subscribeThe twenties. An aimless rant.
Friday June 4, 2010
(Warning: This didn’t start as a rant, but it became a rant. Yay!)
First of all, it’s June. Where the blazes did half of 2010 go already? Secondly, there are many happenings this month so far. It’s my last month of the day job before summer vacation (sweet!) and I cannot wait until I have all of that glorious writing time. Because it will be glorious. As it is, I can’t dig into a local café (and there are tons in Williamsburg) for more than an hour before I need to get back to work/life, and one of my favorite places to write is at a café, with an iced coffee or tea sweating on the table beside me.
Then, nearly every weekend this month we have friends visiting from out of town. It’s a magical time when friends visit. It gives us an excuse to stop being homebodies and actually explore this fantastic neighborhood and the entire city, making us feel better about the money we’re spending. We’re seeing a Broadway show! There are street fairs! Museum exhibits! Good times to be had by all! If left to our own devices I will hide in a corner with my laptop and the boy wonder will play a game (or, now, play with the kitten)… or I’ll play a game (oh, Little Big Planet, you are addictive), or we’ll cook or bake… But we live, as so many people remind us, in frakking New York City! Which apparently obligates us, by virtue of the necessity of allowing others far away to live vicariously through us, to go “out” and “have fun.” We do. Just last week, we were invited to Milk & Honey, a bar that is not myth! I had two of the best cocktails I’ve ever had in my life. But we don’t do that kind of thing all the time. We strive to live sustainable lives.
The “New York City life of a twentysomething” is one stereotype I’ve never fully understood. (There’s an episode of Sex and the City that goes into this; twentysomethings here are supposed to live lives of fun, carefree frivolity involving many one-night stands and much alcohol, the kind of lives that thirtysomethings and fortysomethings regard with mild jealousy. This confuses me!) But how can a twentysomething (who isn’t one of the rare 6-figure earning twentysomethings, or who doesn’t have daddy’s credit card) actually afford to go out all of the time, especially in an economy where so many people in our age bracket are losing their jobs? Unless you love dive bars, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, or you know someone who can pull you into a “cool” place, bypassing an expensive cover, going “out” costs add up. Usually going out makes more sense than, say, having a house party — especially when a lot of people I know are either renting rooms in multi-room apartments with relative strangers, living in a “box” of a studio (which we did! We did that!), or living outside the city entirely (which makes grabbing a group together to go to their place a trek rather than a casual jaunt).
This phase is a unique one: the post-college, pre-”real life” phase of learning to be an adult, finding a grown-up identity (because, yes, that identity we discover as teenagers gets smashed by college, then that collegiate identity gets ripped apart by the “real world”…) All of that fun stuff! I’ve been told a lot, by a various folks that the twenties are “a magical time” or somesuch, that I mustn’t “squander” my time, that I need to “live life while I still have one.” Um, what? (Does that mean that one’s life ends with marriage and/or children? Really?) Do those people realize that telling me that is akin to telling a teenager that they will “get over” all of their teenage drama and hardships, that they just have to “suck it up and deal”? (Because I was told that. That being a teenager was a phase I needed to push through, like slogging through mud, and I’d get through to the other side filthy but whole. Thanks, advisors, for telling me that. Helped so much with the day to day of teenage life, knowing that I was sunk neck-deep in mud out of which I’d eventually discover how to crawl.)
I didn’t know how to deal with that well-meaning advice then, and I don’t really know how to live without “squandering” my life now. What does that even mean? Perhaps it’s because I spend part of my days with a lot of New York City moms — every conceivable (positive and negative) stereotype of them — and all sorts of babysitter/nanny-types. A lot of them ask me the usual questions, get a little picture of me, then proceed to give me life advice. Sometimes there are some pleas — “Don’t have children yet! Please! Don’t! Doooon’t!”) Sometimes there are lectures: You should do this. You should do that. (Because I’m asking for it? Like I was when I was a teenager? I am definitely the kind of person who enjoys making and learning from her own mistakes rather than getting inundated with well-meant but not applicable advice, thank you!) I heard a peer say that the twenties are for partying, the thirties for marrying, the forties for kids. That was the life plan, and she was following that perfectly. Plenty of time, later, for “important things”! Some moms have made similar comments. Why are you married so young? The twenties are a time for freedom! (Because a marriage isn’t… free? Because one can’t do what one wants to do… while also in a committed relationship?) This is not to say that one ought to be in a relationship, please don’t get me wrong, but can’t we make our own choices? Can’t we decide that being committed is just as fun as being single, simply different?
This whole sensation, this well-meant advice about how I ought to be spending my twenties, is very similar to what people said when we got engaged. That for a forward-thinking, modern, feminist woman to be engaged! Before thirty! Oh dear me! What is the world coming to? My response then was, well, wasn’t the feminist movement — isn’t it still? — ultimately about freedom of choice? The ability for a woman to make individual life choices that suit her, not ones that should suit all women or ones that used to suit most women? So why am I supposed to be living my twenties in one way? It’s almost as if there’s this implication that my example pulls down the average for all free, single-life loving twentysomething women everywhere. I’m ruining the curve, oh no!
If I lived in a different state, in a small town, would it even be weird for me to be married? Some kids I went to high school with have kids now. I read a piece in New York Magazine this week, a brief spot on 26-year-old Leelee Sobieski. About being a “young” mom, she says,
“People in the middle of America have babies at my age,” Sobieski says. Had she and Kimmel planned to be parents this early? She pauses. “We fell in love,” she finally says. Still, “I wish I had a girlfriend that had a baby. That would be so nice. I feel like I’m doing this thing that’s really weird, but I look around me and realize that everyone has babies. Look at all these people! So what?”
This is, I think, what some people who have urged me to “live life!” in my twenties are worried about happening to me. That now that I’m married, logic says BABIES! and clearly, babies will ruin my stereotypical twentysomething fun. Some mothers (especially some of the mothers I’ve met who had their first children rather “late in life”) have even expressed mild skepticism when I say we’re not planning on babies yet. (Clearly, I must be mistaken, because I am married. CLEARLY. Women who want no babies, who are married? I feel your pain. Why does society insist on it? Can’t it be up to us?) If I spend a Saturday night — or Memorial Day Weekend — at home, watching TV, cooking dinner, playing the PlayStation… why is that wrong? Someone asked me recently what I’d done over my holiday weekend. Did I go on vacation? Did I go to the beach? Did I leave the city as one ought? No, I said, we stayed in. We adopted a kitten. We made hanger steak. There was a significant pause. “Why didn’t you go out?” I paused. “Should we have?” They paused. “Well, we had fun this weekend! We went to X, we did Y…” Well, good for you. No, really — good for you; I’m not bitter. I had fun. You did, too. Yay for all!
I don’t know where this rant is going — do rants go to any sensible conclusion? But the bottom line is that I am in my twenties and I am having fun. I’m not living my life with any regrets and it bothers me that some people assume I am because I’m married, because I’m… I have no idea! Well, people will assume and I can let them. I’m happy and I’m enjoying the experience that is my life, in all of its uncertainties, new experiences, and happy days of relaxing in front of the television or cooking dinner with my husband (and kitty!). We do things, too. Maybe they’re not the things other twentysomethings do, but we’re not interested in being them. We’re interested in being us. A lot of the “grown ups” I’ve gotten to know the last year assume that there’s something wrong with my life because I’m not following the life path they followed. Some have blatantly judged me for it. To them, I say: I’m doing just fine, thanks.
A rant about the power of compelling writing.
Tuesday February 9, 2010
…and the different emotions and point of view that compelling writing may hopefully illuminate for the consumer.
I live in New York City. I take public transportation. I’ve had more colorful and interesting experiences taking the public transit system here than I did back in Pittsburgh (which was technically my first major solo encounter with public transit), but none of them have lived up to the stereotypical horror stories I heard growing up in the suburbs. Some of my experiences here have been delightfully strange (subway dance routines being the favorite) and some have been plain old creepy (use your imagination, I’m sure it’s close). That’s fine. Sometimes I overhear arguments (always fun!) or one-sided very loud phone conversations (always curiosity-prickling).
But what bothers me — that which makes this a rant — is when I overhear someone’s blatant ignorance, prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, or… well. When people are being offensive (and not quiet about it!), I get annoyed, but when they’re being offensive as a direct result of miseducation, misunderstanding, or a (voiced!) unwillingness to learn… *grumble* I get very mad. Seeing and hearing this kind of thing on TV, on the Internet — that’s expected. But on the bus?
Today it was homophobic in nature. I overheard two teenagers (tenth grade by my guess) talking about being gay in the military and what “being gay” is, by definition, and then how that definition (involving a comparison to a woman) correlated to a gay person’s inability to be an ineffective soldier. (GRRRRR.) One actually asked the other to define “gay” because he didn’t really get what it was. The other teen’s response was so offensive, so misinformed, so casually homophobically ignorant and… I can’t even describe the way it made me feel. As if I’d been punched in the gut, maybe. I’ve heard stories of homophobia, seen blatant homophobia and talked with friends and peers who’ve experienced it first-hand, but never before has it hit me so hard. I’m straight, but that doesn’t change the way it makes me feel. I hated this today. What made this worse was that the teen finished his definition by saying, “That’s what I think it is. I’m pretty sure, like, that’s it.” That actually made me almost turn around and say something — and these were very scary-looking teenagers! (I am easily intimidated) — because I couldn’t believe what he’d just said was, apparently to him, speculation. Loud, ignorant, offensive speculation.
I think before today I might have been a little mistaken in my own assumptions about the prevalence of this kind of thing in the world. I knew it exists, but I didn’t think that knowledge applied to my little corner of the world. Knowing a thing exists outside of my own sphere of experience and experiencing it are two different things, and it took getting my gut metaphorically punched today to remind me of that. Things like this happen every day across the world, and those comments aren’t only about sexual orientation. That ignorance doesn’t only occur in people under the age of 18.
I’ve been told this. Over and over. Statistics, news stories, vague accounts. But I’ve never had a gut-level reaction about casual, callous homophobia/ignorance through any of those “telling” experiences in real life. The only experience I can correlate this with is, honestly, something I read. Someone else’s evocatively-written first-hand account was the closest I’d come before today to feeling that same emotion — and I think that says something, oddly, about the power and necessity of art, of good writing, of fiction and brilliant narrative non-fiction. It has the power to convey profound truths without us having to experience them for ourselves. Today, I did, and that comparison has really hit me hard. That’s what good writing can do.
Good writing has the ability to make us feel things we may not otherwise be in a position to feel, and because of that we are fuller, richer human beings. That old adage, show don’t tell: that’s the beauty of good writing.
Today reminded me, in a very strange and unexpected way, why I write fiction, why I write fantasy; why I consume books and watch movies.
I haven’t experienced a lot of things first hand. In some cases, I may never experience certain things — going to the moon, taking core samples from the icy crust of Antarctica’s Lake Vostok — and for those things I tend to depend on fiction to give me the sense of that realism. To educate me by illustrative, gut-wrenching example. I look to movies like The Hurt Locker to make me feel what it’s like to be under pressure as a bomb specialist in Iraq in 2004. (A recent rental; it’s been on my mind since.) Films like Slumdog Millionaire (which I know surprised a lot of people I know) have an effect when they show you a world you’ve never seen — whether because of lack of experience, travel, or simple knowledge — and by showing you that glimpse, they can affect change. (I’m one of those believers that a change of mind, of heart, can later have a profound impact on the world. Call me an optimist if you must, but I believe that.)
To me, almost more than any other genre, fantasy can’t lose that sense of human connection, the base-level emotions of humanity that bring us together and drive us apart. (Though I’m sure this can apply to science fiction and any other genre in which the world has the capability of being more important than its people.) Fantasy is, like any good fiction, ultimately a mirror of our reality. When I read it, when I write it, I can explore other cultures, worlds, and characters. People I’ll never meet. But they can have a profound influence on the way I view others and the way I view the world. I said earlier today (in a very different context!) that the best fantasy story is one that uses the “genre” to illuminate the differences, possibilities, and promise that exist in our world but by seeing them in a fantastic context they stand out all the more starkly for it. It’s the emotional, “show” connection that gives fantasy, fiction, narrative non-fiction — all good writing, in a sense — its power.
(Okay, this also may be Battlestar Galactica influenced — I’m on Season 2 now, bear with me — and how humanity- and emotional-centric that “science fiction” show is — as it should be.)
No, I’m not going to turn today’s experience into fiction. (A blog entry will do, ha.) I’d be the first person to tell you that I hate preachy books. Doesn’t mean I can’t take that emotion I felt today and work with it, though.
Fiction, at its best, helps to make us feel things our own first hand experience may prevent us from feeling, or to illuminate those things we see every day and don’t appreciate — the list goes on. My take away from today is that as a writer I have the power to show by example and sometimes, in my sheltered little world of a computer screen and daily habits, I need to be reminded that I don’t know everything feels, but what I know, I can share. In turn, I can learn from others.
Maybe one of those teens will see a compelling movie or read an engrossing book — maybe? — that will teach them something, illuminate what they don’t understand. Maybe someone will tell them a compelling story that will get them to see a different point of view. See — because understanding can’t be forced. But seeing is the first crucial step. That is, in essence, what compelling stories ought to do. I hope one day they encounter a story like that.
Oh, priorities. And the bridal shower.
Wednesday February 18, 2009
Lots of things to do, as always, and never enough time — or motivation — to do them all in any efficient or speedy way. Ha!
Today I’ve been writing (for real, for the first time in days), finally forcing myself through the climax I’ve been avoiding writing. I doubt I’ll finish what I want to tonight, but getting through a bit makes me feel productive. I keep pushing it off because I’ve come down with a case of the “what ifs” regarding the scene. What if I did this? What if I took the scene in this direction — or that? The forward motion of the plot is stalling because I’m getting hung up on the details. I just need to push forward with the gut and then rewrite if what the gut likes turns out to make no sense. Methinks. Hm. Sounds like a plan, at least, and I certainly need one of those!
My priorities since Saturday have mostly been leaning toward wedding stuff — writing up the ceremony script, deciding on our vows and what we’ll say — and nailing down other details (the florist, the menu). I’m reluctantly annoyed about this stuff taking up my time. I want to be doing other things but I don’t like pushing wedding stuff to the side or off. It’s supposed to be important, right? It is. I just don’t like thinking about it because thinking makes me worry about Murphy’s Law. Where I go, Murphy’s Law follows, it’s a proven fact of my existence. Planning as much out in advance, as painful as it is, is really necessary.
The bridal shower is this Saturday. Part of me is excited, part of me dreads it. A little. I’m never very comfortable in a crowd, and make that crowd a group of women fawning and gushing about the approaching wedding and I think I might pass out a little due to lack of oxygen. (My smile will be plastered on and too-tight, not allowing enough oxygen to get to my brain; I can see it now.) I keep trying to focus on the bright side: everyone there will be there because they care about me. They’re not set on embarrassing me (too much) or making me uncomfortable (unless it’s funny). I hope. Being the first (of our close friends, of our generation/age of cousins) to get married is awkward. We’re doing everything with little personal experience guiding us. I’m always nervous about endeavors like this. But I keep trying to reassure myself that the nervousness is the good kind, the eager-for-the-new-experience kind of nervous. My only bridal shower experience was my cousin’s. I was in high school, bored out of my mind, and I really didn’t care about all of it. Now I’m not much more enthusiastic about the details, but I think my natural curiosity will pull me through it. I want to see how this will all turn out.
I’ve realized that because I’ve been writing so much fiction this last month — the last 6 weeks really — and focusing on the wedding in all of my other time, my blog entries have suffered a bit. I really miss getting all literary or critiquey on this blog! I think I need to write up and schedule a few posts reviewing the books I tore through this past weekend, at the very least. I have a few drafts of essay-ish posts I’ve been writing… I think I need to finish a few of them. I love discussing fantasy. Complaining about how my wedding planning is progressing (or not) should be going on the blog I’m keeping for family and friends for the wedding. Right? Sigh.
I am getting married.
Wednesday January 7, 2009
I am getting married and it’s finally becoming real. The whole show dog aspect of it, anyway. (Erm, that was snarky. I mean the “public ritual” aspect of it is becoming real. Sorry, snarky bride police.)
Yes, it’s old news, generally, for people who know me, but it’s also shockingly real all of a sudden. Between today and yesterday two boxes from Papyrus Custom Printing arrived containing — hoho, you guessed it — custom-printed wedding announcements and thank you cards. So it’s all slowly becoming more real. That and the fact that the year is currently 2009 and is thus the same year (two thousand nine) that is printed on everything it’s no longer a vague “future” thing. It’s rapidly becoming a now thing.
The funny thing about all of this is that the actual exchanging of vows — or, well, not that; the actual signing of the documentation legally declaring us husband and wife – is the easiest part of the thing. It’s absolutely everything else that’s going to have the possibility of driving me crazy.
stress vs. willingness to spend
I’ve decided it comes down to something that can be explained graphically, and so I made a quick graph in MS Paint, old-school style. Basically I believe that the more or less you’re willing to spend, the less stress you have because if you’re not willing to spend much at all, you can’t have much, and if you’re willing to spend endlessly, you can hire someone to stress out for you. But if you fall any where in the middle, you eventually succumb to a certain amount of stress. The middle is where I estimate you’re willing to spend enough money to get everything exactly the way you want it to be but you’re not willing to go the extra step and hire a wedding planner to do it for you. I bet there’s a lot of room for argument with this graph but for the point’s sake, let’s go with it.
I’m somewhere on the rapidly increasing slope of the first part of the curve, where we’re not willing to spend much but by that token that means we have to do everything ourselves and we have to make certain sacrifices in order to ensure we don’t spend more than we actually want to spend. This complicates matters rapidly. Like choosing a photographer. Do you all have any idea what photographers charge now a days, especially when you have Keyword: Wedding as part of the transaction? Or a florist? If it’s just for some event, that’s one thing, but you throw in the word WEDDING and the prices skyrocket. It’s annoying. Really. This is part of what I hate about the wedding industry. (Other things include special cake servers encrusted with pearls and your monogrammed initials, EW; the list goes on.)
I hate that you can’t have an inexpensive wedding yet classy wedding. (Another graph: cost vs. “class.” You can imagine how sharply the slope inclines in that one.) It’s impossible. We chose up front to do the one thing guaranteed to keep one kind of cost down: we’re inviting only a select group of people, not all one hundred plus potential people we listed early on in the process. I just mailed twenty — twenty – invitations today. That basically amounts to forty people, maxiumum. That few meant stamps, invitations, and up-front costs are down. Favor costs are down. Food and drink costs are down — there just aren’t that many mouths to feed, so we can get elegant in food and beverage choices instead of going hick to be cheap. Reception site: we were able to get one that fits 100 people reaonably comfortably which will be just roomy for the forty of us.
However, regardless of how many people are going to the wedding, the photographer still charges for X amount of time and X amount of photos. There is a limited window of negotiation. We’re going to negotiate the heck out of it. Florist — there’s going to be a cost to that because of the Keyword: Wedding issue, but we’re only ordering a handful of tasteful little — tiny, really — arrangements for little tables, plus the usual lapel & bouquets. But as there’s only one Best Man and one Maid of Honor, no additional wedding party folks, that means we don’t have to go crazy expensive by any stretch. (I also have flower tastes that run basically only to peach/cream/white roses, nothing like orchids or calla lillies or gerber daisies, nothing crazy unusual or expensive.) So that’s one thing.
All of it, regardless of our cost-cutting methonds, makes Bryan and I wince a little. We knew from the start we’d be doing this wedding ourselves — our invitations are written from us, as etiquette states the people who pay for the party are the ones who are “hosting” thus from whom the invitations technically come. We also knew we wouldn’t want to wait very long to be able to really afford more (we were more inclined to go to City Hall and get it done, really, rather than waiting another two years to save up to have a big wedding). Honestly, even if we could afford a BIG wedding, neither of us wanted one. Neither of us is into complicated things. We like simple. Easy. Stress-free. But unfortunately even this path that we’re taking, while it looks on the outside to be stress-light, is actually more stressful than we really anticipated.
Or maybe it’s just me. Bryan is more or less mellow but I find I am starting — starting — to agonize a little about the details. I really know I shouldn’t. I should really stop thinking about any of it. All of it. I went ahead and did all that I’ve been able to do this early in the game and I think that’s a lot. I’ve been trying to keep on top of everything. All of the details. It’s agonizing, really, when it comes down to it, because I am a detail person. I can’t even write if it’s not in the right font. When anything remotely associated with the wedding comes across my vision and it’s not the way I want it I have to struggle to tell myself not to get involved or worried about the details where I can help it.
This morning at the post office, I discovered that the “wedding” stamp, a white heart on an ivory background, was 59 cents but because our envelopes had something “three-dimensional” (i.e. a ribbon) in it, I needed to pay a surcharge per envelope, making the stamp cost 62 cents. The 62 cent stamp was a green dragonfly. The envelopes were ivory; the wedding stamp was ivory. I had a moment — a fraction of a second moment — where my inner monologue was made up entirely of shrieking, agonized profanity. The perfectionist in me was clawing at my insides, desperate to make myself say, “Let’s go with two 59 cent stamps per envelope because they are the wedding stamp and they match so perfectly. The unnecessary cost is worth the effect of the cute little stamps on the envelopes.” Instead, I decided to go with the green dragonfly stamp. It’s classy. Yes it is. I tell myself this. I have been telling myself this. It’s also better than the 59 cent stamp and a 3 cents stamp (or 3 1-cent stamps) per envelope. I had to strike down the urge. It’s only the envelope of the invitation! You’ve written out every single address in the proper etiquette with your nice script handwriting and it looks lovely and classy but it’s only the envelope! The clerk at the post office looked at me strangely. She looked so regretfully at me, too. It was as if she anticipated the breakdown or the hissy fit. She looked at me, rumpled layers of clothing, damp ski jacket, pink extremities, and I swear her look told me, “You can break down, now, I’ll understand and sympathize.” It was surreal. I calmly and detachedly stamped all twenty envelopes, dropped them in the box, and walked out. Do you see what I mean about willingness to spend versus stress? I might have paid $15 more for double the unnecessary stamps to make ‘em all “pretty” but I’m not willing to, so I sacrificed that for a brief moment of stress indulgence. Sigh.
Thinking about it more, I realize I’ve gotten the look a few times now. The “Oh, she’s the bride, if it doesn’t go her way she’ll throw a fit, so let’s be prepared for it” look. Sometimes it’s tinged with sympathy, as if it’s really fine — accepted and expected! — for me to indulge in a fit because it’s practically my duty as a bride to throw a fit or ten; sometimes it’s tinged with resignation. The David’s Bridal clerk was looking a little resigned to me throwing a fit when the gown I wanted wasn’t in stock pretty much anywhere so I’d have to order it blindly if I really wanted it. But I didn’t throw a fit, I approached it all with an almost clinical practicality. If anything I was actually a bit snarky, more or less because I hate dressing rooms. Hate. Hate. Hate. (If she would have tried to come into the room with me I would have thrown a fit. Yep, and it’d be my ordained right to throw a fit, too.) I tried on 6 dresses and each one was not perfect and I was shrugging about it, dancing around in the gigantic flourescently white things, saying exactly whatever popped into my head. “Meh, this one’s too crusty with sequins. I’m not getting married in Vegas.” Or, “This one’s visible boning makes it look a little cheap. I’d much prefer the hidden boning.” “This one’s bodice is a little low and slices into my boobs uncomfortably. I don’t want to be a slutty bride, thanks.” And what was really funny was that the bridal consultant still didn’t get a sense of my personality after all of that, even after I really blatantly said I can’t wear strappy heels because my feet will hurt so stop pushing them on me or that the ridiculous foam thing they pretended was a bra was actually horrifically uncomfortable so I don’t want to buy it for $75, thanks. Hm, I suppose I was sort of rude. I said it very politely with a smile, maybe that helped. My mother was also there being judiciously practical with a hint of emotion leaking through now and again. (I think she too is realizing the ritualistic aspect of this is just about real now.) Also, the more I think about it, I think I was deliberately pushing on the snark because I was refusing to get all gushy about it. (High gush factor in a bridal store dressing area. HIGH GUSH FACTOR. I hate being gushy. Hate hate hate. Just like dressing rooms!) I refuse to be a girly girl about a lot of things, and being all “Aw! I’m in wedding dress! Prance, prance, prance!” probably would have made me vomit a little. Thus the snark. Make everything into one big joke or criticism fest and the sentimentality gets shoved aside. I couldn’t even bring myself to smile in the pictures my mother took of me in the trial gowns.
(Naturally I ended up ordering my dress blind — the size will work, no worries — and I figure that’s the best thing all around. Dressing room was for almost naught, though, tear, tear a little for that.)
I think as things move along, I’m going to either get snippier, snarkier, cooler, or gushier. (I’m going for snarky cool — detached from stress, staying far away from gush.) Though the bridal shower might be hardest. That’s pretty much the ultimate estrogen gush fest. Please, someone get me a provocative gift or toy so I can open it in front of a bunch of middle aged women and have a good belly laugh. I really think that will be essential in keeping away the gush factor. Oh, and beer. I think I will need beer at my shower. Or a nice margarita.
So many things to come in the next month or two. The bridal shower. The bachelorette party. (I am staying out of planning that one — I am not Scrubs‘ Elliot, thank goodness. So long as I am not forced to do anything inappropriate with a man who is not my husband to be, I think I will tolerate pretty much any curveball the ladies decide to throw at me.) The only (unfortunate? fortunate?) thing is that the wedding festivities don’t end after the wedding. In May there will be receptions held for us by Bryan’s family, which means we get to have more opportunity for by-proxy stress and gush. Oh, joy. The funny thing is that throughout all of this, Bryan has agreed with me. He hates all of this as much as I do but unlike me he dismisses things. No worries. He puts it out of his head. He knows if a matter needs fussing over I’ll be fussing, so he doesn’t have to worry about fussing. It’s funny, really; we just want it to be over. Or, rather, we want the day to be here already so we can just stop worrying about the planning. Or maybe I want that more than he does. The marriage thing is exciting but the wedding thing is more stressful than anything. I think I’ll get legitimately excited when it’s here. It’s the agony — borderline, borderline agony — now I can really do without.
Repeat the new mantra: Low stress, low gush, happy times will come. Breathe.
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