trip, Day 1: Road Trippin'

(This is a travelog of my adventures at Kelly and Caleb's wedding.
Link to Salmon Trip, Day 2; Salmon Trip, Day 3; and Salmon Trip, Day 4).

We started out Thursday morning by having breakfast at Goldy's, where there works a very hot South American waiter (happily married, of course). After breakfast and some farting about in town, Tyler and I were off, hoping that the beautiful weather would hold for the rest of our drive to Salmon. It became apparent, however, about 12 minutes outside of Boise that we were driving into a big system of rain clouds. We stopped at the Wal-Mart in Mountain Home to get some batteries and film for our cameras. Walmart is home to some hilarious displays, such as a stack of toy horses that looks like a great big toy horse orgy. Ther was also a wall of Darth Vader noise makers, and we had fun making as many of them breathe loudly at the same time as possible. I purchased a toy red and white Minicooper for $1.97, only to find that the manufacturer attached a platform to the bottom of it so I couldn't roll it around. I didn't have a screwdriver, so the platform stayed on it the whole trip, much to my annoyance.

After Wal-Mart, we hit the road to Hailey and Ketchum and, ultimately, Stanley. Have you ever noticed how many wierd little cafes there are along the rural highways of Idaho? And how many of them look like they've been closed since the '80's? When were these places ever open? Did they get much business when they were? What inspired people to build them in the first place? Who ever thinks, "Wow, a run-down cafe in the middle of nowhere! I bet the food's outta sight!" These were the questions Tyler and I tossed around on the way towards the Hailey-Ketchum metro area.

The airport in Hailey is bigger than I could have imagined, and there was a humongous private jet parked there. I couldn't help speculating on whose it was. Arnold Schwarzenegger? Teresa Heinz Kerry? Bruce Willis? Anyway, I really wanted to eat in Hailey or Ketchum because there were tons of yummy looking restaurants serving Thai and Vietnamese food, but Tyler wasn't hungry and said they were probably overpriced anyway. We waved at the restaurants and said goodbye to exotic food for the weekend.

There are a lot of buildings crammed into a small space in Ketchum, especially, and the whole area looks like Aspen, Colorado--except the ski lifts and vacation homes and condos and yoga studios and spas and golf courses and art museums and overpriced bars, restaurants, and stores don't feel so much like they are right on top of you in Aspen. This is what I'm used to and expect when I go to the mountains. Touristy and wealthy. It doesn't bother me; I love ski towns.

After wondering whether we could see any Janet Jarvis neighborhoods from the highway, we stopped at the SNRA headquarters to use the bathroom. I wish I'd taken a picture, because they were the creepiest bathrooms I've ever seen. There were like 5 tiny goldenrod-colored stalls crammed into a dark, low-ceilinged space the size of my closet, and I was compelled to push open the door of each, lest a zombie be lurking in one of them,(there wasn't). The phone outside had a sign on it saying, “You are calling from NRA Headquarters,” which Tyler and I thought was pretty funny. When we finally figured out how the hell to get out of the confusing parking lot, we were back on Highway 95 heading towards Stanley. We passed much fresh snow on Galena Summit and thanked our lucky stars that no deer jumped in front of our car.

We cursed the Bridge Street Grill in Stanley for being closed at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, (awesome burgers, y’all), and had an unremarkable lunch at the Stanley Lodge instead. It snowed briefly and lightly while we were inside. After that we drove into some serious rain, and Tyler drove faster an more maniacally every time I cringed--and I cringe a lot since I get really nervous when I’m not at the wheel. We came to Challis, aka the asshole of Idaho. We didn’t even see a rainbow, which happens a lot in Challis.

We got a good laugh at the expense of the Sidlo family, who has adopted a section of Highway Litter Control near Challis, (“That sign just said this area was sponsored by the Sildo family! Could you imagine if your last name was Sildo? It rhymes with dildo!” “You’re a dildo! And anyway, it said Sidlo, not Sildo,”). We finally got to Salmon, where we had a happy reunion with Noellie at our sweet wood-paneled motel, the Wagons West.

After Kelly’s wedding shower, Noel, Tyler and I headed to the Owl Club for some good old drinking fun.

I was glad to see they had installed a curtain in the ladies room, because the way it used to be you risked being seen on the pot whenever someone opened the door. There's a machine in the bathroom that dispenses Freedom Ticklers, and Kelly M. thought this was so funny she had to have one. Caleb's friend hauled a guitar into the bar and a singalong broke out. I learned a new song over the weekend. I'd never heard "West Virginia" by John Denver before, but after about 300 repetitions, I'll not soon forget it.

There were some seriously drunk people in the Owl Club, including one guy who knocked his barstool over on me and later tried unintelligibly to talk to me when I went to order a drink. There was also a woman who was falling out of her clothes and taking some liberties with her barstool. She told me about how she'd stopped traffic on the highway between Idaho Falls and Salmon earlier that day to rescue a calf that was wondering around in the road. I thought that was pretty cool. Some old white-haired guys stumbled in a little later and couldn't communicate with the bartender to order more drinks, so plastered were they.

The Owl Club, Salmon's Fun Spot

Rainbow over Challis

T-shirt back

T-shirt front

You Don't Have to Be a Dunce

I chose a very simple concept for my t-shirt. On the front of the shirt I have placed a crying face wearing a dunce cap and under it the caption, “Stupid?” The back of the shirt contains a smiling face holding a book and a solution to the problem posed in the first picture, “Try reading.”
Part of the reason I chose such a simple concept is because I can’t draw—even stick figures stretch the limits of my drawing ability. More importantly, though, is the message conveyed by the words I have chosen, and I didn’t want any complex picture drawing attention away from the message I’m trying to convey. The message is a simple one which I wanted to be accessible to as many people as possible, and since it is a sort of immature statement, I thought it perfect to be accompanied by drawings that look like they were rendered by a child. I’m not trying to make fun of illiterate people, but rather, people like my ex-boyfriend. He likes to sit around and talk about how smart he is and how much he knows about every subject under the sun, but if a person ever mentions a book, he’ll say, “I don’t read, hon.” No, because he’d rather be playing video games. I think not reading is the stupidest thing to be proud of, and I know many people who share this sentiment toward books. Frankly, I don’t get it. It’s a childish way to be, in my opinion, and doesn’t make a person sound very intelligent. So I guess I am responding to this juvenile attitude with my own juvenile sentiment.
I wanted a very simple picture that would be easily identifiable as a symbol for stupidity, so I chose a person wearing a dunce cap. The dunce cap also recalls elementary school, which fits in with my whole theme of childishness. For the back picture I could have just as easily shown the smiling figure reading a newspaper, but a newspaper is harder to draw, and would have complicated my elementary theme, as I think children would probably be more likely to read books than newspapers.
I used HP Iron-on Transfer Paper for colored fabrics and a green t-shirt simply because I like the color. The shirt cost $5 at Wal-Mart and the iron-on paper is $10 for a pack of 6. The reason I chose to use the front and back of the shirt was because I couldn’t make both pictures and all the words fit in a pleasing way onto the front of the shirt. Showing only half of the message on the front makes an observer think more and wonder what point the shirt is trying to make. Also, I find it amusing to see only the word “Stupid?” and the dunce-cap picture on the front of the shirt. I will definitely wear this shirt in the future.

Bookmaking Jenny

I had the most sensitive moment today. Belle & Sebastian's "Judy and the Dream of Horses" played through my entire walk from the Hemingway center to my car, which happened at twilight after I spent an hour cutting interesting words and pictures out of cardboard boxes for class. The only way it could have been more sensitive is if I'd been heading across campus on a vintage cruiser with a basket on the front, heading to my home/job at the local church. Now I'm farting around on Myspace and "867-5309 Jenny" just came on.
Today in class we visisted the Reserved books, and got to see the oldest books in the library's collection. One of them has given me an idea for a classroom edition project, (this is the thing where I have to make a copy of the book for everyone in class, in case you couldn't tell.) It's called The Anatomy of Melancholy and it offers, satirically,
"THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, WHAT IT IS, WITH ALL THE KINDS, CAUSES, SYMPTOMS, PROGNOSTICS, AND SEVERAL CURES OF IT."
So what I need to do is come up with a more modern "condition" which can be humorously represented, like angst, existential dread, road rage, or similar and its causes and effects. Any suggestions would be welcome. This will be hilarious!
OMG I just had to add that I just saw a funny sketch on Chappelle's Show where they showed what the internet would be like if it were a place. It was gross and dirty and funny!