Boring wedding stuff

This is not my wedding dress



But I do look pretty cute in a Barbie wonderland bomb, no? This was me playing dress-up after getting the dress I'm really going to wear, and which was more than $1,000 less than this. I just asked the nice clerk at The Wedding Bell if she had something big, white, sparkly and poufy to try on just because how many more times am I going to be wedding shopping? Like, never.

So that mission accomplished.

Then, a week or so later it was on to Longview, where Kris has been gung ho about producing the ultimate delicious wedding cake. Apparently she's been busting out the algebra calculating the precise ratio of baking powder to batter weight for a 12" cake round (an uncommonly large size) and buying a thingy you soak in cold water then wrap around the cake pan to prevent the sides from cooking too fast compared to the middle. Actually, she bought two and McGyver'd them together. Then she did a test bake (judged by all to be a smashing success) with three kinds of icing options. This cake has been a challenge both mental and gustatorial!

The cake (which you can see here, and do check out the photostream, where it shows the steps to fill it and her hummingbird infestation) was coconut. The icing options were all coconut, rum-flavored filling inside, and lemon in and out. Ray and I absolutely adore all-coconut. We took that and the rum-filled leftovers home and I swear I ate a decent sized piece of cake twice a day for a week, and Ray had his cake, too. And ate it (goes without saying). Kris used the Alton Brown coconut cake recipe, modified for the cake size. It was also doubling as my pre-birthday birthday cake.

This is going to be the best-tasting wedding cake I've ever had. And all my lovely guests too. Kris is also making a red velvet cake for the "groom's cake." We're pretty sure there will be multiple servings per most people necessary because they're great cakes and the buffet will probably be serviceable buffet food.

So I had a dream last night that I had superpowers and there were these people who were also superpowered were out to kill me and they killed everyone I know and I found my old Philly house smeared with blood everywhere and I barely got out of there alive. That's where my dream kind of ended. Lots of my anxiety dreams have me running down this little path that cut through the block. Don't know why. That was a lovely little place when I was a kid, one I think back on very fondly.

But anyway, although my dream was technically a nightmare, I never really felt the kind of overwhelmed freaked-out feeling that I got at Macy's today setting up a wedding registry. I felt a little dizzy at one point.

I kind of picked myself up a bit and realized I was not spending this money, someone else might be. And I felt a little better and a lot guiltier. But then the bridal consultant showed us that almost all our items were under $50 (everything is basically on sale because there's a depression on), and even the sheets I said, "We're spending $200 on sheets?" about, are on sale so they aren't nearly that expensive.

Funniest registry moment was at the towel display.

Me: "I like these. Which colors you like?"

Ray: "These" (points to cranberry-colored towels)

Me: "No. And not the brown ones either. No more brown and white. I like these."

Ray: "Uh, okay, those are fine."

Me: "How many towels should we get? Four?"

Ray: (consternation in voice) "Four??!! That's a lot of towels. Just get one."

Me: "Who gets one towel? That's just weird."

Ray: "We don't need four new towels. We have a lot of towels."

Me: "Well, yeah, but getting one towel? One? Isn't the point to have multiple towels that match?"

Ray: (shrugs) "Yeah. Get two."

Me: "Okay."

Later in the car:

Ray: "I've been thinking about the towels. I have some towels that are kind of old. Maybe it's time to get rid of some of them."

The cheapest item is a lemon reamer (on sale, $3.99). On the website it just calls it a reamer, which, paired with its pic, makes it look totally naughty.

Oh, and it goes without saying that there is a non-profit that will be even more grateful for donations than we are, the 7th Street.

So there is your boring wedding stuff update.

Goings on around the Harbor

So Ray and I went to see "The Women" at Driftwood Friday night and poor little Cora Foss, in the middle of her little emotional scene while pounding the floor and screaming "MOTHER DEAREST! FATHER DARLING!" was interrupted by the craziest senior moment I've yet witnessed. An older lady in the third row appeared to wake up when Cora started her speech and yelped, "WHAT'S GOING ON!" Although it sent a ripple of annoyance through the audience, Cora kept going. Go Cora!!

Saturday night we went to the Hoquiam Shows Its Best auction where for my birthday Ray got me a ride with Besty Seidel in her Lemondrop, a BMW Isetta. The ride also entails a sundae at the Sweet Shoppe.

What I have been hinting for is a way to get a bedside table and lamp by my side of the bed for more convenient reading.

Speaking of reading, I finished three books this weekend!!! (one exclamation point per book). The first was "Authentic Happiness," about positive psychology. Basically it states that we all have a baseline of happiness and there's not much we can do about that permanently except volunteer more and do more fun stuff and work on our capacity to love and be loved. For people who do not have so many of Maslow's Hierarcy of Needs met that they can pursue these ways to be happy, well, tough luck. Actually, people in poor countries tend to be happier than people in rich countries. Seligmann, the author, posits something that comes close to why Mildred Kalish, who wrote the last book I read about growing up in the Depression on a farm and all the chores and stuff she had to do, loved her childhood. It had a lot of purpose, a lot of work that was challenging but accomplishable and although her folks were "hearty handshake Methodists" (i.e. they did not hug and kiss on meeting) there was a lot of security in the family.

Basically, we'll all have to be sustainable agriculturalists before we get back to being happy.

I also learned from the online assessments that I am in the top tier of happy people. I scored in the 80th percentile compared to my gender, age, occupation (probably even higher in these times) and zip code. Ironically, I am also among your more vengeful and avoidant types. If you've wronged me, chances are, I'm p.o.'d about it still. This is made even more ironic by my "core strengths," which include broad-mindedness and fairness/justice.

Perhaps this explains why I think I can write mystery novels. I KNOW why people want to murder. I don't DO it, of course (my style is avoidant, so if I'm not looking at you while you talk to me, well, if you have half an inclination to social skills, figure it out). But I understand. ;-)

Sign up and test yourself at www.authentichappiness.org.

In "Guyland," Michael Kimmel really does us a service by doing an anthropological and psychological study of a bunch of "guys." Male entitlement and frustration abound, and the misogyny he uncovers will freak you out. If you are a guy, you should probably read this, especially if you feel like your disgust with your situation hasn't found a voice, or that the ones that are popular, like Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, are selling you a bill of goods that are too foul.

But absolutely the best read and the most enlightening was "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw" by Bruce Barcott. Although he is perhaps too sympathetic to the protagonists of this real-life fight against ecological destruction, developing world corruption and the arrogance of multinational corporations that fly beneath the radar, well, the protagonists ARE fighting ecological destruction, corruption and arrogance, not to mention the undermining of a young democracy and the people's rights to know and to health. Read this book. If you like the writing of Michael Pollan, John McPhee or you just like the style of the New Yorker, this is a non-fiction book that you'll totally like and it will take you a little further than Pollan will on the meaning of sustainability.

So, ah, there you are. After my feminist screed on the dumbness of weddings I hope this is remarkably more positive and enlightening. Oh yeah, I am back to my happy baseline. The prospect of a ride in Lemondrop with Betsy has totally picked me up.

Weddings are STUPID

Part One. (Because I haven't read a single wedding mag or visited "The Knot," I am sure there is a world of crazy out there that I have yet to encounter.)

So weddings = supposed to register. Apparently the whole world will be waiting with bated breath to find out where Ray and I are registering. We are too, as we have no idea what an inventory of stuff we need would look like (indeed, we both seem to feel awash in stuff right now and willing to not own more stuff, or, if we do, to get it our own selves).

HOWEVER, should we register, the people who are interested are supposed to find out how? By seeing that we're registered on our invites or enclosures in the invites?

Oh Lord God Almighty NOOOOO!!! HERESY!

They have to learn by Word of Mouth.

Maybe that worked back in the day, when going from Aurora to St. Paul was a big deal (circa 1925 or so actual distance: about 17 miles. In people's imaginations: GOING TO EUROPE, info from GMR). Today, when I have family and friends all over who don't really all know each other, that doesn't work so well.

If you are a bride who ignores this etiquette rule, you are a BAD PERSON. Check out the comments here. And God forbid you ask for money! I dare you to type some query along the lines of "I'm a bride and want cash" in Google (there is some pro-asking for cash advice, but it's all "this isn't classy and it takes tact," and the comments are all bile). Even Chinese people get mad about it even though we've all seen that scene in The Wedding Banquet where the red envelopes come streaming in. (Note that if you are a groom you are presumed to have limited, if any, agency.)

So this means that people have to come up to you or your family to ask where you are registered. They are forced into a conversation about someone's wedding. Maybe they want to talk about it, maybe they don't feel like getting sucked into the mountain of crazy that is wedding talk from someone invested in a wedding.

Frankly, I come down on the side of, just tell me on the invite so while it is on my mind, so when it occurs to me, I can go straight to the Internet and buy you something. I cannot be trusted to remember to ask someone or even know whom to ask. I appreciate the bluntness and ease and do not need to do some sort of pearl-clutching over breached etiquette. I do not feel I have been assaulted by someone's greed. People who feel like they are being assaulted by a line of ink that reads, "we are registered at the Sharper Image" need to take some Prozac, grab a ladder and climb over themselves.

Also frankly, it seems to me that there is a lot of free-floating bride hate out there. This culture absolultely hates when women decide to remove their (purely theoretical) sexual availability from the public pool. They hate women having a "day." They do everything they can to denigrate and hate on brides in particular — like the groom has no agency in having a celebration that is "too lavish," "too weird," "too selfish" or too whatever, or worse, that he's being suckered by a succubus so his masculinity is diminished. Even if all the trappings of a wedding are patriarchal and so are its roots, I think it bothers some people that women are taking control over their weddings, as much as they are their marriages, their careers and their fertility.

It bothers folks that women are able to spend their own money on weddings, that we're able to obtain credit to pay for it, too (although, hello, not really the best use of credit). They don't like that we're able to pick who we want to marry. They don't like that we feel we should have control over our own weddings and get mad when we find relatives doing things like inviting people we don't know, imposing their own feelings that they had a mediocre wedding and if only we do what THEY want it will be perfect because sad experience has taught them, or just generally making brides mad. It's always the bride's fault, in their narratives.

I'm not saying there aren't immature brides, but I'm saying they are the vast minority and the stereotype that is used to make all us other brides cower in fear of being compared to them. I'm also saying that they are playing into the culture's expectations for them. You think the magazines and the bridal-industrial complex are playing NO ROLE AT ALL in the creation of the stressed-out, bitchy, entitled Bridezilla? You think they're innocent bystanders? NO WAY JOSE. It's another sexist method of control and they are playing right into it.

It's time to liberate Bridezilla. It's time to unhook her from the culture of consumption, to unhook her from her frightful associations. It's time to recast her. It's time that all that energy be harnessed for some better project.