weddingThis coming weekend is going to be very interesting for several reasons, but I’d like to highlight two of them in particular.  First, it’ll be my first Fathers’ Day weekend as a father.  Second, it’ll be my first Fathers’ Day weekend as a Father with a capital F.  Ok, technically I’m a minister, but that’s still pretty cool.  Yes friends, your main man P-Dawg is an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, ready to co-officiate fellow blogger Mike Honcho’s wedding this weekend.  I will be the most Jewish minister there, I imagine.  I’m excited and ready to rock the party, but I gotta say, becoming legally able to marry people was far, far too easy.

Check this out: I went to TheMonastery.org.  Easy enough to remember, no?  I clicked on “Free Online Ordination” – oh yeah, did I mention that it was completely free too?  Then there were five bullet points of instructions with which I had to comply.  Summarizing, they are: Put your real name, please don’t put a fake name, double check that you put your right name, don’t capitalize your name incorrectly, and really guys, don’t put a fake name.  Those are the regulations.  On the next page, I had to put my name (my real one, spelled and capitalized correctly), address, email address, birthday, and sex.  That was it; I’m not even close to kidding.

I was very pleased to see it was so easy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too easy.  Shouldn’t I be required to do more than that?  I was given a pretty awesome power, and that was the whole of the initiation process?  It’s way easier than buying a song in iTunes or even making a rental car reservation online.  Hell, it’s just about as easy as leaving a comment on this blog.  I couldn’t let go of the nagging feeling that I’d missed something or that I would show up to the wedding and realize I needed to complete some 8-hour online course, so I called the LA County Clerk’s office.  I waited on hold for a while before reaching a nice woman in the correct office.  I explained my worries, and she told me, “It doesn’t matter how you were ordained as long as you were by a religious organization.”  She went on to tell me that the biggest snag that people run into is by not filling out the marriage license correctly.  “Make sure you use black ink,” she said, “and you need two digits for the month and day and four digits for the year.  Otherwise the form is invalid and we send it back.”  “Oh,” I said.  “The marriage is still valid though,” she added, which was a bit of a relief.

So that was truly all I needed to do to be able to marry people.  This coming Saturday, I promise only to use my new powers for good – that is, I won’t sneakily marry unsuspecting couples on the dance floor, no matter how much fun that could be.  I’m debating whether or not I should add “Ordained Minister in the Universal Life Church” to my resume; since not everyone knows how retardiculously easy it is to become one, it might look impressive or give me an undeserved dignified air about me.  Either way, I’m very much looking forward to Saturday, and I know the whole wedding event will be awesome.  Oh yeah, and the other kind of fatherhood is fucking rad so far too.