Individually Collective Blogging: On Being Engaged
My good friend Christina and I have been participating in NaNoWriMo together for two years now. Next year, we were contemplating choosing a storyline and characters and each writing our novel using the agreed upon plot and setting. I’m not sure how this is going to work out, but it sounds rather interesting. I was also recently inspired by my Twitter-bud, @melissaoyler and her friend (Amy) who are choosing a random topic and then each blogging about it. Christina and I thought this would be an awesome way to test out our ability to write individually on a collective topic.
This week’s topic: Thoughts on being engaged
Visit Christina’s blog to read about her thoughts on being engaged: here.
I should also mention that our Individually Collective Fictional Writing has been suspended for the time being. We appreciate you following Cliff’s one adventure, however, NaNoWriMo is fast approaching and we want to ward off any potential Flying Monkey attack. For those of you who might not be familiar with Flying Monkeys, they like to troll the blogs in the months leading up to NaNoWriMo to make sure that any WriMos aren’t trying to get a head start by composing some prose a bit early. We simply can’t have that, now can we? So stay tuned in November for our Collective NaNovel.
Congratulations are in order!
First of all, I must extend my most heartfelt congratulations to Christina on her recent engagement! I will be proud to stand as up for her at her wedding as a bridesmaid.
This week’s blog topic has come out of this happy news. Originally, Christina had suggested that we compose our collective blog on the topic of “1st week impressions on being engaged.” Then she reformulated that to be “1st week impressions on being engaged when you actually had communication contact with people. She did this, of course, because I got engaged during a 3 week long excursion in Europe and Africa. Because of this trip, they only people that I informed of our happy announcement were my parents (who I actually phoned collect from Italy) and our friends in Africa who we were visiting (and promised that if on the off-chance they happened across someone who knew someone who was friends with someone’s aunt or uncle back in the States they wouldn’t tell them about our engagement and ruin our surprise).
And I’ve got to be honest, being nearly 6 years removed from the moment that I actually got engaged, my memory is a bit fuzzy as to what I was thinking when I returned State-side. So, I shall be offering a bit different perspective.
Notes on Being Engaged
Being engaged is certainly an exciting, scintillating time! There’s all that planning for the most important day of your life, and you’re in love, and everything is wonderful… right?
Wrong.
Well, sort of wrong. I was certainly in love, and I was certainly excited, but the planning of the wedding was an event that literally caused me to quit my job and hire a therapist, a licensed clinical psychologist. And no, I’m not kidding about either of those two things. To be fair, I did work up until about two months before the wedding, and then things got just too crazy for me to deal with and I decided I needed to some “space.” But the psychologist came in very early on. And boy did I need him! Here’s why:
Things that make a Bride crazy
They say that as a bride it’s “your” day. Too bad they don’t tell you how hard it is to get to “your” day. Here are my top three things that I thought I might just go crazy over:
Guest Lists
I had always planned to be married barefoot on the beach with only a handful of guests present. Living in Northern Virginia makes beach weddings infinitely more difficult. There was no beach wedding to be had unless it would be a destination wedding, and since my father nixed the thought of even having the wedding party driving 3 hours south to Williamsburg for me to get married on the lawn of the Wren Building at my dear alma mater, I figured that Sanibel Island, Florida was out.
Choosing the venue wasn’t the problem. Nope. It was the guest list. It got completely out of hand! My handful of guests rapidly turned into a raging monster of a guest list that went through a full three rounds of revisions and agonizing over which cousins and second-cousins we could cut and not risk offending.
To make matters worse, as an Only Child the attrition rate of my wedding guests was virtually nil. All of our vendors kept saying that we could expect X% of guests to not show, to RSVP regrets, to send gifts (money) only. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Practically everyone came… and wanted to bring extras!
My tiny little beach dream wedding with only my closest “people” turned into the wedding of the century.
Stationary & Invitations
I read somewhere that your wedding stationary (to include engagement party announcements, save the date cards, wedding invitations, and thank you cards) would set the stage for the entire shindig. Fabulous. A tiny piece of paper gone wrong and everyone will think that I was no better than White-Trash. I agonized.
Being on a budget, I created my own engagement party announcements and save the date cards… which I think turned out fantastically well. However, doing the DIY thing can be a bit crazy. I specifically remember my mother and I going through a paper cutter and then rushing to the local office supply store to use theirs, and spending oodles of time there pains-takingly cutting those cards into the appropriate size. And then I also remember leaving my mother there to cut the remaining 100 or so by herself because I had to rush off to a therapy session (Heaven forbid that I miss that!).
But the thing that was worst of all was addressing the invitations. I was determined that they would be hand lettered, and suddenly I wondered why I didn’t take a greater interest in calligraphy when I had the chance. Not only did they have to be hand lettered, but I wanted them to be addressed according to the most meticulous protocol. Sadly, some of the guests on our list didn’t have addresses; my husband-to-be had said he would just take them to the guests. I just about had apoplexy when I heard that! No, every invitation had to be hand lettered with the appropriate titles, with a stamp, delivered by the U.S. Postal Service (or some postal service for the very few that were being sent overseas).
I cried tears of relief after the task of addressing the invitations was over.
The Guest Book
Getting married in a garden, I didn’t want a traditional guest book. I found a fantastic idea on some website/bridal magazine and decided to have a “Guest Trellis” instead. We found a fantastically beautiful trellis that we said one day I could put in my garden at my new home with my hubby (which, might I add is still sitting in my mother’s basement exactly the way it looked on the day of my wedding), and devised a scheme by which to attach little cards that guests could write their greetings on and affix with tacks.
Oh, but not just any tacks would do. I needed special tacks. Ideally, floral tacks. We search and searched and search and I couldn’t find anything that I thought was just perfect. I wanted badly to have the perfect thing. And then, while my mother and I were browsing around Michael’s one day we came across these beautiful, tiny, paper flowers. Except they weren’t affixed to tacks, they were on tiny pieces of wire.
Oh, NO PROBLEM! We’ll just glue the flowers on to the tacks! Riiiiiiight, like that’s a good idea.
Well, it was a good idea, it was just incredibly tedious and required just the right kind of glue; that took us several more trips to Michael’s to determine which was the right type of glue.
This particular project had me in my therapist’s office crying. I was crying about how we only had so much time left and I was having to glue these little flowers onto thumbtacks for my guest “book” and that we weren’t even sure if they would hold together for the wedding! And how disastrous would it be if all of a sudden all the flowers fell off of the thumbtacks and there were just plain silver thumbtacks on my trellis?
And at that moment, I looked at my therapist and realized exactly what I had said and I burst out laughing. I was some kind of psychotic version of Martha Stewart! He laughed with me.
Incidentally, 6 years later, the flowers are still affixed to the thumbtacks.
Update: For those of you who might not have been familiar with the details of my engagement, you can read about them here.
HAHAHA! I remember the whole thumb tack extravaganza!
I totally agree with you about the guest list being a huge problem – and it’s one that you read about and always think, I won’t have that issue, and then it’s nearly devastating when you realize you’re fighting with your fiance about “plus ones.”
You are bringing back memories! What a fun time but I am glad those days are over … and I love the trellis story! LOVE IT. It’s so telling – something soooo important can still be sitting in a garage 6 years later. Such is life.