the cicadas

as you might remember from a lazy saturday discovery channel program (or wait--didn't you spend your lazy saturdays watching the discovery channel?), periodic cicadas are fantastically disgusting looking bugs that live underground for 13 or 17 years and then come up to make a huge racket, find some insect lovin, and then very quickly die as their offspring head underground for another 17 years. perhaps upon hearing this information you thought "how interesting! what a strange life cycle!" and maybe you also thought "but this information will never have any real impact on me". i did. but then, i wasn't planning on moving to chicago and getting married the summer that three "broods" (that's what they call them) would emerge from their subterranean lairs to make really noisy mating calls (they say it gets up to 100 decibels!), litter the ground with their carcasses, and gross out innocent people throughout the city and in any outdoor weddings that might be happening in any of the city parks. like the one i'm planning on having in a month, just at the height of their infestation.

we, the intrepid bandit wedding planners, are going on as planned with our wedding, plague of locusts or no. perhaps someday we'll look back at a wedding overrun with noisily horny bugs and laugh. or maybe we'll end up miserable and wonder why we didn't take God's warning more seriously. i mean, it's a plague! on the wedding day! what else would you expect?

i guess probably we'll look back and joke that we're miserable, perhaps in response to questions people ask about why we have a cicada's molten body framed on our wall (which also sounds like something else we'd do). probably we'll grossly exaggerate the number of cicadas, the noise, and how many we accidentally ate because they ended up in our sandwiches. probably i'm already exaggerating the number of bugs we'll have in our park and how loud they'll be. if you're planning on coming out for our little picnic/wedding, do us a favor and try not to let the facts get in the way of a good story. and...bring some mosquito netting.