Meet the Wedding Party: Bridespeoples

A keen observer may have noted that I have yet to talk about our wedding party.  I have noticed that among my friends and fellow bloggers, most people seem to have a pretty easy time choosing their bridesmaids.  In fact, many people have their wedding party picked out before they even get engaged.  This was not an easy decision for me.  Choosing the core group, the three people I ended up going with, was very easy.  But there were other contenders.  One in particular who I really wanted to ask to be a bridesmaid, who I in fact did ask to be a bridesmaid the first time we were engaged, I agonized over for months, wondering if I should ask her this time around.  Though we haven't seen much of each other in the last few years due to distance, we still write (with real, genuine paper!) and talk occasionally, and I still consider her a close friend.  My soul mate.  The problem is that she never picks up her phone.  Or responds to any attempts at communication on a regular basis.  And in the end, I decided I didn't want to deal with the inevitable stress of having her as a bridesmaid.  I'm sad about it, but it's just not worth the strain.

So with that final decision made, I present to you my peeps!

Maid of Honor:  Seema

 

Seema and I have been friends since seventh grade and became best friends soon after.  I'll never forget our first conversation.  Being GATE (honors) students, we had a lot of classes together.  While walking to English one day after Drama, Seema came up to me and said, "Hi Courtney!"  I proceeded to look around bewildered, gave her a small smile, and continued walking.  But she kept talking to me and eventually said my supposed name again to which I promptly responded, "My name's not Courtney."  We've been friends ever since.  And yes, that is the start of the toast I will give at her wedding.  We've been through a lot together over the years--from hatching plans to dance to "Bye, Bye, Bye" on the tables of our history class and spending inordinate amounts of time at Disneyland to crushing boy troubles (including being broken up with by our boyfriends on the same day--yes, they planned it that way) and keeping in touch while hundreds of miles apart.  She is one of two people from high school I still keep in touch with, and after ten years, she is still my best friend.  Seema is one of those rare gems of my friends who was excited about my wedding even when she was single, and I'm so glad I'll get to have her by my side when the day comes.

Best Man:  Cody

 

Yes, that's right, I'm having a boy on my side at our wedding.  Deal with it.  In spite of his recent "ignore the family" attitude, my brother and I have always been very close, and I would not feel right getting married without him by my side.  Cody is one of the most interesting people I have ever known and is very difficult to describe.  I would caution against any attempt to classify him, so let's put it this way:  you know those "he's the most interesting man in the world" ads?  That's Cody.  I am so proud (if extremely jealous) to say that my 19-year-old brother has made more progress on his career than any recent college grads I know, and he and his band, Of the Vessel, have started playing gigs across Southern California.  I love him very much and wish that he would descend his "cloud of awesomeness" to talk to me even when other people are around.  But for now I'll just have to console myself with this:

Muahahahaha.  He was so cuuuuuuute :).

Bridesmaid:  Megan

 

Megan and I met the same way Daniel and I met actually, through BookWorlds.  Well, OK, that's not entirely true.  As Megan likes to remind people, we technically met when I added her on facebook despite the fact that we had never met in person.  But in my defense against utter creepazoidness, we had 3 classes together, the same major, AND we grew up 10 minutes away from each other!  It was fate.  We got to know each other in our Harry Potter class (the same one Daniel used to frequent that was taught by our officiant), and the next semester, we got a lot closer when we taught a class on The Lost Years of Merlin.  I will never truly be done repaying Megan for sticking with me through that highly cumbersome class, but I'm so glad she did (even if it still haunts her nightmares) because we became good friends and then roommates.  She is my closest friend from college, and I'll be happy to have her with me on our wedding day even though I know she'll spend the ceremony itching to get out of her bridesmaid's dress.  That's what she said ;).

And so I introduce you to my peoples.  Megan was highly amused when I noted the diversity among them, and we have taken to calling them my multicultural bridal party--the Indian, the White Boy, and the Asian with a dash of Latina (the runners up were a Persian and a very Aryan Mormon).  My friends have always been pretty spread out, culturally, physically, and socially, and I like it like this.  Whether because I like lots of different experiences or because I am a self-loathing white girl I am not entirely sure, but regardless, I love my friends, and I want ALL of them to share my wedding day with me.

How did you pick your bridal party?  Who did you pick?  Was it easy, or did it require debate?

How to Have a Successful and Productive Wedding Planning Weekend

Step 1:  Don't do nearly enough research before heading to your wedding destination.  Be sure to have a good reason like a personal crisis and failed ceremony plans right before too.

Step 2:  Make it so that you only have 2 full days at the destination that is over 400 miles away from where you live.  While you're too poor to come back up for several months and everything you're doing must be decided by the end of this trip.

Step 3:  Get sick the day before driving to your semi-destination wedding.  Get a lot worse the day that you leave.

Step 4:  Make yourself sicker by stuffing so much food down your throat that you literally cannot stand another bite.  Then try to look at outdoor ceremony locations in the dark and the cold.

Step 5:  Get a lot sicker your first night there.  Go to bed late and wake up before dawn without being able to get back to sleep.  Remember that you only have 2 days to do everything and try to power through the pain.

Step 6:  Be too out of it to think to check whether the florists you're visiting are open on Sundays.  Waste 2 hours driving to closed florists.  Feel like an idiot.

Step 7:  Wake up with a fever on your second and last full day.  Decide to press on anyway despite inability to stand for more than a few minutes.

Step 8:  Look for outdoor ceremony on a cold, windy day near the ocean.

Step 9:  Leave early the last day to get home to your brother's birthday party.  Make sure your fiance was up all night with you so that he is too tired to drive and ends up sleeping while you drive.  Try not to crash.



How Not to Kill Yourself through Your Own Stupidity

Step 1:  Make your fiance do most (and then all) of the driving.

Step 2:  Have your amazingly scrumptious food tasting before you realize you are dying.

Step 3:  Eat cake so delectable that you can still taste how good it is even when you cannot smell.

Step 4:  Reject your OCD nature and let your fiance check out hotels on his own.

Step 5:  Ditch everything that doesn't need to be done now.

Step 6:  Sleep in the car between ceremony locations.

Step 7:  Watch everything your hosts have saved on their DVR.


Though I hope this doesn't happen to you, as Jillreigh reminded me recently, shit happens.  People get sick.  Things do not go as planned.  Life is not perfect.  Sometimes, you just have to deal with it.  We really needed to get our ceremony and hotels taken care of, but the flowers can wait.  And I had to suppress my god-forsaken nature and not do everything myself.  This was probably good practice for the day of when I will not get to set up the wedding decorations and will have to leave it others...and not freak out if it's not perfect.

Rolling with the Flow on Photography

In some amazing moment of clarity and non-craziness, I managed to book a photographer based largely on instinct.

As I've mentioned before, Daniel does not care about photography.  Wants good pictures, but wants little to do with the choosing process.  So this decision was pretty much all on me.  And contrary to my OCD, must-research-everything-or-perish-trying personality, I basically just booked the person I wanted because I wanted to.

Not that there weren't any cognitive processes going on in this decision.  I did research.  I've been bookmarking people casually for months, and I definitely searched for cheap, good photographers in the Bay Area (thank you WeddingBee).  I ended up actually speaking to four photographers which definitely isn't nothing.  But for once in my miserable excuse for a life, I didn't overdo it.  Even though I knew I could find someone good for a cheaper price than the photographer we booked, I just did not want to put in the exhausting amount of effort it would take to do it.

And I am in love with our photographer.  I mean, who wouldn't be after this:

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He was the one I wanted from the beginning.  There are a few others that I was very interested in until hearing their prices, and one in particular who was willing to work with our budget despite her large amount of experience (Jen May is awesome, check her out), but our photographer was BY FAR the most reasonably priced for his ability.

As soon as I saw Helen and David's wedding, I knew.

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So it is with great pleasure that I present to you, Stephen Cheng Photography!

 

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The main reason I didn't book Stephen immediately is that he lives in Orange County, so we have to pay for him to travel to NorCal.  Daniel and I initially viewed this as a totally unnecessary burden on our budget.  Why pay for travel expenses when there are plenty of good photographers in the Bay Area?  Well, thing is, these awesome but cheap photographers seem to be hiding from me, and Stephen was perfect.  I couldn't get his pictures out of my head.  He just seemed like an awesome fit.  His style, romantic without sacrificing realism, is exactly what I was looking for.  I'm even considering using 2 of the 4 songs on his website for the ceremony procession!  It just seemed meant to be except for the whole price issue.

So we met with him (and boy was it nice to be able to finally meet with a photographer in person), and I was happy to hear that he is excited about our wedding!  Always a good attribute in the person who's going to capture it (and I'm pretty sure he was sincere.  Our location is the shit).  We were able to work out travel expenses that will only put us slightly over budget, AND he agreed to give us an extra 2 hours of coverage just because he would be there anyway.  That was what really cinched it for us.  Daniel was very impressed by his reasonableness, and I knew we were never going to find a better deal than 8 hours of coverage for our budget.

And so we booked our photographer with enough thought and research to back up the decision, but mainly because I am in love with this:

 

 

 source (in case anyone hadn't figured it out already)

In spite of myself, I feel really good about this decision.  The pictures will be good, we get along with the photographer, and our budget will live.

Have you made wedding decisions based on instinct (or laziness)?  How did you choose your photographer?

Am I an Idiot?

My mom basically just offered to pay for me to have a florist so we don't have to DIY our flowers.

And I basically just forbade her from paying for it.

I have reasons.  I've always been the only frugal person in a family that tends to spend more than it really has.  In college, I was the only one of my friends who didn't live on a set budget, and I probably could have gotten my parents to give me a lot more money than they did.  Instead, I scrimped and saved, lived in shitty (and frankly dangerous) parts of town to save money, and spent an awful lot of time trying to live with the bare minimum so that I could help them by not having to ask for money as often.  So this refusing money thing isn't exactly new.

And now more than ever they just don't have it.  My brother is going to start at a private school in the fall, my dad's job situation has been precarious for a while (he's in the movie industry and thus does not have stable work at the best of times), and my mom retired in June and doesn't have much of a pension.  They don't have money to waste on a florist, and if I don't protect them from themselves, they certainly won't do it.

But sometimes I think I'm an idiot for refusing the help.  This isn't the first time.  And their argument, that I'm going to stress myself out so much I don't enjoy the wedding, certainly has merit (not gonna lie, I'm worried about this too).

On the other hand, their well-being is so much more important than a stupid flower arrangement, and I'm kind of proud that the girl who wanted to do her wedding on a $10,000 budget not because she had to but because weddings are ridiculously expensive is still in there, alive and angry about my photography budget (more on that later).  I've tried to take a more laid-back, non-anxiety-attack-inducing view toward the Almighty Budget, and I've accepted wayyyy more wedding money than I ever thought I would (budget over $15,000?  Say what?).  But at this point, I'd feel bad for accepting more because it's just not necessary.  We're fine, we don't need it, so why put strain on anybody?

Of course, we'll see if I eat those words with a gilded spoon come August.

Where do you draw the line between having the wedding you want and making sure it doesn't interfere too much with your (and your contributor's) life?

Universe, I Hate You. Mostly the God of Uteri.

This is not my day.

My day is not really wedding-related, but it is very marriage-related.  In the long term.

I just came back from the obgyn's office.

I don't think I've spoken much if at all about this, so I'll give you a summary.  Between March and August of 2009, I went to the hospital 3 times with severe abdominal pain caused by what they thought at the time were 3 successive ovarian cysts.   Ever since the third one, I've had annoying to severe abdominal pain in the same area as the cysts.  I've spoken to several doctors about it, and each individually came to the same probable diagnosis:  endometriosis.  I'll explain.  The sciencey side of this is that the uterus leaks blood into the surrounding area that creates tissue that should not be there, and this process causes pain.  The practical effects are that I have debilitatingly painful cramps during my period, frequent ovarian cysts, and pain in my right ovarian area on a rather frequent basis.  The pain is off and on, but there's been enough to cause me to want to do something about.  That is, have surgery.

Surgery is the only way to know for sure whether it is in fact endometriosis, but the ultrasound I had yesterday produced some rather unexpected results (btw, sticking a plastic tube with a camera on the end up your vagina is something I hope you never have to experience).  Turns out, the most likely cause of the pain I've been having for the last year-and-a-half is not in fact endometriosis but a mass attached to my fallopian tube that has been slowly growing and messing shit up in there.  I am not particularly happy that the 3 ultrasounds I had previously mistook this mass for an ovarian cyst, but on the other had, my health insurance wasn't good enough to do anything about it most of that time anyway (say what you will about the health care bill, it is going to save my life [not quite literally but close enough] by allowing me to be back on my dad's health insurance).

Anyway, now I have to have surgery to remove it, but the issue lies in what exactly will be removed.  I won't fixate on the details of what will happen if they need to remove part of my bladder or cut into my urethra.  I have much more interesting, marriage-related, and more likely results to brood over.

The mass is very closely attached to my fallopian tube.  They won't know how closely until they cut me open, but there is a decent chance that they will have to remove it, making it impossible for me to have children naturally using the right ovary.

When the doctor told me this, I was concerned but not too fazed.  I can still have kids using the other ovary, right?  I asked her.  The answer was a lot more disconcerting.  Whatever's causing this could be affecting both ovaries but only causing pain in one.  The other could be infertile or need to be removed despite its apparent OKness.

Long story short, there is a decent possibility that I won't be able to have children.

More worrisome right now is that I have to consent to how much they can do, but they won't know what needs to be done until the surgery is in progress, so I have to consent to, say, removing both of my ovaries before I know whether or not it will happen or I'll need to or whatever.  Basically, I have to decide how much I trust my doctor to make the right decision or if I should say, "No, you can't remove that" beforehand.

I pretty much told her she could do whatever she thought was best, but I haven't signed anything yet, and I can still retract that consent.  But the thing is, I don't think I can make an informed decision without knowing what will happen.  How am I supposed to judge how I will feel about actually removing an ovary when it is more likely that I'll be fine?  But then, I can't really not remove stuff either because if the tube does need to come out, I'd still be in pain and probably couldn't have kids anyway with that tube.  But if both of them have a problem?  Or if the other one develops problems later?  I don't know.  I don't want to do anything that 30-year-old Nicole will regret, but I also do not want to be in pain for the next 7+ years while I wait to be ready to have kids.  And if I did, it would just get worse, and the other consequences we discussed would be worse, and I could actually have some major internal organ failure if I don't do it.  So I guess I really should just consent to whatever she thinks is necessary.  But still...

I want kids.  I always have.  I love them.  I mean, I was a toddler teacher last year for a reason.  There's never been any doubt in mind that I will one day have them.  And there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I cannot handle having one now or any time in the next few years at least.  I would so regret not getting my shit together before having kids.

It's just hard being 23 and being told that your fertility is in doubt.

And I mean, it will probably be fine.  It's just having to make decisions without knowing that makes it hard.

Daniel took it really well.  Said he'd love me regardless and just wanted to know about all the possibilities.

I really would be all right with adoption, but I'd still like to have at least one of my own, and who knows how I'll feel by the time I actually want kids?

It's just hard.

And to top things off, I got a call on the way home from the doctor from our potential ceremony site saying that the site we want cannot be rented for weddings nor can any other park in Tiburon!  Yeah, I found them through a list of locations you could get a permit for, but apparently they do not want structures in any of their parks, and apparently a chair is a structure.  The lady from the city of Tiburon was rather snarky.  I was not pleased.

I'm really glad we're going up to NorCal this weekend.  I won't have to apply for jobs (and I have no idea where I should be applying now or when I'll be able to start), we need a new effing ceremony plan, and most of all I'll be able to talk to my friend Dana.  I don't know how this started, but Dana and I sort of ended up being relationship and abdominal pain buddies, so it's a good time to get to talk to her in person.

I hate my life a little bit.  I so do not want to deal with this.

A Spur-of-the-moment Wedding

On Sunday, one of my very favorite authors got married in an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment wedding.  For those who don't know him, Neil Gaiman is an incredibly creative and unconventional author who has delved into the darkest, longest-forgotten corners of literature and come back with a cornucopia of knowledge and references.  I love him because every word he writes is new and innovative but conscious of the depth of its roots and the imagination of its audience.

Naturally, someone so unique could not have a conventional wedding.  And while we of the blogosphere are clearly devoted to planning, sometimes almost religiously, it can be nice to remember the attributes of spontaneous declarations of love, witnessed by only the people you really care about:  http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/01/yes.html.

Shoesies for My Feetsies: Dreams Do Come True

When searching for my shoes, I mostly looked in the department store sales racks.  Lots of selection plus mostly reasonable prices seemed like my best bet.  After-Christmas sales seemed like an excellent time to search, so when I was at the mall last week, I made a point of checking all the shoe departments.

And finally I lucked out and found these:

They are pretty much perfect.  They've got the side strappy deal that I like and the behind-the-heel strap that I think looks so elegant.  The light, silvery color appeals to me and works well with my dress.  Plus, there's just the smallest touch of bling which is awesome.  And best of all...

 

...the heels are the perfect height!

There are just a couple of things that I'm worried about.  The strap doesn't really hold my heel in place, so they flop around a bit, but I spent a lot of time walking and dancing in them at the store (much to the other customers' chagrin) and it was fine, so I think that will work out.  More problematic is the utter lack of traction.  I definitely like me some traction, especially since catching myself in this dress will not be easy, but my dad said he can rough up the bottoms for me, so we'll make it work.

On the whole, they fit my criteria really well, so I'm happy to check another thing off the list.

 All Personal Photos

I'm happy with them, especially because they actually fit into my budget, but they're not my dream shoes.  For as long as I can remember, there has been only one shoe that I ever truly loved, one shoe that would be special enough for my wedding day, one shoe. to rule. them....all right, not really, but when I first envisioned my wedding shoes, only one image came to mind.

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That's right, a glass slipper.  A real glass slipper.  What can I say?  I'm Disney obsessed, and Cinderella was my favorite movie when I was little.

I knew this was completely impractical and never going to happen from the beginning, but my shoe search really started with obsessively googling real glass slippers.  The above were the only ones I could find that were real and would fit a real foot.  They are almost $300.  Obviously, that was not happening.  But for a moment, I did dream of walking down the aisle in these beauties...and then changing into shoes that were not trying to destroy my feet for the reception.

It's probably best that I could never afford glass slippers.  There are so many things that could go wrong.  But I love that they actually exist, and perhaps someday I'll buy my dream shoes anyway.  For now, I'm content with the practical pretties that I have.

All right, I know I'm not the only one who wanted to be Cinderella on her wedding day.  Fess up.  Who else is salivating at the thought of wearing glass slippers?