I swore up and down that I wouldn't become one of Those Brides that let themselves get so stressed out about the wedding that they stopped enjoying things. And, well. That, um... worked out. I also promised I'd never refer to myself as a "bride", so... yeah. I give up.
I was a pretty much prepared to fail at Not Getting Stressed Out. I stress out when the laundry basket is too full or if there are too many un-folderized photos on my Nikon's memory card or when I'm at page 400 and and Edward still isn't back, even though I'm pretty sure he's going to come back because there are two more books in the series.
But I wasn't prepared to fail quite so spectacularly.
The things I'm worried about now are things I have absolutely no control over, which actually kind of makes sense. If I can't do anything productive about it, I should at least worry myself sick over it! It's the least I can do! I know this is counterproductive, but knowing that doesn't make it easy to stop. I focused on making my lists, checking things off, and trying my very, very best to STOP WORRYING.
And then I started getting dizzy. Once while I was driving, which was... scary. But since I've been subsisting on coffee and instant oatmeal and lettuce (from our farm share! because we needed one more thing to do every week this summer!), I guess it's not exactly surprising.
And then I came down with some sort of ridiculous July flu, which of course I immediately assumed was of the swine variety. I had to call in sick to work on Tuesday because I felt THAT awful. I call in sick to work less than once a year. The last time was about two summers ago, when I almost got hit by a truck trying to walk in to the office after a three-day stretch of particularly brutal insomnia. I HATE calling in sick. I just feel so guilty (for no reason other apart from my own neurosis) that it negates the entire point of staying home. But at this point, I didn't have TIME to battle a drawn-out recovery. So I stayed home, slept for thirteen hours and finished my shower thank-you notes.
And then I got a rash on my face. And my lips started to feel sort of numb. And then I developed these ugly looking sores on the inside of my lips AND I got a zit right in that little crease between your top and bottom lip, which made it really hard to do things like, you know, eat. And talk. And drink water.
Dudes, you don't even have to say it. I KNOW that it's psychosomatic. I am 100% sure that all of these random ailments are stress-related, but you know what? Knowing that it's all in your head doesn't make it any easier to STOP. In fact, it makes it harder because now you can start freaking out about how OH MY GOD I'M SO CRAZY I'M ACTUALLY DYING. But before I keel right over, I need to finish updating that wedding website and find space for all those shower gifts and find twelve of those stupid picture-clip things that can hold up three sheets of 5x7 cardstock and whose stupid idea was it to make the table numbers out of cardstock anyway?
That was the state of things when I went outside this morning to drive to my second dress fitting and realized that I didn't know where Joel had parked the car that morning when he got up at 6:30 to move it to a legal spot. My friend Liz and I roamed the block, but after ten minutes we had to give up and walk down to get her car because Joel wasn't answering his phone and we were going to be late for the Russian seamstress (who, during the last fitting demanded NEXT TIME YOU BRING FRIEND. FRIEND MUST LEARN BUSTLE.) As we raced up I-83 in Liz's Mini Cooper, with my Spanxx and my wedding shoes on my lap, I could actually feel my face starting to swell up.
But... then the dress fitting was actually pretty good. I didn't get yelled at by the Russian seamstress this time, the dress still looks perfect and at least my lip didn't LOOK swollen (although at that point they were totally numb). I did sweat through my t-shirt, but that's why I love those JCrew tissue tees. They dry REALLY fast.
We drove out to Frederick for what feels like the millionth time this month, and when stopped into the wholesale liquor store to confirm the alcohol order for the wedding (because they refuse to return my phone calls) and the team of teenagers working at the counter promised that they'd definitely give my printed-out list to the dude in charge when he came back, like, TOTALLY, no problem lady, I had this sort of out of body experience. So what if they don't give him the order? So what if they don't show up on the day of the wedding? We know where the store is. My dad has a truck. It'll be fine.
When we arrived at the salon for my hair and makeup trial and discovered that on the outside it strongly resembled a trailer, I didn't really care. It was nice enough inside.
And the hair lady totally understood what I was talking about. And she didn't even judge me for coming in with hair that hadn't been washed for, uh, a couple of days (dudes, I am not kidding about NOT HAVING TIME TO SHOWER LATELY). She just spritzed on some dry shampoo, gave me a bottle to take home since I'm all out (and I HAVE NO TIME TO GO BUY MORE) and did my hair exactly the way I wanted in about 20 minutes. She didn't try to hard-sell me on a more formal updo, she didn't roll her eyes when I asked Liz to take pictures to send to my mom. She was perfect. And the makeup lady, who I was even more nervous about (since I don't wear makeup or like wearing makeup and makeup scares me), was even better. If that is possible.
By the time we left, I was actually smiling.
Huh.
When we got home, I realized I could feel my lips again.
