And Away We Go!

H. and I had our first planning meeting today over brunch with our fabulous crew of friends who are going to be in the ceremony and help us make the big day happen. I feel so blessed to have such an amazing group of people in our lives and helping us plan our wedding. And if this first brunch is any indication, our wedding's going to be a blast! We had some yummy food--homefries, veggie and maple chicken sausages and scrambled eggs with spinach--cooked by H. to perfection, then we did some fun story-sharing about how we'd all met each other and then we did some brainstorming and planning. THEN, my good friend A., by request, did an impromptu salsa dance lesson, which surprisingly everyone participated in. It was so much fun and totally reflected me and H.'s values: music, friendship, good food, dancing and just a generally grand time had by all.

Here's a picture of the impromptu salsa lesson:


And what a talented and connected group of folks this is: my other friend AR can get us a hookup on a digital projector which we'll use for a slideshow and even offered to help GROW some flowers so we wouldn't have to buy as many for the wedding; MR is the decorations and flower diva; two friends named A. are helping to settle on a reception venue (see my earlier panicked post), and everyone pitched in to help do our Save the Date postcard mailing. A. and N.'s new Baby K. (all of four months old!) made us all coo and smile with his cute lil' self as well.

And of course I was the event coordinating queen and had easel pad paper up to help us all with the planning structure (I can't help myself, I love event planning!):




We had a great time and look forward to more meetings like this one--where we can really be ourselves and have others help us visualize and manifest our wedding in meaningful and fun ways. Being around our friends today made me realize how lucky H. and I are, and how amazing our life already is, and how amazing it will be post-September 20. Blessed indeed.

Frackin' Around...

...with my template! Tsk-tsk if you were thinking I was going to talk about naughty, sowing-my-wild-oats-before-settling-down kinds of things. I would NEVER discuss those kinds of things in my blog. (Wink)

Seriously, though, I've been really irritated with the new template/interface on Blogger (I couldn't figure out a way to enable comments for God's sake!) so I finally reverted back to the 'Classic' template, et voila! My comments have magically appeared. But I'm still figuring out how to not make the links I add show up in a different font than everything else, and how to make things look a little bit nicer. I know a grant total of like two short lines of HTML code, so I will be enlisting the help of none other than my lovely fiance, H., to help me. You see, he's a web programmer/designer on top of all the other fabulous and lovely things he is.

So please be patient with me and my blog as we tweak and work out the kinks. Oh yeah, and I'm having the first meeting of my bridal party this weekend! We're going to come up with a more interesting name for them--they're all good friends that are helping us plan our wedding and who will be in the wedding in some way. It should be a fun meeting.

And as far as the other f**kin' around, believe me I've lived my fair share of party days and wild young nights. One of the reasons I'm getting married and looking so forward to having kids is that I'm quite content with my memory of those years, and the fun I had, but I'm also quite ready to get domestic, stay home, clean my kid's snot from her face, and let H. make me brown rice and veggie stir-fry. Ah, the glorious boredom of settling down!

Learning Along the Way

A friend recently read this blog and told me she was surprised at how 'open' I was (read: sharing too much information) about the stresses, ups and downs of wedding planning and my life/relationship. I told her that there are plenty of other bloggers out there that are WAY more open with their business than I am, but that I understood where she's coming from.

Well, in the spirit of sharing but not sharing TOO much (I do like to keep many things private), let me just say that the emotional side of preparing for and planning a wedding are much more intense than I thought they'd be. My therapist says that getting ready for our wedding is triggering all my 'core issues'---aka sh*t I've been dealing with in my life for a long time, and that a lot of us deal with on an emotional and psychological level, whether we're aware of it or not--like abandonment, insecurities about commitment, fear of turning into my parents, etc. This triggering has led to a lot of soul-searching and tough conversations between H. and I. But although neither one of us is perfect and I definitely have made some mistakes, said hurtful things, etc. to him when I'm really just anxious about making the biggest commitment I've ever made to another person in my life, I can also safely (and gladly) say that the whole process has brought us a lot closer.

I guess that's what people mean when they say that even just the process of planning a wedding will test your relationship. There are so many aspects of the planning--setting the invitation list, picking who's going to be in our wedding party, dealing with family, talking about money--that can bring up thorny, difficult issues, that it's so important that we try to stay grounded and remember why we're doing this all in the first place.

And really, even though we decided to get married partially to make our families happy and partially to set ourselves up financially for a life together, really we want to get married also because we love each other, and because we want our community of friends and family to witness and honor the commitment we're making to each other. The journey to that day has its fair share of obstacles, but it's all just practice to help us refine how to be with each other, how to love each other, and how to take care of ourselves along the way.

I'm learning a lot, and I think H . is too, on many levels that I'd never really thought about before. It's a fascinating journey, and one that I'm not regretting.

Reception Venue Panic Attack

Had a bit of a reception venue panic attack today. Realized last night that our then-first choice for the reception, a Chinese banquet hall, might not be the best choice (kinda pricey, kinda run down facility, extra cost for matching table linens, etc. etc) but that if we tried to do it at the reception hall on the same campus as our wedding ceremony, we'd have to cut down on the invite list significantly. Well, I couldn't get this stuff out of my head (and I'd hd too much caffeine yesterday to boot) so Yours Truly ended up staying up most of the night worrying and doing planning on my computer and getting only about 3 hours sleep.

Fast forward to later on today, when I called the event coordinator for the campus where we're having our ceremony to inquire about whether the reception hall was still available. Alas, the woman we'd talked to before hadn't mentioned that it's alumnae weekend during our wedding, and that the reception hall was booked. Drats! So that lead was eliminated.

After that bad news, I sent a desperate-plea-for-help email to my wedding party--a smart, resourceful crew if there ever was one, and thank Goddess--and now have a couple more venues (including a small community center in the next city over, which I hadn't even entertained because it didn't seem 'nice' enough, but now seems like a pretty good deal) to add to my potential reception venue list. I'm so glad I finally reached out for help on this issue. H. just isn't big on organizing events and sometimes feels a little intimidate by my can-do-it-all attitude that he doesn't suggest things that might be perfectly good ideas.

So we're getting closer to finding the perfect place for our reception, and with the help of our friends and community, everything's going to be all right! I feel it now, I really do.

Getting Stressed Again...

...but trying to breathe and stay calm. Settling on the place where our reception is going to be held has proven more difficult than I thought--expense is the big factor, with most places having minimums for number of guests (the one place we're looking at has a minimum of 200 guests, which would increase our costs by at least $1,000). I've thought over and over, 'Maybe we should just skip the big wedding and save the money for a house," but then as I've told H., I really can't imagine our wedding being any smaller than the 175 we're currently anticipating and still feeling like our community of family and friends is present.

I was reading some Thich Nhat Hanh this morning, some of his thoughts on Sangha (Buddhist term for spiritual or other community) and marriage, and I realized that we really can't compromise on our wedding size. It may cost a little more money to try and go with a bigger place, but in the end the blessings and joy that a wedding of our true community will far outweight any monetary cost.

Still, I'm a little torn by where, finally, we should plan to have our reception. There are so many fantasies and ideals I have--not to mention the ideals of our respective families that we must contend with, although, fortunately, they are being shockingly quiet about their wants--that I'm projecting onto this wedding. One of the things I've done to try and soothe any sorrow I might have about not having the wedding in the 'perfect' locale (e.g. a garden ceremony and reception site with beautiful views and delicious food--I've costed some of those places out and unfortunately they'd cost us at least $15,000 alone) by thinking, 'Well, H. and I could always have our ten-year anniversary vow renewal ceremony here...." That's helped a lot, thinking about the anticipated longevity of our relationship, how this wedding is just the beginning of a long, hopefully happy road ahead, which will be marked by many other 'firsts'. In this way, I've avoided getting too caught up in the idea of a 'fantasy' wedding, but that ole' socialization is pretty powerful.

Wish us luck as we make our final decision.

Our Wedding?

It's been an interesting process, planning this wedding with my fiance, H., who is a graphic designer and deejay by trade so has some important skills to contribute to the planning process. Although I still rag on him for not doing enough sometimes, I have to admit that I have a pretty good thing going on compared to other brides whose boyfriends think that wedding planning is just for women.

Of course, the bridal industry completely reinforces this belief/stereotyped/f**ked up assumption, which is totally sexist and not very modern. I mean, come on, it's the year 2008! I can't believe sometimes how little progress we've made, especially in a supposedly industrialized and modernized society, in terms of gender relations. Of course, I've already noticed how much I've bought into these assumptions about brides and wedding planning, which I may write more about later. It was really trippy to realize how, even as a self-proclaimed radical feminist, I felt like I had to prove to my family and friends that I was going to have a 'perfect' wedding and if it didn't turn out exactly like I wanted it, it was going to be a tragedy, or at the very least, everyone was going to feel like it was my fault that it didn't turn out right.

H. has been great at basically telling me when I get stressed out or worried, "Everything's going to be okay. The wedding's going to be beautiful." That's been one of his main roles in our relationship, as I tend to be much more of a type-A stress case than he is. Of course, my obsession/attention to detail is a major plus when it comes to event coordination, but even the most balanced of event coordinators needs someone to tell him/her, 'You just need to relax and not be so stressed out about everything.' Because in reality, if my dress isn't the most to-die for fashion creation since Princesss Di's, it really is okay. And in the end, half the stuff that the bridal magazines and web sites are pushing on me is stuff that neither I nor H. give a crap about. But there's a definite psychological/marketing strategy that they use that is highly effective, playing on the gender roles that our society places us in which say that the wedding is the bride's one day to be a princess, and the man is sort of just there to shine a light on her.

There are lots of ways that H. and I are already planning our wedding in a more egalitarian way, which is much more reflective of both our relationship and the ways that we want to relate to the world, our politics and values. He's in charge of the invitations, the rehearsal dinner, the photograpy stuff, the music, his own clothes and those of the 'masculine' (not all the people dressing like men in our wedding party ARE men) folks in our wedding, among a few other things. I'm in charge of overall coordination (mostly because I have professional experience doing it), getting our wedding party and planning meetings together, my clothes, the reception venue/food stuff, and a few other things. We've done a bunch of stuff together too, of course (meeting with photographers, checking out venues). And his side of the family is paying for more stuff. So it all kind of balances out.

I've read some interesting things about more progressive, egalitarian, and honestly, more fun ways of planning a wedding, from the Offbeat Bride blog and this book called There Must Be Something for the Groom To Do which is the best thing I've read so far about how much pressure is put on the bride to have a spectacular, perfect wedding and how the groom needs to step up in order to help change this dynamic.

In the end, it's still just me and H.'s wedding, despite the fact that our families have a lot invested in it, and have certain expectations about what it should be like. H. and I have some pretty cool and different values than our families, and the way I see it this is a big way that we can show them our whole selves--by planning a wedding that is really going to reflect who we are, what our relationship is about, and who our community and family truly is.