Say "Yes" to the Dress .. It Is Your Destiny!

And life has a funny way of helping you out when you think everything's gone wrong ..

Been in a reflective mood lately, as I've been hanging around family and trying to keep them sane until the memorial service that happened on Saturday. Where honestly do I fit in with my relatives and why are they the way they are? I think I've mentioned in the past that my dad's wing of the family, which is pretty much him, me, and my daughter .. are pretty much black sheep / outsiders that tend to get away with things mostly because ,"well, you know how they are!" Hell, my daughter and I are both much more liberal than everyone else in the family as well so that divides us up even more.

So it feels odd when we all get together under sad circumstances and can share in some commonalities instead of the usual focus on our differences. We are all a loud bunch and have a keen memory, as I got to hear more about my dad's pre-teen years hanging out with his cousins. We hate people being late, and being late ourselves makes us all really cranky. We also can put away a huge amount of alcohol. Seriously, I had no idea my prodigious drinking in the past was some part of my genetic engineering. Not the addictive part, but the metabolizing element of our bodies.

Where am I going with all this? Well, I wasn't sure until I started typing but I can see it in the caption here that I made when I got home from the service and the dinner collation afterwards. Not many people recognized me at the wake, yet they recognized my daughter even though they had probably never met her, or remembered her being an 8 year old. I went from really long hair and clean cut face to a shaved head with a long goatee beard (probably nine inches long from my chin to end of hair) so when I was younger, I looked a LOT like my daughter. I ended up hearing lots of "Oh Hi Wow, you granddaughter is all grown up now and she looks just like Damien. Speaking of the devil, where is he?" and I'd be right next to my dad, and wave, "It's me!" and then the reaction would be, "I didn't recognize you without your bangs hanging over your eyes. You look like a biker now!"

With that mindset, it is easy to see where the start of the caption came from, and the rest is mostly a wish fulfillment I hope will happen for a few of my TG friends. They say that acceptance is the last stage of grief. Acceptance means something else too, and as this caption shows, hopefully there will always been a connection between the past and what is to be in the future.

My uncle was a big gearhead, and often fabricated parts for my vehicles when I couldn't find them in a parts store of at a junkyard. So this one goes out to him.