'My Life Meant Nothing Until You Used My Toothbrush'

"Well, there's nothing like a wedding to screw up a family. ...  Something that's supposed to start nice, two people making promises to each other. I'll love you forever, I wanna die when you die, my life meant nothing until you used my toothbrush. And then it starts. ... Who do you invite, who sits where, open bar, yes or no. ... Auntie Junie doesn't eat chicken, Uncle Momo's off his meds. ... And then after all that planning, the reception will still be a disaster because no matter what you do or how carefully you plan, halfway through one of those nauseating Bette Midler ballads, someone's getting drunk, someone's sleeping with someone else's wife, and someone's chicken kiev is landing on the cake."

I am determined for this blog not to turn into a place where I kvetch about wedding planning because I am incredibly happy to be getting married to such a wonderful person and the fact that wedding planning is stressful, well, just comes with the territory. It's supposed to be the easy part after finding the right person to marry. Right? 

Well, turns out it's harder than I anticipated and mostly entails spending ridiculous amounts of money and trying to do your best to make the smallest number of people mad at you as possible. But turns out, even that's a cheery take on the situation—because it's mostly about making everyone you care about unhappy to varying degrees (one benefit to eloping is that it makes everyone equally mad, except for my dad, who likes the idea and even offered to pay us if we elope) and just trying to minimize the total unhappiness. And basically, no matter what we do, someone (or many someones) thinks we're being inconsiderate to the extent that it seems like what they're saying is that it is inconsiderate for us to even remotely take into account what's important for us.

I'll try to return to kvetching about other topics soon but just needed to get that off my chest. 

*Also, it's a quote, not an admission of actually sharing toothbrushes. Gosh, people. 

Deep Thoughts: The It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Edition

The end of the semester is always crunch time, no matter how well-intended I was about getting things done earlier or being more efficient or whatnot. Things that break the monotony by making this semester even harder than past semesters:

• Going to school solely for a meeting only to get stuck in an elevator for 45 minutes and miss the meeting. 

• A moving-out roommate unceremoniously removing the Internet a day early while I was smack in the middle of using it.

• And, oh yeah, wedding planning. I have no idea why such a happy occasion has to be so stressful to plan. And why libraries won't let me use their space to get married. (With the exception of the NY Public Library, which will gladly let me use their space ... for a small fee of $50,000.) 

But a week from tonight, I will be so done and so far away and so happy. If only I could fathom getting there alive and sleeping in between now and then.