Operation Pink Herring

Love and marriage and all the stupid details in between

Planning a wedding is one of those things that you think you totally understand.  You hear people talking about how there are so many details that they think they'll go insane and you nod along; of course, it's a huge party with lots of expectations, families are merging... it's stressful!  We get it.  But in the back of your mind, you're thinking "I don't really see how many of these alleged details there could be.  When I get married, I'm not going to worry about all of that crap."

And then, my friends, you start planning a wedding and all of a sudden there are so many details that you think you might drown in minister phone numbers and invitation designs and you have to delete thenknot.com from your browser bookmarks because it throws a hundred tiny purple exclamation points in your face every time you feel like killing a few minutes browsing pictures of wedding-day hairdos.  Because as it turns out, you aren't sure about the loose, low bun anymore.  Maybe an updo would be better.  Or a low ponytail thing.  Maybe you should get a haircut.   Maybe not.   Fuck.

I still consider myself fairly close to the "zen" side of the bridezilla scale, but now that we've officially crossed the six-month mark I find that the wedding is on my mind pretty much constantly.  It's always there, lurking in the background.  When I make my to-do lists at work I find myself creating a separate wedding to-do list in the margin of my paper.  Prep for 11am conference call... call that other minister.  Fedex that package to New York... look up the address of the hair salon next to the venue so we can cruise by and see if looks shady when we're out there for the caterer tasting on Saturday.   I'll add to the list day by day, week by week, all the time becoming a bit more frantic.   Why haven't I called that minister yet?   What about honeymoon destinations?   Forget honeymoons, what about invitations?  I need to call that store in Hampden....  And then, all of a sudden, I'll have a burst of productivity and I'll call seven different people and in one short half-hour I've crossed nearly everything off the cursed to-do list.  And then I'll feel great, and I'll wonder why I don't just DO things right away instead of thinking about doing them for three weeks.  And that, my friends, pretty much sums up my life.   Just DOING things is easier than thinking and worrying about how you really need to do them.  If only I could manage to apply this principle in other areas of my life (like, say, cleaning the house and clearing out my work inbox) I am pretty sure I could rule the world.  But there is so much good TV on and I still have two Harry Potter books to read, so... yeah, nevermind.   What were we talking about? 

The planning is slowly but surely moving along, which is good because time has officially started to fly by.  We finally set the preliminary wedding menu and we have the tasting on Saturday.  The whole menu thing was ridiculously taxing.  In hindsight I should have realized that a girl who has trouble deciding what to order that very moment at a restaurant (the eggplant!  no, the shrimp pasta!  no, the steak!  Yes, steak.  Or eggplant...) would have some difficulty deciding what 100 other people might want to eat six months from now, but I suffered under the delusion that picking out food would be easy-peasy.  Be forewarned: it's a pain in the ass.  Stop worrying about making everyone happy and just pick something.  You're welcome. (Wow, between "just do it" and "stop worrying and just do it", I can't believe no one's hired me to write fortune cookies yet.)

Other things that are D-O-N-E... Save-the-dates have been chosen, printed, addressed and mailed (and this was very enjoyable because I adore paper products and have a compulsive love for hand-addressing things).  I ordered two huge boxes of mason jars from EBay to use for the table centerpieces and they all arrived intact (and I got a refund for the first batch I bought, which arrived not-intact).   I created a wedding website.  And... is that really it?   It... it can't be.   But, yes, according to my spreadsheet, that's it.   Wow, that's really quite depressing.  

But!  Let's also note that the following are thiscclose to being done: 

• Confirming the menu and sending in caterer deposit (hopefully this will move to the D-O-N-E list after Saturday's tasting). 
• We have two more officiant meetings set up (one on Sunday, the other on Tuesday - although, to be honest, I'm wondering what kind of minister is available to meet with people at 10:30 on a Sunday morning?  Should she be, like, in church or something?) You people who go to church and have a minister/pastor/priest/rabbi to do your ceremony:  YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LUCKY YOU ARE.  The price of being a heathen is not, as it turns out, just eternal damnation.  No, you also have to weed through a list of one million phone numbers and websites and try to find someone who is 1. moderately reliable, and 2. not a total douchebag, to marry you.  And take it from me: there are a lot of shady-ass douchebags out there, and quite a few of them make a living performing wedding ceremonies.  We did find a dude that we both liked very much and he would be perfect (despite being on the high end as far as fees go - and fees in this racket are anywhere from $350-$750) except for the fact that he has another wedding an hour and a half after ours.  He assures us that this is do-able and not a problem at all and on the one hand, I trust him because, hey, this is his job and he has a lot more experience with weddings that we do, so if he says it's not a problem, it's probably not a problem (and besides, we'll be first so it wont' be our wedding thats' screwed if things run late).... but on the other hand, I don't know if we want to be responsible for ruining someone else's wedding if someone's car breaks down or a freak tornado blows through in the morning and delays things.  So... we will sacrifice two hours of television-watching time to meet with officiants.  And if neither pans out, Reverend NPW will fly down from Boston and marry us.
• And... that's it.  Jesus, I really thought I had more things to list here.  I am really starting to get depressed now. 
• Well, let's also add "picking out bridesmaid dresses" to the almost-done list because if weren't for JCrew this would also be D-O-N-E.   Jenny, Beth and I finally sat down over the weekend and decided on three dresses from Jcrew.  This way, people would have a bit of a selection at very reasonable prices, they would all be easily ordered online, and possibly best of all - they came in a lovely "vintage blue" color that matched our color palate perfectly.   I was just about to send out an email with the final Bridesmaid Dress Decree yesterday, but when I went to Jcrew's site to copy the links for each dress I noticed that they are all sold out in vintage blue in every size between zero and fourteen.  I shot off an email to Mary, my personal Jcrew wedding consultant, to see if possibly this was just a fluke or a website error or something other than JCREW TRYING TO RUIN MY LIFE... but seeing as many of the other colors are now showing up as backordered until April, I'm not hopeful.    In the meantime, back to the fucking drawing board.  I have never spent so much time looking at dresses that I am not even planning to wear, and this is really getting dangerous.  I already have two black and white strapless dresses hanging in my closet with the tags still on, so there is really no way that I can justify buying this dress for myself.  But... it's so pretty.  And the economy, it needs stimulating!   Let me ask you, internet: if you were a bridesmaid, how would you feel about picking a dress from this lovely page of lovely dresses and wearing it to my wedding?  Because I am just about DONE with Jcrew.  First they change clearance to final sale, and now they're trying to ruin my wedding.  We're done, Jcrew.  It's over.  For real this time.   Unless - Mary from Jcrew, if you're reading this - I JUST NEED FIVE DRESSES IN VINTAGE BLUE.  EMAIL ME.  I'LL FORGIVE YOU.

Bridesmaid dress fiasco and the officiant racket aside, I am getting more and more excited for this whole wedding shebang.  As the weather gets warmer and the daylight stretches longer, July feels less and less like a faraway time in the mystical future.   The closer we get to spring (and holy hell, am I ever ready for it to be spring), the more real the whole wedding thing seems - and dudes, I am SO excited.  Don't let my complaining fool you.  When I'm  not feeling sorry for myself for not having a personal secretary to deal with the bullshit details, I'm feeling like the happiest goddamn person in the mid-Atlantic.  I am blown away on an almost-daily basis by how lucky I am (or I should say, we are, because let's face it: I'm not a bad catch) and it makes me feel all mushy inside.  And as I keep reminding myself, that's what all this wedding nonsense is about: having someone who tolerates my wearing socks to bed and my tendency to never close the cabinets in the bathroom, someone who will still kiss me in the morning, knowing full well that I have the most offensive morning breath in the house - and don't forget, we have three cats. 

Now, if you're all finished vomiting after that spontaneous Sap Attack, I have to excuse myself to call a few more potential douchebags to see if they're available on the 25th of July.

Sunday night blues

The scene: house on the Jersey shore belonging to Jenny's retired parents.  Jenny and I are still in bed at 1pm on Friday (happy "just because" day off from work for us!) and we place bets on whether Beth, who was supposed to leave Ithaca at noon, has departed yet.

Jenny [calling Beth on the phone]: How far away are you?  We just woke up.  Actually, we are still in bed.
Beth:  How late did you guys stay up?
Jenny:  Like, 11:30pm. 
Beth: Wow, and you slept until 1?  how much did you guys have to drink?
Jenny:  Um... nothing.
[brief pause, in which we wonder if we should have tried to pretend we didn't just sleep for nearly fourteen hours]
Beth:  I cannot wait to get there.

We spent the entire weekend doing nothing but sleeping, eating, drinking, laughing, and watching girly movies.  At one point we were all sitting silently at the kitchen table, washing down homemade guacamole with an endless supply of Diet Cokes from Jenny's parents' fridge and reading (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for me, Eclipse for Jenny, and a stack of InStyle magazines for Beth), and it occurred to me that life just doesn't get any better than that.

The only bad part about wonderful weekends is that they make crashing back into reality that much more painful.   Sunday nights are always tinged with the sadness of another weekend gone by, and tonight that's compounded by the facts that 1) the only thing on TV is this stupid-ass awards show, and 2) I only went to work two days last week, so the pile of Emergencies in my inbox is likely to be larger than normal.   Sigh.

Fourth (I think) Annual (except not annual) Blog Share!

Today's post is written by an anonymous blogger as part of -R-'s ongoing great Blog Share experiment.  In case you missed it the last time I participated in this, the Blog Share works like this:  -R- announces a Blog Share is coming up.  Bloggers around the universe sign up.  Everyone who signs up submits a post to -R-.  It could be a funny post, a sad post, a scandalous post or a confession post - anything they want to write about with their murdered dad's Invisibility Cloak on  a cloak of internet anonymity.  -R- mixes up the posts in a giant internet hat and emails each participant with their Anonymous Blog Share post.  On the designated date and time, we all put our posts up for the internet to enjoy.  And some of us almost miss the 11am posting deadline because we forgot our laptops at home.  Bon Apetit!

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After our recent presidential election, a cousin of mine posted a couple of bulletins on myspace with some extremely ignorant and racist remarks.  Actually I only read one of the bulletins but then could tell she was posting more because of what the titles were (subtlety was never her strong suit).  When I read that first one I was so upset I was actually shaking. (Just so you know, my thoughts are that no matter who you voted for, racism is never okay.  I realize that not everyone agrees with me, but for the basis of reading the rest of this post, I figured you should know where I'm coming from).  I immediately started writing a reply and trying my hardest to make it so my words would cut her to the core and she'd realize how much of an idiot she was being.  The two of us were raised pretty similarly in regards to our beliefs and ideas about the world.  Our grandparents were very present and influential in each of our lives (I would even say more in her life than mine) and taught us that all people were valuable.  My point here is that I could not believe that someone who was basically raised right alongside me could write things that were so full of ignorance and hate. 

Before I hit send on my reply to her I read it to a friend of mine to get her opinion.  She said that while she totally understood my desire to basically scream at my cousin (albeit through an email) she encouraged me to not reply in the heat of the moment, but to calm down a bit before I did anything rash myself.  I also talked to my mom and she put to rest some fears I had about me maybe not knowing my grandparents as well as I thought I did – could it have been that they were racist?  She gave me an emphatic no to that one.  Anyway as the story progresses, I ended up not doing anything about it.  I think once I talked to my friend and my mom the fire had somewhat gone out of me.  Instead I chose to basically ignore her (and this is really because I cannot stand confrontation.  And yes I know…very healthy.).  But now a couple of months have gone by and in the meantime she of course has sent me stupid little "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year" and "Love You!" graphic comments on myspace (I think the fact that we communicate solely by myspace these days should have tipped me off to the fact that we no longer have as much in common as we used too) and I haven't responded at all.  She recently sent me a message asking for my help on something and I just tried to keep ignoring it, but then she sent me a follow up message and I had to reply, but I kept it very short and to the point.

But now here we are in this weird space of there being a conflict between us and her having no idea that there is anything even wrong and me trying to figure out how I am going to continue to ignore her for the rest of our lives.  And that will be really difficult – we aren't just distant relatives.  She is the girl I thought I would have as my matron of honor some day (I was hers).  We wore matching outfits well into our elementary school days.  We had an imaginary friend whom we tried to convince our brothers was real.  And so on and so forth.  And yes, if I'm really honest with myself and think more clearly about the last few years I can see that we've grown apart.  She has made some decisions that I've been pretty appalled or annoyed by.  I think she may think I'm too "citified" for her taste (sure because I moved to a place with maybe twice the population of our po-dunk hometown).  So yes, there are differences.  We are older and we don't agree on or believe the same things anymore.  But what do I do to move on from here?  Do I confront her (ugh, this makes me nauseous just thinking about it) or do I act like nothing is the matter and everything is hunky dory (also not sounding too great)?  I think it would be a little weird for me to say, "Hey, you know way back in November when you wrote those horribly racist things?  Ya, that wasn't cool and I think you're an idiot."  Where is the middle ground in all of this?

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Each Blog Share participant has the link to where their anonymous post will go up, so if you care to leave a comment you can do it here and the author will see it.

A complete list of all the blogs participating in this round of Blog Share is right here.

I'm OK, you're OK. We're all OK!

I talk to cats! You talk to cats! If we ALL talk to our pets that means we're all normal, right? Well, at least that's what Max told me last night. After we finished our nightly Harry Potter book club discussion.

In other news, I'm pretty sure this video is relevant to your workday.

(Link via The Bloggess)

Carry on.

Bluebird on my shoulder

So I have a confession: I talk to my cats. 

I say hello when I come home from work and ask how their day was.  I tell them to calm the hell down when they swarm me in the morning looking for food even though their bowl is filled with perfectly good food and what, do they think food grows on trees?  Well, yes, Max, you have a point, some food does grow on trees but I'm pretty sure that no farmer in Florida is harvesting 10-lb bags of Science Diet.  

You get the idea.

I always tell them goodbye when I leave in the morning.  This morning I was in a chipper mood, and instead of just telling them "goodbye", I said "see you cats later".   I meant "cats" in the cool-cats-50s-slang way, but then I laughed my ass off the whole way to work because CATS!  THEY ARE CATS!  HAHAHAHAHA.

Either someone slipped some Prozac in my coffee this morning or I am really, really ready for this almost-springtime weather. 

If you guys are not on twitter, you're seriously missing out

That is some thrilling, high quality content, right there. And I didn't even go to the grocery store OR the gym today!  Joining time-wasting social media sites while slightly delirious = BEST IDEA EVER.

Or something.

Getting bangs, on the other hand.... not so much a good idea.  Well, you know how the song goes, two out of three ain't bad.  So now I just need to find one other thing to be right about and I'll be all set.

/SLOWEST FRIDAY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORKING WORLD

I now declare it the weekend.  AMEN.

And we won't even get into the Battlestar Gallactica obsession

Thanks to a combination of clementines, snow days (finally!), sleeping late and Harry Potter, I seem to have finally kicked the persistent cold with a side of feverish delirium that has been plaguing me for the past week and a half.  But not before I (1) went for a haircut and ended up with side-bangs, and  (2) joined Twitter.

So, yes.  Twitter.  You may have previously heard me saying that I just don't get it.  Who needs to know when you're going to the grocery store and when you're at the gym?  No one, that's who! Right?  Right! 

But then I read a comment on Janet's site referencing something she'd twittered about, and I wanted to see that particular post (or "tweet," if you will), damnit!  But Twitter wouldn't show it to me until I created a username.  So, fine, I created Twitter username.  (This was a particularly slow evening, in case you couldn't tell.)  And then the next thing I knew I suddenly I had a Twitter "account" and was following 20 people.  And now I am addicted; the end.

Let's talk a bit about everyone's favorite boy wizard.  I have had Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone sitting on my shelf ever since I bought it at a garage sale several years ago, but I never felt compelled to read it.  I finally picked it up in December, hoping it could save me from a particularly rough patch of post-Twilight depression... and I have to tell you, I was not that impressed.  It was a cute kid's book and a quick read, but it was no Twilight; THAT's for sure.  I felt the same way about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. 

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, however, I really really liked.  Really, really, really.  I panicked a bit when I realized on Thursday -- just as I was leaving for a 2-hour train ride to New Jersey -- that the collection of Potter books I'd borrowed from my friend was missing Book #4, but I've now procured my brother's copy and I daresay I'm close to being completely hooked.  I really didn't think it was possible to get any nerdier than being a 28-year-old Twilight fangirl with three cats and a blog, but it turns out I was wrong!  You can also be a 28-year-old vampire nerd who texts in Twitter updates about Harry Potter! Five years after liking Harry Potter was cool!